Confrontation

I just got my contributor’s copy of the latest issue of the literary journal Confrontation. I was pleased (and relieved) to see my poem in this issue. I had been rather apprehensive and worried about my poem’s appearance in this journal, mainly because back in December I received a proof page from the managing editor that caused me some alarm. According to the managing editor this was a “typescript proof,” although I’m not sure what the purpose of a typescript proof is! IMHO the basic purpose of a proof page is to show the author exactly how his page will appear in print, but if it’s in typescript then I don’t see how that can be considered to be a “proof”! The problem that I had with this typescript proof they sent is that the formatting and layout of my poem was totally wrong, although all the words were there and they were spelled correctly. Alarmed, I hurriedly sent detailed corrections to the editor, both by email and by regular mail just to be doubly-sure he would get them! This particular editor apparently does not like to respond to correspondence, so I was never sure when I sent him correspondence if he had actually read it or not. So even after I sent the corrections I was still quite worried about whether my poem would appear properly in print. As it turned out all my worrying was for nothing because the layout of the poem was perfect in the actual printed issue. I’m very pleased with the way they presented my poem, and in fact the entire issue is beautifully done, a real work of literary art.

It seems a bit odd and ironic to me that they chose this particular poem of mine to publish, since it’s a brief, oddball poem that I wrote very spontaneously in only about 20 minutes. Whereas other poems of mine that I’ve put considerably more thought, effort, and time into are still looking for a publisher!

Light in Winter gig

Yesterday I had a very interesting and unusual gig. I played some percussion as part of a performance called “Dance of Scales” at the Light in Winter festival. It took place in the Statler Auditorium at Cornell. “Dance of Scales” was an unusual kind of performance, consisting of scientific lecture, dance performance, music, and video. It was produced and directed by Max Evjen and Megan Halpern of Redshift Productions, and featured Cornell physicist Itai Cohen and choreographer/dancer Maren Waldman. Other dancers were Sarabeth Matilsky, Holly Hibbert, and Kalay Mordock.

“Dance of Scales” consisted of four parts, and I played the darbuka to provide the musical accompaniment for the second part (the other parts of the performance used pre-recorded music). I thought the whole show went very well, without a hitch. The dancing was beautiful (and especially impressive considering what a challenge it was for the dancers to perform on such a small stage), Maren’s choreography was graceful and imaginative, Itai’s presentation was fascinating and charming, and I thought my drumming was mostly pretty good. I was very pleased that there was a big and enthusiastic audience! It was one of the more unusual gigs that I’ve ever played and also one of the most interesting, especially since I happen to be kind of a science nerd.

Some thoughts on Mary Daly

The recent passing of the “radical feminist” theologian Mary Daly has led me to ponder some of the confusing issues concerning gender and culture in America. Daly was a feminist thinker who admitted outright that she had no use for men, believing them to be inherently (simply by their very presence) oppressive to women. She refused to allow men to attend her classes, and she asserted that if the vast majority of the male population were to be eliminated that would be a good thing. She also was remarkably contemptuous of transgender people, calling them “freakish” and “Frankensteinian.” While Daly has gotten much praise as one of the most influential pioneers of feminist philosophical and theological thought I’m troubled by her attitudes toward men and transgender people, which seem to me to be basically inhumane, insofar as they treat certain people as essentially unworthy of respect.

In my humble opinion Daly, for all her philosophical erudition, made a fundamental mistake in failing to make a crucial distinction, between the people, i.e. individual human beings, on the one hand and the culture on the other hand. I agree with Daly that male culture has traditionally had many negative and destructive aspects to it, and that the overwhelming dominance of male culture has resulted in our society becoming greatly screwed up. But let’s keep in mind that what is really needed to turn things around is a sweeping re-evaluation of our entire culture and its values, with an eye toward trying to propagate more humane values. What is NOT needed is more of the old, old game of separating out a portion of the population to be denigrated. If women have historically been treated like crap, to simply turn that around and treat men like crap instead does not serve the greater cause of building a more humane, life-affirming culture that values people as inherently worthy.

The wayward kaval finally comes home, Friday drumming gig, etc.

