tones for Jones' bones

Through Kickstater, let's make my next record!

2010-06-09T05:20:00.004+09:00

Howdy, everybody! I've made this recording of songs that I wrote in South America; I've also set up a page at Kickstarter with the goal of mastering and duplicating this new record, HALLAZGO. Please check out the above link, and consider plegding!

Happily Ensconced in Málaga

2008-11-14T14:53:00.006+09:00

Howdy, folks! Hope all is well. It's quite late, about 1 a.m., but Noelle and I have rented this crazy little doohickey that keeps us connected to the internet until tomorrow morning, and I don't want to waste too much time.

We're here in Málaga, a town of 25,000 perched in a valley high up in the Sierra Occidental. We're staying with the mother of a friend of ours. It goes like this: Noelle went to University with Cara, who taught in Colombia two years, and is engaged to Sergio, both of whom have moved to the U.S. for the time being. Sergio is from Málaga, and spoke to his mother, Alba, who was happy to have us drop by. So we've been having a lovely time, making arepas, walking to nearby pueblitos, trying desperately to carry on intelligent conversation in Spanish. We are set for a walk to San Jose de Miranda on Sunday, to meet Alba's father; however on Saturday night we are slated to belt our pipes out at a new Karaoke bar, and we may not be in top form the following day. We're also looking at riding mules around a glacier next week. Doesn't that sound like a hoot?

It was a nice trip here, from Santa Marta, and the Ciudad Perdida, albeit not without its difficulties. I certainly hope you're peeking at Noelle's flickr site, where we're uploading scads of pictures. Two notable points of interest in between Santa Marta and Málaga are the small cities of Aracataca, (A Rock-a Talk-a?) the childhood home of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mompós, stuck between rivers, notoriously difficult to reach, and the city to which Simon Bolivar claims to owe his glory.

We began looking into visiting Aracataca when we heard there might be a train there from Santa Marta. We asked around, and some folks at the Ethnological museum in Santa Marta, while of no help whatsoever, expended quite a bit of energy trying to find information for us. One of the curators, who spoke extremely rapidly with a bit of an impediment, told us (in the midst of about 600 other words) to call him if we went to Aracataca. We didn't call. But we did run into him in the middle of main street just a couple of hours after arriving in town. We treated him to dinner, at a restaurant of his choice. He, among other things, used to work with the famous Colombian photographer Leo Matiz. He ordered for us. Water a la Leo Matiz. Plaintains and chicken a la Leo Matiz. And to top it off, when he spoke to the cook he used his friend's name as some sort of invocation, as well. "Leomatiz!"

When he found out that I'm a violinist, he was on the phone inside of a minute trying to get me a spot in a concert scheduled for later that evening. We said goodbye to the cook, "Leomatiz!", walked across town, and met a musical group called Soncataca. I played a few songs for them (I chose poorly), and it was agreed I would play a bit in the concert, for some good old-fashioned intercambio cultural. We walked back to the hotel to change, (stopping for a couple of beers, and some antique Vallenato music by an Aracataqueño composer Lucho Bermudez) agreeing to meet later in the evening. It was halloween, and all the kids had come out by this time; Superman costumes, traditional Colombian garb in miniature. The ice-cream sellers were out in droves, as well as a strange man with a raffle set-up that included a big flatscreen TV showing video of people being tossed and gored by angry bulls.

The concert was to start at 8. We arrived a little after 8. There was no crowd. Then slowly, there was a small crowd. Then the band continued to wait UNTIL TEN FORTY-FIVE to begin playing. We stuck around for the first set, congratulated the band (who did sound great!), ducked out of my commitment to play (who knows when that would have been), and made arrangements to have lunch with our host and the lead singer the next day. When the next day came, we demonstrated our knowledge of Colombian culture by not showing up. We had heard that sometimes Colombians will make an appointment they can't keep; we saw it happen in Aracataca. Our party-animal host

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nols/3008470316/in/set-72157609032359237/

was leaving early for Santa Marta, yet agreed to lunch with us. The lead singer was the center of attention, and drinking heavily early into the morning, yet lunching with us? A strange cultural convention, although it does allow one to leave graciously, the promise of a lunch that will never come...

We also had a spectacular time getting to (Bus, bus, van, van, boat, van, motorcycle) Mompós, and spending the evening of the Day of the Dead in a traditional cemetary, lighting candles for departed friends and relatives. And for the record, Mompós does feel like the Colombian version of Faulkner's Mississippi.

We are now trying to keep from second guessing our host here in Málaga. I'll let you know how it turns out. Leomatiz!

Lost Blog Heads for Lost City

2008-10-24T10:56:00.004+09:00

Well, folks, my apologies for waiting SEVEN months to write anything at all.

There. I've said it, I'm not going to dwell on my negligence, or feel bad about it for too long. But golly, it's been ages. Noelle and I have left Korea. It was difficult, and bittersweet; Our dear friend Yun Seon-gyeong accompanied us to the airport for a tearful goodbye, a free bump up to first class, and a surprise sighting of a famous Sumo wrestler. For the last month and a half, we were in the United States, visiting family and friends. It was fun, memorable, expensive, and exhausting. So now, we've come to Colombia, and are leaving tomorrow on a six-day trek to the lost city of the Tayronas, Teyuna. It also promises to be fun, memorable, expensive, and exhausting. So much so that I'm still stressing about whether or not it's a good idea to go. ¡But damn! I can't remember the last time I saw a lost city, so I'm pretty sure this is a rare opportunity.

We've been in Colombia for a week now, and we're still finding our feet. A lot of our rusty Spanish has come back, we're learning new words, but the quality that we lack is the endurance to speak (or try to speak) for minutes, much less hours at a stretch. As weird as it sounds, I miss Korean. I think that both of us, after two solid years of meaningful cultural exchange, grow a bit tired when faced with confusing or overly enthusiastic greetings coming from a culture we don't understand yet. There's also the difficulty of knowing exactly what is or isn't safe. In Korea, we'd hear all the time that what we were planning to do (or more often, what we did last weekend) was unsafe. We didn't have contacts in the area, we were going to sleep outside; had our supervisors known we camped illegally through our week in Japan, they probably would have had coronaries. And we laughed off their warnings because we felt that we could rely on some fundamental observations we made about Asian culture: not a lot of touting, very little theft, polite strangers. But here, we have the touts, rumors of theft, a lot of barred windows, a lot of folks who clearly have little more that what they're wearing; but for the most part, nobody bothers us. It feels a lot like India, except we get more warnings from proprietors, folks (and guidebooks) not to do this, go there, etc etc. In any case it hasn't been especially eye-opening so far, but extremely fun, if a bit too hot.

My favorite experience so far is a bus ride that Noelle and I took with one of the proprietors at Casa Viena, out hotel in Cartagena. We wanted to get our yellow fever vaccination, but were told at the administrative office that the mobile vaccinating unit was in a barrio called Boston, quite a ways outside of the city. Upon asking our proprietor how to catch a bus to Boston, she interrogated the the cleaning lady (who apparently knows the suburbs well) in very rapid Spanish about Boston's safety, and decided to accompany us. Within ten minutes we were on a bumpy, loud, vallentano-music filled bus moving approximately the same speed as pedestrians, with sellers jumping on and off, offering us cokes, fruit, candy; we drove through the central market, which was absolute chaos. Unfortunately, once we reached the medical center, we were sent elsewhere, and once we reached elsewhere we were instructed to go much farther out into the countryside, and we gave up. But we got a authentic Colombian experience, and coupled with a beautiful plaza called Samtisima Trinidad, made for a memorable Cartagena.

But I have to go. A South Korean guy just showed up! I hope I can still talk!

six years? are you serious?

2008-03-12T19:56:00.003+09:00

I've gotta write fast, as fast as I can. I'm reworking the web site at the moment (lots of cool new widgets out there on the internet for free these days, thank God, 'cause some of us can barely code) which always prompts a heavy degree of wistfulness as I'm forced to wade through almost six! years of archives and whatnot. And the biggest thing that gets me down is that six years ago,working away at a group home in Watertown, MA, riding my new XJ-750 there and back every day, planning for the bike trip, I was not nearly as worried about making mistakes or planning especially well. In fact, I feel as though I've grown so cautious of late that I've got to keep hammering out the words here just to keep from editing on the fly and sucking any hope of real current I might otherwise generate. I sure f*ing hope that this isn't what growing older is about; closing in on yourself until an intricately sculpted tower of things you're afraid to alter replaces the cruddy, rough, ready-to-adapt mindset of youth. I've had to go through the last number of years' worth of music too; I'm proud of it, by and large, but I can't help noticing the trend that as I learn more about production and performance, I also grow more afraid to do the wrong thing, or maybe just too picky about doing the right thing. Crap. I guess I need to resign myself to changing the way I'm going to change, but at the moment, part of me is rebelling for sure. Let's hope that dragging the ol' fiddle down to the Amazon, or some dirty bar in the southern reaches of Buenos Aires works to remind me of priorities I may have supplanted.

In other news, the semester has started again, and things are a bit weird but OK. We've had two days of class so far, and I made a fundamental miscalculation in preparing the curriculum this time around: I thought the little buggers wanted to learn! The dang sixth graders have completely given up, for the most part. Urgh. I've got what I think is a very fun and humorous way to drill the simple present, and I've got all these fantastic books to read, when the rugrats are willing to pay attention! No memorizing boring dialogs! Please! We must learn how to intuit at least a little bit of English structure!

It looks like I'm going to Cheongju this coming weekend with my friend Hyeong-gyu, theastronomer from the nearby Seomjingang Observatory, a small but excellent fixture not so far from our house.

Nols and I are kind-of planning our upcoming trip through Central and South America, and I sure as hell hope that a little day-to-day discomfort will get me writing again, maybe even with a little indignance. Wouldn't that be nice...

Check out the new kipjones.net if you get a chance.

Even though it's too damn cautious.

Hope you enjoyed my translations of Korean poetry.

2008-02-10T21:04:00.001+09:00

from "Sky, Wind, Stars, and Poems" by Yun Dong-ju (1917-1945)

Instead of a Foreword

Looking to the sky until the day I die
without one speck of shame
the wind in the space between the leaves
troubles me.
With a heart that sings the stars
I must love everything that's going to die
and then the path given to me
must be crossed.

Tonight, as well, the stars are grazed by the wind.

* * * * *

Boy

Everywhere, as maple leaves, a sad autumn drips and falls. Each bared seat from which the leaves have fallen prepares for spring, and the sky is spread out above the tree branches. About to look tacitly into the sky, his eyebrows take on a blue pigment. When he sweeps his warm cheeks with two hands, the pigment appears and stains his palms as well. He looks into his palms again. In the lines there, clear river water flows, clear river water flows; in the river water a face sad like love - a beautiful innocent's face, childlike. Fascinated, the boy closes his eyes. Even so, in the clear flowing water, a face sad like love - a beautiful innocent's face, childlike.

* * * * *

from "The Love of a One-eyed Fish" by Ryu Shi Hwa (1958- )

Salt

salt
is the sea's wound
not many know it
salt
is the sea's pain
not many know it
on every dining table in the world
like white snow
when salt is shaken and falls
it's the sea's tears
not many
know it
these tears exist
for everything in this world
to bring out its flavor

* * * * *

Bread

There is bread in front of me
a well-baked loaf
received adequate fire
equally done from front-to-back.
Ever since it was young wheat
Head hardening in the heat of the sun,
its immature sentiments
Were made excessive by the blowing wind.
And again the mill machine sets up
its obstinacies to be crushed, one by one.
I have lived leaned over on one side
in thinking only of myself
I have had no time to properly mature.

There is bread in front of me
All the way through
a well-baked loaf

* * * * *

윤동주시인 - 하늘과 바람과 변과 詩 - 序詩, 少年
류시화시인 - 외눈박이 물고기의 사랑 - 소금, 빵

만약에 읽으실때 실수를 찾으면 연락해 주세요. 시를 번역하기 대단히 어렵습니다!

WHOA--he updated his blog--is he dying?

2007-10-16T15:21:00.001+09:00

Actually, his left eye does hurt a bit, but he's nowhere near death, he admits that shirking the blog for FOUR MONTHS is a bit long, and vows to try never again to maybe wait quite so long. The above picture is stolen from the Hyundai Heavy Industries website. This morning I learned that in Ulsan, we have the world's largest shipyard. This afternoon, I sent in a tour application, so I hope my next blog entry is a report on what an amazing experience the tour was. I distinctly remember trying in vain for a full day to be allowed into the harbor in Chennai, so I sent my application in Korean, using the kiss-ass verb tense all the way through.

I got married since the last time I typed anything here! The beautiful Noelle Elizabeth Myers accepted her fate, and my last name, about two months ago. Life is better now, a little more confusing, (and I can't seem to sleep for seven hours without waking up, now) and a lot more interesting. We got all set up in this great apartment, got just the right furniture, put up some great decorations, and learned last week that we have to move to an apartment WITH NO HOT WATER IN THE WINTERTIME. Which is not so important right now, the weather being relatively warm, but in two short months it will be the difference between a happy wife and a mad (or possibly dirty) one. Hm. The two of us also took a very nice 5-day ferry-and-motorcycle trip to the island of Jeju, which cleared up its weather expressly for our arrival. We got extremely sunburned climbing up Hallasan, South Korea's highest mountain.

If you're waiting for your thank you note from our wedding I swear we're writing them! Actually, Nols is done with hers and I keep putting it off like an idiot. That's the whole story.

I have a new job now, at the English Town, a sort of boring, white-collar version of Mr. Rogers' land of make believe. Students recite dialogs in mock-ups of movie theaters, airports, stores, etc. I pull teeth to get them excited while they change money at the bank. I also give a presentation every morning in which I try to cover why learning English is important. In the beginning of this presentation, I ask the students why they think we learn English. This morning, one bright (and sometimes annoying) girl answered in Korean, "To make us look good to other countries". It's funny 'cause it's true!
Sometimes I'm really surprised at Korean students' inability to make abstract inferences, or more specifically, to think independently of each other. (I admit, for the record, that I might not be priming them especially well, although I do try.) For the most part, in any group of students, there's one creative thinker and one kid who's good at English, and they team up to answer questions; the rest of the group is happy to hang on to their shirttails. One of the first frames of the presentation is a map of the world; the Korean peninsula is red, as well as a few isolated dots in China, Japan, Los Angeles, Toronto, Australia, etc. I ask the class what connects the colored areas. It's the rare group that can reason their way to "places in the world where I can speak Korean" without major help from the teachers. Every so often, though, some kid figures it out halfway, and shouts "Kimchi!"

In other news, Noelle and I have learned the Korean equivalent (in gambling ferocity) of Texas Hold 'Em, called Go-Stop. It arrived with the Japanese occupation in the early 1900s, and is played with Hwat'u, lovely cards grouped four to a month, with a different flower for each month (no numbers, no words; really attractive). We have been playing quite a bit this last week and a half, and at the end of our games usually one of us feels bad. The game seems to have uniquely long losing streaks; our friend Seon-kyeong played with us for two and a half hours, and didn't win a single hand. We went at it again the following evening, adding Chi-won to the mix, and this time Seon-kyeong killed everybody for almost an hour straight.

In other other news, I have made a lot of new songs, some little, some dumb; I have been uploading them only to facebook, which is lame. Now, I've also put them on my homepage. When I returned from the States, I brought with me an Mbox2, a nifty hardcover book-sized I/O interface for recording music into our laptop. It's great!

Best wishes for October. I'll see if I can get to the Hyundai Shipyard; if I can, I'll let you know about it.

I guess I must admit

2007-07-15T14:10:00.000+09:00

that teaching is rewarding.

I will be home in less than a month!

2007-07-01T17:34:00.000+09:00

And soon I will be eating a lot of pizza.

While most teachers

2007-06-20T15:03:00.000+09:00

take volleyball to new levels of seriousness in the gymnasium on Wednesday afternoons, I'm lounging with the English towners. Of late the English town teachers (Noelle, Yun Seon-gyung, Kim Jung-hwa, and the newly hired Mrs. Emelinda Chow, about whom I've written a dumb song but she hasn't heard it yet) are docile to the point of stasis in the afternoons. The semester already feels like it's winding down; it's only a little over a month until I get to visit the States, see my friends, and get hitched.

Noelle and I are switching jobs. She'll get the sweet four-school low-supervision neat-students mountain-commute gig, and I'll take over her job, where I have to be in the same building each day, walking a different group of students through the same dialogs. I'm not thrilled about it, to tell you the truth, but Noelle deserves to have some real students, and some mountain commutes too, I guess.

This last weekend we took a bus together to Wando, eschewing the motorcycle because we thought it would rain, which it didn't. It was hard not to vomit on the bus, actually, but our ferry ride from Wando to Cheongsando was rather nice. In fact, we were invited by the captain to spend the ride with him on the bridge, after a short conversation about underwater construction prompted by a large platform afloat in the bay.

Me: (in Korean) Do you work on this big boat?
Him: Actually I'm the (incomprehensible, but turned out to mean 'captain').
Me: That big thing. Is it a gas station? It has four big things up on it.
Him: (Incomprehensible) before construction (incomprehensible) you have to do it.
Me: Ah. Will they make a bridge here?
Him: Yes, but (incomprehensible).
Me: I see. (not knowing what to do) Noelle, should we go and get some coffee?
Him: Coffee? Please come this way.
(on the bridge, now)
Me: Is it hard to drive this boat?
Him: No, it's easy.
Me: Where's that construction thing on this GPS?
Him: Ha ha. It moves, we just go around it.

Immediately upon our arrival we were hailed by some construction workers. It was the kind of grating 'hi' that I've grown to really dislike, but the guys were nice; they took us out to lunch and drove us on a short tour of the island, which culminated in a doubles ping-pong game won by Nols and the boss. They won the rematch too. I should know better than to team up with a subordinate in Asia (or to go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line). When we got back to town everybody was asking us if we'd had a good time, which made the island feel very small. We ran into the builders the next morning too, but by that time Noelle's right eye had swelled up pretty impressively and they didn't want to hang out with us anymore. It was a nice weekend, overall, however each time I visit an island a ways from the mainland I come away a little depressed. I think it would be tough to live on one.

I bought some French books at the Seoul International Book fair a couple weeks ago, when Nols took me to see Pat Metheny trio, and these days I'm reading Le Petit Prince, Milan Kundera's Le Rideau, and The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic. I thought Pavic invented the Khazar story from the ground up, which made me look like a prize idiot when talking to this Israeli guy who knew a lot more than me about history. I'm ashamed to say that after traveling in India I tend to prejudge Israelis a bit (I expect them to be a bit loud and confrontational, I guess, and my conversation partner indeed was), which rubbed a bit of salt into the wound.

토끼 아저씨와 멋진 생일 선물

2007-06-09T14:52:00.000+09:00

It's a good day! I've just succeeded in reading 'Mister Rabbit and the Cool Birthday Present' without having to resort to the dictionary every ten seconds!

Thank God for local libraries.

I am a dolt, always, it seems.