My wayward kaval order did in fact finally arrive at my house. The company had, to my great consternation, shipped it to my old, old address but after I put in a change-of-address form to have stuff forwarded, it turned out that it did actually get forwarded to my new address. So, problem solved. So now I feel a little sheepish about getting so cranked up with anxiety about my kaval order when now it seems obvious that I just had to be a bit patient and everything would be fine! While I tend to be a rather easy-going dude in most respects, I can get quite anxious when it comes to my instruments. The new kaval is OK but not great. It seems to be pitched properly although its tone doesn’t seem to have quite the depth and richness of my old Macedonian kaval (the one that cracked!). Still, it’s a decent instrument and I’m sure I can use it for some upcoming CMEMME gigs.

Last Friday evening I had a very interesting and fun gig playing percussion to accompany a great local folkmusic trio called Ironwood, which I had never played with before. The gig was at the Blue Frog Cafe in Cortland. J wanted to go along to hear the performance so we both drove out there in my pickup in some very snowy weather! This Blue Frog turns out to be kind of a nice little place. As expected though, what with the crappy, crappy weather and all, the audience was pretty sparse, and I certainly couldn’t blame people for not wanting to go out anywhere in such weather! Only a crazy person or a musician would go out on a night like that.

I played the doumbek to accompany the other musicians (guitar, fiddle, upright bass). We played for a solid two hours without a break and I thought the whole group sounded pretty good. I had a lot of fun and it looked like the other musicians were having fun also. Although it was a small audience, a few people there were clearly really appreciating our music a great deal. At the end I put my drum in its bag and, being pretty tired by then, staggered out the door. As I did I heard a young woman yell something to me like, “You guys were great!” In my tired state, what she said didn’t really register on my consciousness for a while. J and I were about halfway back to our truck before I realized it, and by then I was feeling too tired and lazy to walk back in and thank the lady for her compliment. The snow was still pouring down all the way home. I didn’t really mind the snowstorm though. It had been a good musical evening. Music makes everything better.

On being a Google detective, the Bulgarian connection, and my across-town neighbors

A couple of days after I posted the previous thing about the case of my missing kaval from Bulgaria, and wondering how I could get in touch with the folks who now live in the house I used to live in, I decided to do some serious Google detective work. Following a chain of weird hunches much too long and convoluted to write down here, and doing a whole lot of Google searches, I was eventually able to find the name and phone number of the lady who now lives in the house I used to live in (until 2006). The house that supposedly this company in Sophia, Bulgaria shipped my new kaval to. And furthermore it turned out that the owner of this house is on Facebook! Well I happen to be on Facebook also, and I sent her a Facebook message explaining the situation, giving her my phone number, and asking her to please call me if my package from Bulgaria arrives at the house. I was half-expecting that from reading my message she would think me just some kind of nut and ignore it, but I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from her the next day. She was very, very gracious and pleasant and promised to call me if the Bulgarian package arrives at the house. She also talked enthusiastically about how much she and her spouse love the house. It made me very glad to hear that.

So, still no kaval. I did submit a change-of-address notice to the postal service to have mail forwarded from my old house to my current address, but of course one never knows (especially in Ithaca, notorious for its unreliable mail service) if this will actually have any effect and will result in my shipment being forwarded to me. I’m expecting my kaval to appear somewhere, either at my current address or my old house where the very nice lady currently lives. Sure hope it arrives soon, as I will need it on the 25th when I will resume rehearsing with the middle-eastern ensemble….

The case of the wayward kaval

Seeing as how I was having some major problems with my kaval cracking (as mentioned in previous posts) I decided to buy a new one. The kaval I have been playing is from Macedonia. I decided to get a Bulgarian kaval this time. The Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Turkish kavals each have their own culturally-distinctive, traditional style of construction, but they are all musically the same instrument. That is, a Bulgarian kaval plays the same natural scale, and has the same holes and is fingered the same way as a Macedonian kaval (and as a Turkish kaval). I decided to go with a Bulgarian one this time because the wood on the Bulgarian kaval is thicker than on the Macedonian one, and I got to thinking this might make the Bulgarian instrument more resistant to the ravages of the extremes of temperatures that it might be subjected to, especially in an Ithaca winter.