2007-06-06T18:18:00.000+09:00

At the moment, Nols and I are doing wedding invitations. This makes me realize that I almost never talk to any of the people I care about. I feel bad and I'm sorry. I hope I get better.

Happy Easter

2007-04-09T13:36:00.000+09:00

A better blogger (of which Beater Becker bicked) would have had something to say at regular intervals throughout the last number of months; I'm often torn between not wanting to list inane details and apathy, which keeps me pretty far from the keyboard. But of late things have been really getting into a good stride, and not wanting to write eight essentially identical update letters to my close friends and family, here I go.

Noelle is in Iksan tonight. I've got her computer at my place. This last couple of weeks, issues warranting serious discussion have been popping up, as I imagine happens in any engagement. Like a lot of couples, we perceive the individual and his/her responsibility in a relationship in rather different ways. When she considers someone, she gives greater weight to who that person is now than I do, while I am more inclined to factor in what I feel to be his or her potential. At its worst, sometimes it seems that I'm not accepting enough and that she doesn't try hard enough; at its best, this difference in perception provides support in unexpected places. Having never considered another human being so much before (actually it feels sometimes like I've never considered anyone before, just bumbled through friendships and relationships) I'm now having an easier time getting in the shoes of strangers and aquantainces. In short, I'm really excited to be getting married. The most affirming thing to me, so far, is that when we talk of the future there is so much room for one another. Neither of us are eager to sacrifice dreams, but we are learning to say to one another (and soon to everyone we fricking know) that those plans are less important to us than the health of our relationship. Ten bucks says in five years I'm kicking myself for writing this paragraph; I could have been racing horses across the Mongolian steppe but instead I'm clipping her toenails.

I don't know if the heightened empathy has anything to do with it, but I've been making a bunch of friends recently. My Korean has just reached the point where, instead of only smiles, nods and I don't knows, my conversation partners get frustrated with my small vocabulary and ball up beer labels while I thumb through my dictionary. It's a nice balance: those who would be my friends must master their impatience in conversation (and be good at charades). Like an inverse version of the Groucho quote about clubs and members. This evening at Kimbap Chunguk (riceroll heaven) I ran into a student of mine, Su-Yeon, her younger brother Keon-u, as well as their parents. The family lived in Alexandria, Virginia for just over two years, enough time for the ten-year-old boy to learn a lot of English (but not enough to get by in a US school) and miss a lot of Korean. He's something of a discipline problem in his class, I guess. We met while I was peeing at school, and he snuck a peek, so to speak. I pushed him back and he said, clear as a bell, "Why are you hitting me!?". We have both acknowledged ourselves as 'special' in a somewhat derogatory sense; our lack of understanding creates a kinship. Noelle and I have also got standing invitations from the town stonesmiths (Chinese characters into boulders!), the family that owns "First Tearoom", and a county bus driver, all of whom have asked me directly how much soju I can drink. And I don't want to jinx it, but I might have finagled private Tae Kwon Do lessons from a 3rd dan instructor in exchange for tutoring his daughter.

Frisbee is going over really well out here. No one has played before, and it's an instant hit with the kids. We're going to bring a bunch back this summer; they'll make fantastic gifts.

Happy Easter. I confess I was hoping for something really poetic to come out of the woodwork here, but instead I've said my piece. The cherry blossoms (big ol' misnomer as there ain't no fruit gonna come no how) are in full bloom, it's warming up, and Anna Karenina was a good read. Next is "The Geography of Thought" (thank you, uncle Steve) about quantifiable differences between Asian and Western reasoning. It looks like it's going to be very good.

Ah, yes;

2007-03-19T13:12:00.000+09:00

GOKSEONG ELEMENTARY SCHOOL곡성 중앙 초등학교
SIXTH GRADE READING: What comes next?

1. It went down like clockwork yesterday at the defunct Confucian school on the outskirts of town. Some cuckoo had written up a large number of near-unintelligible signs, showing off a third-grader's command of brush and ink. One read "the Gecko game", another "build a house". Hung from bare Korean pines, they floated auspiciously in the afternoon wind.
Was it:

a) an incipient shootout at the Kyeol-hon corral,

b) a failed insurance fraud scheme,

c) the setup for a marriage proposal,

d) the sixth annual squid worship administrative convention

2. He brought her, eyes closed, through the forest, snapping twigs and whatnot. Building on a long-standing game of one-of-us-blind walks, she didn't complain. When she found herself confronted with the scene and the man, she:

a) waited patiently,

b) sliced off a bit of his right ear with a concealed butterfly knife,

c) recited the fourth surya of the Qur'an backwards in an obscure Malaysian dialect while simultaneously raising the man, by his collar, into the air

3. Time receded into the trees while he laid his intentions bare. When all was said, she (having already surveyed the scene) surveyed the man, and confidently answered:

a) "Sixteen of them."

b) "If you do that again, you know you'll need surgery."

c) "On the condition that I never shave my legs again."

d) "Yes."

So from the preceding, which of the following can be concluded?

a) The upcoming French presidential election will occur with each likely candidate sequestered in individual state-of-the-art mini space stations.

b) Kip Jones and Noelle Myers are in fact engaged, and will return to the United States this summer to make a big deal about it.

c) Noah's ark has been found not in Turkey, but in New Jersey, where it has escaped detection for millenia by cleverly masquerading as a train-car diner.

(Answers: C,A,D,C)

Advocates MP3s and Myspace for Morning Zephyr

2007-01-04T23:06:00.000+09:00

Hello; happy new year!

Advocates is ready for download!
Well, the record never got really mixed (although I'm crossing my fingers), but I'm sick of waiting, and here's what I've got.

http://www.morningzephyr.com/advocates.html

Also, this band is now 1 of 145 million odd users on Myspace. (Check my math, but that's over 2% of the world...how is that even possible?)

http://www.myspace.com/morningzephyr

I am currently enjoying Solzhenitsyn's 'First Circle' and a new pair of L.A. Gear sneakers. Tomorrow afternoon I'm meeting with a Chinese teacher for a lesson before Noelle and I go to China. She doesn't speak English, so our lesson will be severly hampered by my Korean. But as they say, some is better than none when you already look like a complete idiot.
Cheers to you.

Grinchy Greetings from Gokseong!

2006-12-25T00:38:00.000+09:00

It's getting on one a.m. Christmas morning; Noelle is crashed out on the couch, and my guilt at not having written a word since the seventh of November is weighing on me. Last year at this time, if memory serves, I read David Copperfield, eating chocolates and Parle-G crackers before riding to Powai lake on my Atlas Gold Super. Today, I hereby put forth the following statement: a holiday is immeasurably better if shared.

Noelle and I picked up our Chinese visas yesterday morning. We're going to bum around China for a few weeks in January and early February. Everything about traveling, so far, seems much more complicated with a partner because one cannot torture oneself so easily. Even worse, sneaky desires for creature comforts hide behind my desire to see Noelle comfortable. Still, it's an exciting prospect; and likely a good agent to temper the naive Christmas happiness that's floating around Nols' pad--around the fake tree, the stacks of gifts (!), and the in-floor heating.

On Friday night my co-teacher Kim Jung-hwa, who I teach with in the three rural schools, took us out for Kalbi, coffee, a stroll and a drive in Gwangju. The three of us happily hummed carols and discussed language; Kim Jung-hwa is my de facto Korean teacher these days. Over coffee I learned the verb suffix for "when", as in "when you drink this" or "when you go". Having my education so tied up in a friendship is a new dynamic to me; I'm grateful it's turned out as it has. Today, Nols and I walked around Gokseong, made a solid spaghetti-and-meatballs, before turning our attention to gifts from family, friends and each other. She found, in Korean, the one Tintin (Ttaengttaeng?!) book I don't have, "Destination Moon". Tomorrow, in addition to phoning family, we're headed into Gwangju to see a Stomp-like performance. A friend of a friend is going to sneak us in, I guess, and then we will watch chefs chop and dice in a manner befitting members of a samulnori. Add these outings to after-school snack trips and take-out binges with the likes of Kim Jae-Hung, Yun Sun-Kyeong, Pak Chi-won, and Vivian Bernal, and you have the ingredients for a good Christmas season abroad.

This coming week is the last of the semester, and the last regular teaching I have until March, save 9 days in February. I think I'm going to take a series of trips around the peninsula by local busses, sleeping as cheaply as possible and studying Korean. First up is Gangwon-do, I think; it's widely praised for its beauty by everyone that I ask. I have a couple of textbooks that I'm using for language study, but like anything, the most difficult part is overcoming my pride and simply talking like a monkey at every opportunity. Today I laughed leaving the library, imagining my exchange from the librarian's perspective. Some guy with a thick American accent says: "Theess theeng, thees card...I want to doo. Can I doo? I need a picture?"

I will try not to go so long without writing next time. Merry Christmas.

haenggum--happily action render?

2006-11-07T10:49:00.000+09:00

I'm currently watching a mystery machine that has the power to destroy Noelle's and my clothes. It appears to be a combination washer and spin-dryer. I've never heard of such a device before, but I've spent the last fifteen minutes decoding the runic inscriptions on its instrument panel, selecting options that may or may not be correct. This process, believe it or not, sheds a bit of light on the ambiguous English phrases emblazoned on products in this part of the world. The spin-dryer options read as follows: ch'oegang--best, peak, ultimate; kang--river; chung, in the middle, also Buddhist monk; yak, medication, but used in a lot of words implying slightly, or a dash of; and t'alssu anham, which seems to imply dehydration. I've often wondered if speakers of languages whose lexicons do not approach the OED find certain processes or actions imbued with the quality of other actions or processes which share linguistic similarity. I suppose I don't mix up a train ride with training for a race, or a drivetrain, so I needn't be too literalistic. Perhaps I should pose the question this way: How do people, who speak different languages, reason differently, if indeed they do? Linguists learned long ago that the color spectrum is divided in different places for different languages. It makes me wonder what larger, if any, difference in cognition exists between someone who counts as we do, and the stereotypical pacific islander who counts "one, two, three, four, many".
At any rate, there is not nearly enough water in the washing machine. I've been hoping it would fill up as the cycle progresses, but instead it's been rollling the wet clothes back and forth for 20 mintues without filling the tumbler. Apparently I selected the wrong setting for 'hoe', which means both 'round' and 'fish'. I've also put too much washing powder in. I hope the "superlative" spin-dry setting doesn't cement bits of washing powder into the clothes. I'll find out soon--when the washer heralds its completion with a happy electronic jig, worthy of one of those horrible birthday cards.

The appliances here in South Korea are smarter than Stateside appliances, which, combined with the Hangul barrier, makes for an intimidating experience. Noelle and I are still joking that we'll come in and the rice cooker will be playing my violin. Each time I go to use it, the display reads something different. We've had success on the "Kim-bap" setting, a sticky, dry setting that makes us wait for 10 minutes before we can open the door (the appliances lock down! I couldn't open the washer right now if I wanted to...) but each time, it's a puzzle to get the thing to read "kim-bap". Right now it's reading 11H, yesterday it was reading 4H, and when I got up this morning, the machine was warm. We unplugged it, and the clock is still on. Thank God it has no thumbs.
In other news, I have at long last procured real, actual coffee beans. The ROK has really taken to instant coffee, and there are these fantastic coffee vending machines all around (at ~30 cents/demitasse...), but no beans or grounds anywhere. I've been through charades with the proprietors of the groceries here in Gokseong (who are now used to me walking in, smiling, and stating a newly learned sentence such as "The drain is clogged." or "Is there a wrench?" and then not understanding a word they say) to no avail. Two days ago Nols and I went to the provincial capital Gwangju, and found a 1Kg bag of beans for $20, which I promptly bought. The brand's slogan: "The real coffee". I've also been visited by Jehovah's Witnesses, which was a bit surreal.

Cheers!

Happy All Souls' Day

2006-11-01T12:49:00.000+09:00

I've just eaten some very spicy ramen while uploading new pictures to the flickr site. I'm now waiting on my teaching visa; I thought I was going to have to go to Japan, but as it turns out, my previous visa is transferable. I'll start teaching in a week or so. Until then, I've got lots of studying and exploring to do. Nols and I bought bikes, and I've been enjoying the degree of independence they afford us; yesterday I rode to the nearby city of Namwon, looking for coffee beans, among other things. No dice! Each morning I am greeted by the expatriate aroma of freeze-dried coffee, despite my best efforts to upgrade. We'll see how this progresses.

We've been shuttled around from apartment to apartment; there's no question that the bureaucratic spirit runs high, here. Noelle must leave her apartment because soon it will be my apartment, but I can't move in now because my contract hasn't started. Furthermore, we're not to take the extra appliances, dishes, and furniture in the old apartment to the new one yet, even though the new apartment (that we don't even need to be in, if I can't move in officially for another week) lacks some basic things. Ah!

However, hanging out and poking around is a lot of fun. We're, to some degree, the talk of the town; numerous strangers and acquaintances have demonstrated a solid knowledge of our goings and comings. Still, there are ten thousand people here, so our notoriety is confined to certain small circles. There are three foreigners in town, now; the other is a guy from Edmonton named Rodney who's been here for a number of years, but supposedly is something of a hermit. We've had two abrupt conversations on the street (he sticks out like a sore thumb, which, I suppose, I do too), during both of which he's intimated that the school district will be putting a lot of pressure on me to teach a number of extra classes.

Everything is going very well.

I've allived in limbo

2006-10-25T18:07:00.000+09:00

Well, I got here. Gokseong is beautiful! There's fog in the mornings, there are mountains everywhere; all sorts of smells abound, and Korean food is starting to grow on me. What a gross expression, "grow on me". Implying that somehow kimchi could be a natural issue of the human body; what a disgusting thought.

It has been fantastic seeing Noelle again after such an absence. Her work schedule prevents us from spending the days together so far, but we're looking toward the weekend with relish. Again, kind of a weird connotation, "relish". Last night we went out with her coworkers to a huge and varied meal. They're a good bunch, funny and supportive. Among the things I was taught last night is a singularly lecherous pick-up line, so far guaranteed to keep Koreans in stitches when spoken by a yank.

I've been caught in the middle of a strange puzzle in regards to the job that I'm pretty sure I have. As far as I can see, the regional district of education is trying to cut the recruiting firm that recommended me out of the deal. This makes sense...the recruiting firm has really done nothing in this instance except give the "OK" and present a general contract for my general approval. As a result, I've been asked to re-interview for the position with a supervisor at the office of education (my previous interview being with the recruiting firm), submit a different/new set of application materials, and just kind of wait around until they figure everything out. Even more humorously, I have yet to actually meet with anybody in the department of education; so far, it's all been correspondence. Hopefully everything goes without a hitch, and I can start holding my employed head up higher walking down the streets.

"Foucault's Pendulum", so far, is excellent. I highly recommend it. I shied away from it for so long because I had the impression that it would be a difficult read, but it's a straight-up thriller with great characters and a real semiotic quality.
Here's hoping you're well.

loose ends coming out of the woodwork

2006-10-16T01:40:00.000+09:00

I've got less than a week left in the States, now. Even though I've busy over the last six months or so, for some reason it begins to look like I've had all sorts of time I haven't used. Oh well. At any rate, I just completed another week and a half up at the sugar beet farm in western Minnesota, driving from 2am to 2pm when the weather permitted. I was up there with five of my friends, which created an atmosphere of camaraderie in spite of the sophomoric pranks (Jordan is trapped in the bathroom by welders placed in front of the door; one wakes up to a blasting furnace, burners and stove on, and windows shut, on a particularily hot afternoon while desperately trying to sleep before the night shift begins). Driveshafts were broken freely, diesel flowed like wine; the intoxicated teased their friends over the CB. O Beet Lift, wherefore art you truncated in your radiance? &c, &c.

It appears that I have a job in South Korea all lined up for me! I fly out this Saturday, and upon arrival I must prepare a work visa application (that I need to be in Japan to process), and then I'll be teaching ESL until next summer sometime. As I'm following my girlfriend Noelle over, certain aspects of this job lend it an auspicious quality: I'll have an apartment across the street from her, and will likely be her coworker, not to mention we'll have the same J-term break during which we'll probably do some backpacking in China. Overall, I'm more or less thrilled. The list of people on craigslist who want to buy my car is long, Ixtlan (my dog) will be well taken care of by my friend Joel Heaslip, and I've got some fantastic material to bite into over the coming weeks and months: 'Foucault's Pendulum' by Umberto Eco, 'First Circle' by Alexsander Solzenhitsyn, and 'the Dictionary of the Khazars' by Milorad Pavic. I have read almost no fiction since being back in the States, and I'm really looking forward to diving back in.

The latest record still hasn't been mixed, and it might be a while. Everybody's been busy, and I haven't felt like doing all the work this time around, and so it sits. With any luck it will be up on the site someday.

Here's to autumn, and another trip; also to you. Cheers!

Apologies for such a long interim.

2006-09-11T11:35:00.000+09:00

All sorts of things lately have not been happening in a timely manner; among them is the upkeep of kipjones.net. I apologize. To anyone who checks out the site with any regularity, I doubly apologize.

I've decided to take the updates to blogspot. I've had all sorts of trouble with the scripting I tried to import to my site, but being a web-dunce I've not been able to keep it either working or spam-free. To make a longish story short, it hurts my pride a little, but presents a much more pleasant interface for any potential readers.

The short history of the last six months: I was not so long ago in Bombay, studying Indian violin with Kala Ramnath. I returned home; two of my friends, Raphael Fraisse and Erin Peters Bownds, died this spring, followed by my grandfather Donald Jones. I also began dating my friend Noelle Myers; she is currently teaching English in South Korea, and I'll be following her there in two short months. She may be the one! My trio Morning Zephyr recorded an EP entitled Advocates; it's awaiting mixing, but should be up on the site sooner than later. Please stay tuned as I figure out my website once again. Thanks for your patience.

The last from India

2006-03-30T04:55:00.001+09:00

March 29, 2006 - 11:55 AM penultimate

Okay, I've undergone a complete change of heart in reference to 'Tropic of Cancer', and I don't exactly know why. But today I picked up the book to read the second half, and I laughed myself silly. It's still, I think, much too obscene, but maybe not quite as chock-full o' arrogance as I originally thought. To boot, some of the soapboxes in the last quarter are really beautiful in their fatalistic gloom. I find myself vacillating between completely agreeing with Miller and wanting to challenge him to a boxing match. For some reason he writes like a skinny guy. Maybe I should do a Google image search before engaging in hypothetical fistfights with modernist authors. For sure Hemingway would beat me to a pulp. Joyce was nearly blind, but he had so much hardship in his life I would let him win. I think Steinbeck and Faulkner probably learned martial arts in their sleep, while dreaming about a far East that looked remarkably like their native states. When they woke up, aside from having absorbed some new kata, they probably had functionally envisioned the culture of the Orient without any devices necessitating a book set anywhere but California or Mississippi, respectively. Come on, Minnesota! Where's YOUR warrior-poet? That's the problem with the near-arctic climates. It's hard to get up the gumption to be a warrior-poet when you can't bear the thought of leaving your warm bed.