So I ordered a kaval from a company in Sophia, Bulgaria about 3 weeks ago. I got an email message from the company telling me that they had shipped it to my home address but that it had been rejected back to them as undeliverable! (The Ithaca postal service is notoriously quirky and unreliable; I have had on-and-off problems with my mail service all the years I’ve lived in this town). And unfortunately, instead of them contacting me to ask me for an alternate delivery address (I probably would have asked them to ship it to my office instead) they went ahead and sent it to my old, old address on Dryden Road. I haven’t lived in that house for over 3 years. The fellow that I sold the house to has since sold it to someone else, and I haven’t been able to find out who the new owner is. I need to contact the new owner of the house and ask her/him to please contact me if they get my package from Bulgaria. I hate to just drop in on someone unannounced, especially someone I don’t know (it seems kind of rude for one thing, also I’m a shy person and I’m generally very reluctant to approach a stranger and start a conversation), but I think in this case I will have to do so since I have no other way of contacting the new owner of the house. I’m planning on stopping by the house on Dryden Road on Saturday and see if I can have a (hopefully friendly) chat with whoever lives there about my Bulgarian package problem. Hopefully the person will be amenable to helping me with this little issue….

Poets’ dinner

The poetry group that I belong to (and which I’ve been a part of since 1997!) has an annual tradition of meeting for dinner and drinks around the holidays, and exchanging poetry books as gifts. And usually each poet is encouraged to bring his/her spouse, partner, lover, paramour, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc. to join in the celebration. In past years we’ve usually gone to Ragmann’s downtown, because they are very informal, they have tolerant wait staff, seem like they can easily accommodate a group, and we generally have a back corner of the place to ourselves where we can drink, carry on, talk loudly and occasionally sing silly songs without fear of being thrown out. This year we decided to try a different place, whose name I prefer not to mention. When J and I arrived and told the hostess we had a group of 10 people coming she seemed to get very flustered, and she let us know that she was irritated with us because we hadn’t called ahead. In fact she continued to have this sort of low-key freakout going the whole time we were there.

But I was pleasantly startled to see that the waitress was quite familiar, in fact it was one of my former musical colleagues, M, from the middle eastern music ensemble! M is a multi-talented young genius who used to play violin with the ensemble till she moved out of Ithaca to study anthropology at Brown. I asked her how she was doing and she said she had quit Brown and was planning to go to a different school. What a stunning surprise to see her there waitressing!

Although M did a good job as a waitress, and although the food was decent, we were sorely disappointed in how slow the food preparation was. It took way, way too long. And then the place closed up kind of early (for us) so we didn’t really have time to sit back and talk at leisure after dinner (I think we will be looking to a different venue for our holiday poets celebration next year). We hurriedly did our gift book exchange. The way this works is we place all the wrapped books in a pile on the table, then each poet picks a book. So it’s basically a random process and you never know what you will get. I got Budapest to Babel by Agnes Lahozcky, a poet I’m unfamiliar with.

Playing at the Carriage House

First of all I should mention how my kaval crisis eventually played out. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had a major problem on the Monday evening (Nov 30) CMEMME rehearsal, where my kaval developed a big crack. I patched the crack on Tuesday with superglue, and the instrument was fine for a while. Then on Sunday afternoon while I was practicing at home for Sunday evening’s gig at the Carriage House Cafe, the kaval suddenly developed another huge crack! I patched it with more superglue and bound it tightly with string, praying that it would be okay for that evening’s performance. After the glue dried and I took the string off it seemed to be okay. I was just hoping it would get me through the evening!

As it turned out, everything went well. The upstairs part of the Carriage House is a nice, attractive, cozy place but it’s not real large, so when all our audience was in there it was QUITE crowded, with a lot of people not able to find seats and so there were quite a few people standing up in back.

At this gig we were joined by a special musical guest artist, the great Armenian oud virtuoso Richard Hagopian (father of our musical director Harold), who played on the second half of our performance. We played few songs (Bulgarian, Arabic, Greek), took a short break and then Richard Hagopian joined us on some Armenian songs. His oud playing was at times astounding, especially a fantastic solo improvisation that was the most amazing oud performance I’ve ever heard.