At any rate, I fly on Saturday morning, and I'm good and ready. I'm walking into a job, some gigs, and my old place. I'm really excited to see my family and friends, and I've got an application pending at the U of M's linguistics department. (If it works out, yeah! Let's get an M.A. If it doesn't, I think I'll plan another trip.) I'm looking forward to hot showers, driving, and earning. I'm sick of mosquitoes, dust, and arguing. And as an added plus, on Sunday I get to reminisce in all my old college haunts (patronizing them each in the cheapest possible way) like the Vittoria in the North End, the South Street diner, Cafe Algiers in Harvard Square, and many others. In fact, perhaps I could chalk up my recent appreciation of 'Tropic of Cancer' to the impending visit to my own sort of Paris; while in Boston I was constantly swimming in a sea of ideas and experiences I could barely get my head above. And then, when discussing philosophy or literature, one needs only appear to have their head above water; or more precisely, to be just a little less confused or a little more adamant than one's conversation partners. I can't even count how many times I pretended to have read crap I'd only seen in a bookstore, only to have a seemingly cogent conversation about it with someone who probably hadn't read it either. Thankfully as school went on my integrity increased (or I grew disgusted with trying to appear smarter than I really am) as well as the crap I'd read. I wish I still had friends there, but true to form, the college friends have split to greener and cheaper pastures. It's my good luck that Karl Doty is going to school at NEC now, or I'd be up a creek! Well, either way, I get a day to think and remember: playing tables Saturday nights at the Saraceno for tips, playing in the subway three to five times a week, rejoicing at the occasional real gig. My brother-in-arms Tom Richards schlepping his trombone to and from parades, in between funk-band cover gigs with Brian Walkley and the All-Nighters. Both of us writing and practicing constantly, eating rice and beans with scallions for dinner, oats and milk for breakfast, reading 'Crime and Punishment', listening to Pat Metheny Group at unreasonable volumes, and walking, walking, walking everywhere. Getting mugged at knifepoint, having crushes on lesbians (how unobservant could I be?), waltzing into Atonal Solfege a half-hour late and sitting down to sightread some Alban Berg, lamenting musical politics when they're not going my way, being unquestioningly left left left wing, listening to Keith Jarrett's Bach at Josh Smith's place for nights on end. Swinging at a playground with Andrew Johnson, singing memorized solos at the top of our lungs. Conversations about God and Art and Language and Creativity with Aaron Shapiro. Wrestling matches with Rushad Eggleston in the hallway. Cowboy Bebop at Emmet Quinn's. Shana and Matt's Dorchester place. And then the countless vaguer associations: the poets at the Lizard Lounge who all seemed to live in Watertown. The Berklee String Department. The people you see only at jazz shows. The onslaught of visitors to our flat in Hemenway street that left the couch full of graffiti and the walls decorated. The MassArt students, the Boston conservatory students. Renting and denting cars. Talking an acquaintance through a bad acid trip, talking a friend out of suicide, talking ourselves into and out of depression. Bikes stolen, rollerblades given to a mango-crazy Lizard Lounge poet. Snow sculptures in Copley Square. Dreaded recording sessions for film-scoring students; arbitrarily making half of them pay. And through it all, the axis of life in one's early twenties: absurd amounts of coffee fed intravenously as often as possible. What a whirlwind, in retrospect. Henry Miller got it all down pretty well in 'Cancer', it's just that his whirlwind gravitates to prostitutes. If it didn't, I'd recommend the book to my folks; if it didn't, I think they'd enjoy it. As it stands, it's got me really amped up to stroll through Boston, not to mention interested about how my last couple of years fit into the whole linear mess of living. Hats off, Henry. I wonder what happened to you?

hey

2006-03-27T18:34:00.000+09:00

I'm in Delhi, and I'm on my way back to Mumbai and the states in the very near future. I saw the Taj Mahal, which was really cool, and spent some time in Jaipur, where I quickly made some interesting friends.

However, the reason I'm putting fingers to keys today is because I just received an email informing me that Ed Harrington died of a stroke, last week, at 82. Last summer, as I was preparing to travel, Ed told me to apply for a scholarship from his organization, the Harrington Foundation, even though I was not planning on attending an institution and was well past the median age of his scholarship recipients. He graciously gave me a scholarship that amounted to a quarter of my total travel budget, without which I may well have run into logistic difficulties here in India. Aside from this gift, I found him a very intelligent guy who had aged gracefully, keeping friends from many walks of life about him. I was looking forward to seeing him again in Minneapolis; he retained a great interest in life, and I sincerely hope his family and friends are comforted in their loss. The last time I saw him, he had just dropped me off at my car after we'd eaten lunch, and gone back inside his office. Maybe for a half minute or so, I waited in the parking lot, thinking; he did the same from his desk, watching a flock of finches peck at some birdseed. I started up my absurdly loud car and drove off to pack.

In other news, I'm doing well. I'm halfway through Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' which I don't like at all. I'm having trouble buying souvenirs for people, and I'm looking for a dentist, to try and score some cheap fillings before returning to the States in a little under a week. Cheers, readers.

dangit stupid typos I hate 'em

2006-03-23T03:26:00.000+09:00

I'm in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, killing time until my train leaves for Agra at 11:30 tonight. The Maoist strike ended two days ago, very conveniently for me; and after a day on busses and a day on trains, I'll soon be gazing at the Taj Mahal. Now that I'm down to the home stretch, I've got to solve the annoying problem of finding appropriate souvenirs for my family. This has sent me into dumb shops full of worthless crap for the first times since coming here, and so far I've seen almost nothing that I want anybody to associate with my trip. (Except today I saw a hat that read "ADIBAS"; and if it wasn't so ugly I'd have picked it up for someone, God knows who.) Lucknow has the most bored Indians per capita, I think, in the world. In every Indian city there are five men to do the job of two. Yesterday at the border, I spoke with one official, filling out a new embarkation certificate. I assumed that the four people with him were just pals, but after I'd finished the form, the official picked up my passport and form and slapped it in front of the guy to his left, who stamped it. Bored groups like this are really grating if you're in a no-small-talk mood, and Lucknow is full of them. Droves of people with nothing better to do come up and start asking you all sorts of questions. This is normal to an extent in India, but today marks the first day I've deliberately ignored children in a park, and also the first time I've sworn out loud to rickshaw drivers' faces (neither of which I'm proud of). After getting used to the kind people of Nepal, it's hard to readjust to the everyday war of India, and all the 'businessmen' consumed by their desire to make an extra 25% off of you. Not that the Nepalis are perfect; a lot of the guest house owners can barely do addition, and if you're not in the mood for a distorting radio playing the same Nepali song for 20 minutes, you should get off the bus. But at least they don't pester you after you've said 'no'.

Obviously, I need a topic or I'll continue to flounder on the shoals of cultural comparison. Hm. I had a lovely day on a motorcycle in Nepal, rented for $6; I took a nice drive to the south of Pokhara to Fedikhola, and a nicer drive out to the west to Baglung. I was riding a 125cc Hero Honda Super Sprint. Other names here include the Bajaj "Pulsar", the Hero Honda "Splendor+" the LML "freedom", etc. I would love to see one of these 100cc wimpmobiles with a detailed gas tank reading "Gutless Beast" or "I won't get you up that hill" or "Pile on the whole family and hope for the best". The fuel economy is great, though. The highlight of the Nepal ride (aside from the jaw-dropping vistas) came as I stopped for a military checkpoint. Tourists being outside of the Gov't-Maoist conflict, we're usually waved by; this time the officer made me stop. After a short Q+A, he told me to take his friend as far as Kusma, which I did, chuckling.

I'm sorry, reader; my dial is just set to "flounder", I guess. I haven't been sleeping well or consistently for the last few days, and I'm just writing like I'm trying to waste time. You have my apologies, and I assure you that my intention is to write better and more concisely next time. In other news, I found a copy of "Our Mutual Friend" in Kolkata, and it ended pretty well, albeit with a couple of disappointing shortcuts. I also read "King Lear" up in the mountains, and it comes off as unnecessarily depressing, but maybe it makes sense on stage. At any rate, Shakespeare's name-calling must be among the best insults in literature.If you live in Minneapolis, I might see you pretty soon...

The land of the brave

2006-03-19T19:39:00.000+09:00

Also briefly: I am in Pokhara, Nepal, having returned from a trek through the Annapurna region, including the base camp for Annapurna I. It was crazy, I didn't have the proper gear, and all in all I'm exhausted and a little sick now; but it was a great experience and I'm sure I'll write about it soon enough. At the moment the Maoist resistance has forced a transit strike on Nepal; there are no busses to anywhere--no local busses, none to Kathmandu, none to the border. The Maoists are well organized, courteous (I met some on the trail. I was forced to make a 'donation' of 400 rupees, or $6, and I was given a receipt so that other Maoists would know I'd already paid my tribute.) and at least in rumor, roughly as powerful as the government itself. The next seasons will be very interesting and possibly pivotal for Nepal.
I hope to have pictures up soon, and some more exhaustive writing. "Our Mutual Friend" turned out to be very good (I found another copy in Kolkata); I also had the unique struggle of trying to read "King Lear" on the bus from Kathmandu to Pokhara. Finding this impossible, I read it during a snow day up in the Himalayas. I can't wait to upload these pictures that look just like the dumb pictures every dumb person takes out here, expecting to amaze their friends but just garnering dirty looks. Cheers, all!

one long week

2006-03-01T01:11:00.000+09:00

Briefly: I left Mumbai a week ago, hopping off the train a little before my planned stop at a beach town called Varkala. Varkala has the warmest sea water I've ever swum in, a lovely cliff overlooking the water on which the town is situated, and a gigantic heterogeneous crowd of various whitey types paying far too much for everything including the best coffee I've had in India.

By way of Trivanrdrum, I worked my way down to India's land's end, Kanyakumari, where tourists and Hindu devotees alike wake before dawn, clamber to the beach, and watch the sunrise en masse. Similarly they all assemble again on the beach (same beach!) to observe the sunset some twelve hours later. There's a vaguely apocalyptic atmosphere to Kanyakumari; stereos are blaring night and day, with sleep-deprived crowds marching to their calls to prayer like so many walking dead. However, there is a cool temple/statue island combo offshore, which one may visit by ferry. There are two dilapidated boats that comprise this ferry service, and the pilots, who make rounds each half hour day-in day-out, are crazy Indian race-car drivers. I rode this ferry twice (of course), and on both occasions the boats were made to chop though the waves like speedboats and to list side to side like catamarans, eliciting gasps and worried looks from the crowds (our same sleep-deprived devotees). On one of the islands, I was able to view a wind farm some twenty kilometers up the shore; the following morning I hired a taxi to take me there and back. I took a lot of pictures, climbed one of the wind-electricity-mill-things, and just felt fantastic in general. I love wind farms. I love love love watching all of the hundreds of windmills spin at different rates, covering a landscape. Okay.

Then yesterday I caught a train north again to Cochi, a town built over a 16th century Portuguese fort. I stayed at a bizarre "home stay" that included some ostensibly Christian shrines, seashells, and other grandmotherly fixtures. After a couple of nice walks I took another train up to Trichur, where I am now. I net a lot of cool travelers this week and exchanged a lot of email addresses.

There's a radio playing in this internet cafe, and there's a single by the voice that got famous singing "a little bit of ________ (woman's name) is what I ________ (verb)." This song goes "I got a girl in Paris, I got a girl in Rome...etc, etc." It's another two-chord vamp, even. How can we let this happen, people? What are we coming to? This man should be found and tortured with two chord vamps while under house arrest until he repents for the idiocy he's chosen to spend his career propagating.

I have another sad tale; a tale of being whomped below the belt by a mystery Keralan thief. This particular MKT we'll call him/her waited until I was 450 pages into Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" before surreptitiously removing it from my bunk. Grrr! As if the nasty secondhand book is worth much at all! It was, however, a nice warning to the travelers left on the train. Kanyakumari being the last station in the line, many residents of nearby communities were prowling through the cars, casing them out for lost/left luggage and whatnot. But still, it's as if John Rokesmith and Mr and Mrs Boffin and Silas Wegg and Bella Wilfer and Mortimer Lightwood and Mr and Mrs Veneering were taken from their proper timeline and placed in stasis. I'm going to Chennai (Madras) tomorrow night, a city large enough to have a good bookstore or thirty, and there I'll get to defibrillate the frozen characters. Muhuhuhuaahahaa maniacal laughter and such.

I'll get some windfarm shots happening soon. Happy March Day tomorrow.

Sanctified Squidcakes

2006-02-18T01:15:00.000+09:00

I am currently trying to put pictures on the FLICKR site; the connection is quite slow, so I'll be here for a bit. Pretty much every little logistical thing has gone wrong today, and now I've been waiting for 25 minutes without seeing a single sign that the uploads are working. Annoyingly enough, I don't think it's going to work, which is hilarious considering the rigamarole I had to go through to get a computer to read my camera's memory card. I missed my chance to snap a sign that says "CHOHAN Motor Driving School: All it takes is 52 years of experience." However, I did manage to get a picture of the sign for the "All India Center for Local Self Government". Today Kala and her friend Sherad and I went out for some fabulous milkshakes; as Kala and I are both leaving tomorrow, (and as I'm pretty sure it's tradition) we each had two. I gave the bicycle to Hariprasad Chaurasia's Vrindivan Gurukul after bringing all the unnecessary stuff to Lokhandwala, where it will sit for the next month.

OKAY:::there will be a few new photos, but I'll have to choose them carefully as it's taking FOREVER to get 'em up. See you guys on the beach in Kerala.

Jack Flint and the Banjo Dossier

2006-02-15T01:21:00.000+09:00

I've just come back to good old Shere-e-Punjab after a morning lesson. They're wrapping up; as a direct result it's difficult for both Kala and I to keep our heads in the game. I've resorted to asking her to play things while I record them, so I can learn them later. We've been working on what I think is my favorite raga so far, Kaafi (Coffee). It's played (in a version called Mishra-Kaafi) as a dorian scale, with natural 3 and natural 7 to be used at one's discretion. The composition I've learned is just beautiful; I can't wait to bastardize it with dense harmonic structures. Kala's approaching departure is my Mumbai bookend as well. It's strange to think of leaving, but I'm really excited. I've picked up a few train tickets describing a swoop from Bombay to Raxaul, an India/Nepal border town. This swoop takes me south first, to Trivandrum, Kerala (pretty much the southernmost tip of India), and up to Coimbatore and Chennai, Tamil Nadu; I'm going to get a flight to Kolkata ($40! Can you believe it?), hop a train to Raxaul and then a bus to Kathmandu. I've given myself twelve days to do this whole loop, in the hope of spending a couple of weeks wandering around Nepal before making a mad dash to Himachal Prasesh, and Rajasthan, and then back to Mumbai via Aurangabad. March will be a good month. Especially since I'm leaving the fiddle and gear at Kala's and traveling light as a feather. Fricking ten kilometers uphill hiking in Sikkim grrrr.

But after that, -snif-, I'm coming home. In fact, I bought my plane ticket yesterday to JFK (I'm going to walk around Boston for a day before flying to Minneapolis). But it's a good decision. Among other things, I've got the tools I need to carefully cop and adapt Kala's technique to DENSE HARMONIC STRUCTURES MuHuHaHaHa. I'm also on the cusp of a very big idea of music that will probably swallow the next phase of my life (more on that later). I've learned that it's not that big a deal to fly to a different country without a clue. It's no big deal at all. The biggest trouble is clearing out one's schedule and saving money. Subtext: if you're debating making a run for Argentina, you have my blessing. Stop by the Borges library in Buenos Aires for me, please.

On the home front: Anshuman and Keziah are now taking care of a cute puppy that they've named Boris. He's getting bigger, but mostly fat; he craps all over and bites and all that puppy stuff. It's hilarious to watch, because I was probably twice as ridiculous with Ixtlan (who I miss). They speak in complete sentences to the dog and expect him to understand. It's like something out of a cartoon. The funniest development in the situation, however, is the TV/DVD combo that Anshuman has thrown in to sweeten the deal for Keziah, since Boris is 'not her dog'. When Anshuman is at work, Keziah watches the dog and American movies at the same time. The kicker is that it's all rental! It's costing Anshuman some 400 rupees a day--maybe a fifth of his salary as a call center manager. Boris is a more annoying puppy than Ixtlan was (although she was plenty annoying), and this stems largely from his constant whimpering. He whimpers when he's alone, surrounded by people, picked up, put down, just whimpers. He's whimpered through Tomb Raider II, Raising Helen, Van Helsing, and Star Wars III--all of which I can hear down the hall. Not knowing what movie is what, I judge them by their scores; I hated Van Helsing when I saw it, but the music is really exciting. I peeked in during a scene of some movie starring Jennifer Lopez and Michael Vartan, and for a split second I was elated that they had rented Alias and disappointed that the Alias production crew had cast Jennifer Lopez. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I realized it couldn't be Alias because what idiot would cast Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck's ex for crying out loud, on a show starring Jennifer Garner?! Nobody, that's who. This is what I have to look forward to, returning to the country of "cool", of Nirvana (although I suppose in a very roundabout way, this is considered common ground), The Olsen twins, and tabloids. The country where everybody drives, where everybody does their own laundry in automatic machines, where almost nobody is bilingual. But very briefly, on the other hand, I'm looking forward to frozen pizzas, Little Debbies (oh yeah), pianos (very few pianos in India), not being constantly stared at, not having to shove people to get off a train, running water all day, people letting go after you shake hands instead of holding on like a limp fish, and well-made tools.

Recent reads: Of Mice and Men, a collection of Thurber stories, A Farewell to Arms. For my imminent departure I have carefully selected, from a dozen used book sellers on MG road, 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens. I can't wait to crack it open.

sdfh sk[weowei09wer h)(hqwo

2006-02-09T01:24:00.000+09:00

Hello everybody. I hope your Februaries are swimming along. I've been having fun doing the normal old stuff. I did get to accompany Kala to a recording complex in Gujarat, however, and watch her make her newest record. It's kind of 'light-classical' you might say. At any rate, the percussionists, Abijek and Somnath (tabla and ghatam, respectively) were fantastic. The complex belongs to a family of Indian-born U.K. citizens, all Patels (36 of them live in one neighborhood of Leicester!). It was really swank; there were a bunch of servants, and it turns out that many of the biggest names in Indian classical music (kind of like big names in astrophysics or underwater basket-weaving) have recorded there. So, in between takes and rehearsals, I got to overhear choice gossip about performers, and lots of funny stories. Would that they were jazz musicians gossiping about people I knew! There were impressions, humiliating stories, etc. To balance the light hearted atmosphere I read C.S. Lewis' 'The Problem of Pain', which I very much enjoyed. (And Mark Twain's 'Pudd'nhead Wilson', which I found rather formulaic, but maybe I just wasn't in the mood.) I've been working on ragas Jaunpuri and Bhairav. Funny enough, Bhairav, while it has a specific parent-scale, allows for the use of any chromatic note as long as you bring a phrase back into the melodic fold, so to speak. I'm having a lot of trouble concentrating on practicing this week; I hope this lifts, because as of today I'm only in Mumbai for two more weeks! Kala leaves for good on the 22nd, and that's when I'll hightail it to Nepal to go freeze my ___ off in the mountains. I've also decided to go back to Minnesota in early April. I won't find another teacher as good as Kala (and if I did I couldn't afford it), and she's going to be living in California this summer anyway. I'm also sick of struggling with my student violin from 9th grade (although I'm not ungrateful, Dad) and it's time to get some better spruce and ebony under my fingers.