I played ney on most of the songs in the concert but I played kaval (my much-patched kaval!) on a few songs. I was pleased that the kaval held up and didn’t crack anymore! Toward the end of the program we played some Turkish songs.

On the last Turkish song, “Emine,” one of our singers, a young Turkish lady named Aylin who happens to be the Turkish language instructor at Cornell, was inspired to perform a belly-dance to the song! She danced very well, and one of our oud players, Adem, stood up to play the oud with her while she danced. Then our musical director Harold stood up and played a terrific solo on the violin! It was a rousing and very spirited performance. The audience loved it. We finished with another rousing song, the Sephardic song “Gulpembe.”

It was a great evening, altogether one of the best performance experiences I’ve ever had with CMEMME. I went home feeling excited and uplifted….

Benefit concert for Shaleshock

J and I went to a concert downtown at the State Theater on Saturday night, a benefit for Shaleshock, the group that is working to stop natural-gas drilling in New York State. It is a worthy cause, and I was glad to hear that the concert was sold out. We had seats in the middle of the front row. There were three bands lined up to play, The Horse Flies, The Sim Redmond Band, and Donna the Buffalo. We both love the music of The Horse Flies especially, so we were very glad to be so close to the band during their performance. I started to have some qualms though, as soon as I saw that some people from the audience had gotten up and were standing and dancing in the aisle near the left side of the stage, without the security staff making them sit back down. I could see what was coming! It was inevitable that when people in the audience saw that there were folks standing and dancing near the stage, then they wanted to get up and get near the stage also. Gradually more and more people got up and moved in front of the stage. Before long there was a solid wall of people in front of J and me (still sitting in our seats) and we couldn’t see the stage at all! I looked around me and all of the aisles were packed with people standing, and the area in front of the stage was also totally packed with people. I mean it was so packed that it was almost impossible to even move in that crush of people. The Horse Flies finished playing, and then the Sim Redmond Band played. I started to feel very uncomfortable in that intense crush of people all around. I started to think we should just leave, but I didn’t see any way out of the auditorium. I decided to just stay to the end of the band’s set and then try to make an escape. Which we eventually did. So we didn’t stay to hear Donna the Buffalo, but by that time it was pretty late anyway and we were tired. I also felt kind of stressed by the claustrophobic feeling of being in the middle of this crazy mob. The bands played very well and it was great to hear them, but I was disappointed in the overall experience. The State Theater staff should had done something to control the crowd instead of just passively allowing the situation to degenerate into such an insane mess. That is not the way it’s supposed to work when you have a concert in a theater.

Kaval crisis!

Last night was the last rehearsal of CMEMME before our upcoming concert gig on Sunday. The rehearsal went pretty well EXCEPT for the fact that my kaval didn’t work. At all. I play most of the songs in our repertoire on the ney, but a few of the songs are in a scale that doesn’t work well on the ney, so those songs I play on the kaval, which has a more conventional natural scale, i.e. without the quarter-tones that are part of the natural scale of the ney. The ney songs at the rehearsal went well, but I was completely unable to get a sound out of the kaval! I was completely mystified. But when I got home and took the time to examine the kaval more closely I saw that it had a thin but long crack in it, not easily visible but definitely a crack that went all the way through the wall of the instrument. I was seriously bummed about this, as you can imagine. I’ve become very fond of that kaval, a very nicely-crafted instrument which I ordered from a company in Skopje, Macedonia four or five years ago.

I did some inquiries at a dealer in ethnic musical instruments, and although they said that they could send me a kaval or a shvi (supposedly very similar to the kaval), they wouldn’t be able to get it to me in time for the concert on Sunday! I thought about just going downtown to Toko Imports and buying a plain, simple wooden or bamboo flute to use as a substitute for the kaval at the concert gig. My musical friend Marty suggested that some flutes can be patched, and that I might want to try gluing the damaged instrument with superglue and binding it very tightly to see if the crack can be mended that way. I am planning to try that.