I'm not feeling too bloggy today, so that's all the news that's fit to print. Happy seventh of February, and don't let the sheriff getcha down.

it's about time

2006-01-21T01:25:00.000+09:00

OKAY. I've been instructed to "update [my] blinking blog you blobberous blank of bluish blorsnackle" by none 'nother 'en Niall, gnostic gnarly norseman that he is. I've been holding back for want of, shall we say, epic sweep, but perhaps that can't be helped. Things stand much as they did two weeks ago; an occasional brush with the screaming masses at the rail station, a daily thali, hours of (sore, but) pleasant practice, and a current book: David Copperfield. Since the last entry I have thoroughly enjoyed 'Fathers and Sons' by Turgenev, liked okay "Silas Marner" by George Eliot, and learned two dozen new words from "The Information" by Martin Amis. (Among them: recidivist, gravid, crenellated, and etiolate. I wouldn't dream of denying you the pleasure of looking them up.)

Kala is playing three concerts at the Dover Lane music conference in Kolkata; I've chosen not to accompany her because of the expense. As irony would have it, Dover Lane is where I originally envisioned scouting for a teacher, back in October, when I viewed the upcoming trip in a rather more protracted way. Now, thinking about Kala's imminent departure, I'm beginning to eye Kashmir and Nepal on the map with a bit hungrier of a stare, imagining colder mornings with relish.

In the last entry I said something to the effect that I would elaborate on the lessons and the teaching process, and what it's doing to my grey matter in general; since I have little else to write about, I think I'll follow through with this. At the moment I am working on two ragas...

(A bit of tech 1: a raga is, informally, a limitation on what notes one can use in an improvisation, often with further limitations on what order they may be played in. In itself, this isn't complicated. If in C major I allow myself C, D, F, G, and A, in any order or permutation, I will be playing a bastardization of raag Durga. There is also a pair of main notes, called the vadi-samvadi, in Durga's case C and G, that even the illegitimate must highlight. The execution of a raga is significantly more difficult than its structure, and is subject to warring aesthetic sensibilities. All Raag Sangeet (Indian classical music) follows a prescribed pattern that begins with no momentum and gradually builds to the greatest climax that the performer can manage (One criterion for judging a musician's 'stuff'). Needless to say, in something so organic, it can be difficult to delineate right and wrong (or better and best) decisions for different parts of the performance. Thankfully, this is helped by the presence of composition. Compositions are short, generally between, say, 4 and 8 lines, divided into two sections, the asthayi (low) and the antara (high). They may be cut up in any musical way and used as a springboard for improvisation; often the first line (called the pakar, gat or characteristic phrase) is returned to at the appropriate time in the rhythmic cycle, which works well for developing secondary motives in between the familiar phrase.)

...which complement each other well...
(A bit of tech 2: The aforementioned Durga complements Lalit, which I have named in a previous entry, in that Lalit's notes are, in the key of C ascending: B, Db, E, F#, Ab, B; back down: C, B, Ab, F#, F!!!, E, Db, C. The perspicacious reader will notice that the larger Lalit contains Durga, if Durga is transposed as starting on B. This is MUCH clearer in sound than on paper--in fact, Raag Sangeet is a completely oral tradition. Only in the last fifteen years have bound compilations of compositions and raags come into being, and, along with the plethora of recordings now available, are changing the music from a set of localized stylistic traditions into a sort of repertory form, if you will allow for a very loose definition of 'repertoire'.)

...and am due to present them...

A bit of tech 3: a presentation of a raag involves three main sections, called alap, jor, and jhala/bandish/gat/whatever. The alap is a tempo-less exploration of the relationship between the notes, beginning in the middle octave on the tonic (or the vadi-samvadi). The improvisation climbs down, returns, climbs up, and returns. The jor is the repetition of the alap's structure with the introduction of the taal, or time; in the instrumental tradition this is done unaccompanied. In the vocal tradition (which I am studying) this is done with the tabla, within the framework of a composition. The gat/jhala/bandish/whatever is rhythmic improvisation within a composition, often on a different composition than the jor. Singers will also intermittently increase the tempo of the composition as they build their performances to a climax, which could take twenty minutes, or two hours. The presentations I will make will likely have a 3-minute introductory alap, a ten-minute alap within a composition, and about ten minutes of improvisation within a second composition.)

...to Kala at our next lesson on the 22nd. Our lessons take two forms: she teaching me by call and response, or she critiquing me while taking phone calls. She is an incredible technician, and the technical aspect of our lessons has reached a point where I need much more than a day to rein in some of the lines. There is also an affectation of Indian singers called "gamuk", an (onomotopeic, I think) shaking of the voice. It's very intense, and like vibrato in western music, has the added advantage of covering up small intonation irregularities. The main technique to wrestle with, however, is the constant sliding and shifting, often playing each note in a line with one finger, as fast as you please. Oy!

So how is all this information affecting how I think about teaching? Well, that's not the big shift. The big shift is the frequency of the lessons, the number of students (two--next month I'll be the only one) and their makeup. Growing up, I had one music lesson a week, and certainly never had dinner and tea at my teachers' houses, nor accompanied them to their concerts, during which a lot of valuable information is divulged about the music (and the way they play it!). The nicest part about a daily lesson scheme (with multi-day breaks) is that a teacher can prescribe a manageable amount of work, and a student can actually move ON for pete's sake, instead of weeks of lugging C.P.E. Bach's Fantasia in Q minor to R. Todd McPherson's house to be told time and again that I need to stop looking at my hands.
I have only had three violin students so far, in life. The first was an ex-coke addict, whose name I forget, no--Dave Stryker. Dave played a bit of squeezebox, and wanted to learn Celtic fiddling, too. We met when I was playing in the Boston subway (Downtown Crossing, the orange line. Ah!) for my bread and butter, and naturally I'd try to teach anybody. We had our lessons at Berklee. He could barely hold the bow, and for $20 a crack, I don't think he got much more out of our lessons than a friendly smile and a tape of me playing 'Cooley's Reel'.Next was Beryl Pettigrew, my father's sexagenarian predecessor at East High in Duluth. Beryl spends his saturday afternoons at the 'Toga, a bar of ill-repute that, on saturday afternoons, temporarily gives sway to "The Billy D Route 66 Quartet" (which, if it weren't for a certain Paul Ierino on piano, would barely be music; as it is, Paul plays beautifully, and could play with anybody. Paul gave me my first jazz lesson ever, when I was 14. He taught me the blues scale and 'Autumn Leaves' to play it over, thus cementing his position in my mind as a guy who knows the score.) Beryl, who plays the viola in the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra, plays clave along with the latin tunes at the 'Toga. I used to sit in every week, a few summers back, and Beryl enlisted me to show him a bit of jazz violin. We had maybe six or seven lessons, and as far as I know, what he got out of his twenty-five bucks a crack (my rates have gone up!) was a written out solo to "Stella by Starlight" during which, if he was playing it correctly, he bowed on the offbeats.Last was Slade, a thirteen-year old eighth-grader. Euphemistically, her mother employed me to teach her some exciting fiddling and improvisation, (subtext: she's creative) but really, she had fallen to the back ranks of the junior high orchestra and needed to practice SOMETHING for goodness' sake if she wanted to improve her position the following year (which, I won't neglect to mention, was in Dad's freshman group). Each week, as I pulled into the driveway, I was greeted by Luna the dog, who had benifited as much from the previous lesson as anyone else, perhaps by a biscuit. I tried to inspire Slade to write a song, on the violin or the piano; I tried to teach her "Over the Waterfall", I tried in vain to explain how improvisation works. Of my three students, she may have made out the most poorly: for her mom's twenty-five bucks a crack (it was the same summer), she got little more than a hope of future political favoritism, which isn't really my Dad's sort of thing.

So the secret is out: I'm a BAD teacher. So far. But I think that after this student-teacher experience, I'm going to go about it in a different way. 1. THEY come to ME. Absolutely. No question about who rules the roost. Come in, stay, learn. You haven't done ONE thing! Get OUT! Take your damn Metallica CD with you! Etc. 2. Longer than an hour lessons, if there's a call for it. Don't schedule the students back to back--then if there's some real progress, it's not decimated by the doorbell. 3. Make the lessons expensive enough to be painful. You want it, come and get it. If you CAN'T afford it, we'll work something out (like Kala's student Siddharth, who comes over every once in a while, always for free.) but you'd better learn your stuff, bub. 4. (this has little to do with Kala, but is my own addendum) You may not study only violin--sorry. Go get a cheap hand drum, and expect to do a lot of singing. Do you have a guitar? Etc. I have a suspicion that I won't do a lot of teaching on these terms, but at least what I will do I'll feel good about. No more $160 cassettes of Cooley's Reel for my future students, boy. Just you ask 'em.

OKAY, THIS SHOULD CLEAR ME FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS. Sheesh, Kip. They're called TRAVEL UPDATES. You have not provided travel, and you have only written about the past. Change the heading to BRACKISH BLABBERING, you blank of bluish blorsnackle.

Dashiell Hammett in Bombay

2006-01-10T01:30:00.000+09:00

I keep meaning to bring the books I've been reading to write the quotes down, and every time I get the bug to blog they're nowhere around. I just read 'The Unvanquished' by William Faulkner, and it's beautiful. I've never been able to pin down what it is I like about Faulkner, and I think it's that some of the descriptions remind me of Burroughs in their lucidity, and unlike Burroughs, Faulkner isn't imprisioned in his vices or their spectres. Also, learning that both Faulkner and Steinbeck didn't publish anything until they were near thirty is an encouraging thought; and how both of them were constantly working various manual labor-type jobs. Makes you realize why mechanical devices are so faithfully described in both their fiction.

But you didn't come here to hear me talk about books, did you? No, if you're here at all, the chances are good that we know each other well. I've never in all these entries told you how grateful I am to you for reading them. Thank you. I've also not really come forward and admitted that my observations and anecdotes, while amusing or possibly even interesting, are of no real concrete value to a reader. This leaves me to admit that, most likely, you read these entries because you value our friendship, and hope that when our positions are someday reversed, I'll read what YOU write. Well, unless something horrible happens to my eyes, you got yourself a reader.

That admission took some of the wind out of my sail, since what I'm about to pen is a set of rather mundane happenings, maybe especially so, but I've had a pretty good few days and while we're here I'll share them with you. On the down side, my parents' Christmas present to me finally arrived. They sent to me a Leatherman Juice cs4--a sweet multi-tool that anyone with things to cut and unscrew would find invaluable. To my chagrin, when I opened the box I found that a member of IndiaPost had found it invaluable as well, opening the box, removing the tool, and resealing the package with string and tape. I went to the post office to complain, but there was nothing anyone could do. The parcel had been through customs at the airport as well as the regional post office before being delivered to me; the Mumbai postmark indicated that it had stewed in town since December 17th. The tool could have been stolen over two weeks ago. Dratted mandatory listing of contents and their value! I still can't quite believe that a member of the postal service would either value their job so little or act with so much impunity, but two Mumbai phone numbers were left on the package, and no call was made. Next time, UPS.

On the up side, the lessons are going very well. Kala is playing another series of concerts until Wednesday, so I've got a few days to practice some rudiments. There's a big disparity between what I can mimic and what I can play; in our lessons Kala routinely goes way over my head assuming if I can kind-of copy what she's doing than I must understand it, but a lot of the time I'm just parroting. The days when she's gone are the days when I can slow everything down and try to figure things out.
With no lesson today, then, I hopped on the crazy train to attend a concert in Worli, which turned out to be sold out, so I walked around Chowpatty beach for while before exploring a new part of Mumbai proper. I love going downtown, and never do it just for fun because of the fight to get into a train. It's sheer madness; the trains are crammed far past capacity, people ride in between cars and on the roof. At the stations, those exiting the car must all push out together to gather enough force to overcome the tide of bodies pushing in. Today I caught the third train that passed, after jumping head-first into two unsuccessful brawls (and people are shouting, too) and being ejected in a cartoon-like manner. Some buy first class tickets (about ten times as much) to get a seat. Twice, now, I've ended up in a first class car. The first time, I was trying to beat the system. The conductor (who knew there were conductors on local trains?!) asked for my ticket, and I was right back in eighth grade telling Ms. Huston that I lost my homework. I pretended to be French, which didn't help me at all. I pretended not to have enough money to pay the 300 rupee fine (about $6.50), and the conductor marched me out of the train to an ATM in the station, where my resolve crumbled and I pulled a 500 rupee note out of my pocket. The second time, I was headed to the Bandra Bandstand with Rupa, whose family lives in the flat upstairs. We let two or three trains pass (Ladies have reserved cars, which are usually less crowded than the guys' cars, but not always.) before deciding, "OK! We're getting this one." She hopped onto the ladies' car with ease, and I scrambled futilely to get into a regular car. The train began pulling away, I didn't know where in Bandra we were going or how we would meet up if I missed the train, so I hopped onto the first-class car. One lousy stop! Andheri to Bandra is one lousy stop on the fast train and here's the conductor. My bad luck. I started to tell him how I'd be happy to pay the difference in fare, and I asked him how much. He said "300 rupees" and began writing out the ticket. This time I paid without a fight, but felt just as beaten.

Almost instantly I become a topic of conversation in any train car I manage to get into. Invariably, someone who speaks English asks me where I'm from, what I do, etc., and in the minutes that follow I hear my information repeated in Hindi two or three times. This evening, on the way back, the train was mercifully spacious for the first few stops, and I stood watching a group of guys play rummy. They were playing a version with two decks and twenty-one cards in each hand, but otherwise very similar to the rummy we all know and love. The five guys were coworkers and good friends, and apparently thay play every day on the train home, betting a few rupees on each game and keeping a tally in a small notebook. One of them was a dead ringer for Kevin Pollack, only with darker skin. He made the whole group seem like a bunch of gangster archetypes, and as the train got more crowded the sense of anachronism grew; we're all pressed against one another, hanging out of the doors, sitting on the roof, and here are these vibrant, happy thirtysomething men playing cards as if they had no troubles as all. At my station, I shook hands with each of the cardsharps and shoved my way out of the train feeling great, hoping to catch a glimpse of Dashiell Hammett before catching my rickshaw.See you soon--

Hey everybody.

2006-01-06T01:32:00.000+09:00

New photos on the FLICKR page. Don't all rush there at once, the server might crash. Okay maybe only crash to the ground because of an intramural basketball game taking place in the same room. As the server. Okay not very likely. Oh, you know what else? I was going to save this until I had another full update in me, but 'Tortilla Flat' by John Steinbeck is HILARIOUS. When you need a laugh, run, don't walk to your local library's alphabetized fiction section and begin your search. Tonight me go see King Kong. (Yes I know the pidgin-speak is from Tarzan quit stealing my fire.)

happy new calendar day

2006-01-01T01:33:00.000+09:00

Some electricians strung up these exciting lights in the neighborhood, over the main drag, Mahakali caves road. The fifty or so strings of Christmas lights strung perpendicular to traffic take up the half block or so before a busy intersection. They flash off and on in "the wave", of stadium fame, providing a very attractive focal point for one's attention. You can use your imagination to conjure images of the driving repercussions; please make sure to include the soundtrack of squealing tires.

I've also recently discovered Mawa sweets, created entirely of milk and sugar (with a characteristic flavor like cashews or kesar flowers) and fried in ghee. They taste something like cookie dough, but are composed of much smaller granules, and dissolve in one's mouth with little effort from the tongue. While my complexion deteriorates from my new vice, my palate is also rejoicing in having found katchori, a pastry crust lined with a mild dal (lentils, peppers, spices, water) and fried up like a samosa. When eating them the crust flakes into ninety layers. They're not sweet; I'd say they're Indian croissants. And they're fantastic.

Last night I finished 'Lord Jim', by Joseph Conrad, and it nearly made the Mawa sweets pale in comparison. I loved it, and I'll tell you why. Except for a bit too much racism and misogyny, which there's bound to be in an English novel from 1900, it's obvious that Conrad is trying to be as 'above board' as possible. In light of my recent rant, 'Lord Jim' pleases me because of its treatment of literary morality--the narrative affords its characters the opportunity to discuss (and sometimes argue about) the moral ramifications of the events in the plot. Also, the manner in which Conrad consistently let slip the outcomes of Jim's conflicts before relating the conflicts themselves annoyed me in a very pleasant way. And it's really quite funny. I forgot to bring the notebook in which I wrote a couple of quotes, so I'll include them in the next update. Next up is more Steinbeck--'Tortilla Flat' and 'Of Mice and Men'. Something about India really compels me to read his stuff.
But what really got me off my duff and over to the internet cafe (where yes, the duff is again sat on) is raga Lalat, which has my ears bench-pressing microtones. Even last week I responded to my father's question about whether or not Indian music employs microtones with a "yes, but..." (This is because there are never 'extra' notes added in between existent half-steps. This is a bad, cursory answer but I bet if you really care you'll look it up.) However, raga Lalat has three notes which are so far afield from normal half-steps that I've spent three days fine-tuning them. They're now sounding less like braying animals to me and more like notes that don't even exist outside of Lalat's context. The cool thing is that they all sparkle, in a way that they wouldn't if they were the normal flat two, sharp four and flat six (and the seventh is a bit low, but not so far as to feel like a totally different note). Learning how to play alap and improvise within two compositions in raga Bihag was (and still is) challenging to me because I'm so new to Indian music. Lalat is, and will be, challenging because it's on the fringe of my understanding of what music IS. It's also driving home the idea of 'rasa', or associated emotional theme. Bihag is a romantic, fun raga meant to be played between 9pm and midnight. Lalat is a stately, kingly raga for the early morning. Those of you who have played music with me know of my penchant for imagery-driven descriptions of sound, and I've got to admit that it's nice for a teacher to give me specifics in this area. The notes being so outlandish really brings home for me the absurdity of politics; playing a note just barely above the tonic, two octaves above the drone, is like congress purchasing a two-hundred dollar hammer. Without the framework, the specific event is impossible to understand--within it, a product of cause and effect. At the same time, the sounds in this raga are capable of pushing these notes so far above their context, in such a beautiful way, that it's not too much of a stretch to liken them to a nobility that lives in a delicate, refined state while constantly abusing a million serfs that rarely question the struggles of their existence. I've heard that at the height of the Raj in Calcutta, the average British family had 119 servants!
I've got to cut this short, because the owner of the internet cafe is trying to close early (it's ten-twelve pm). I hope I don't sound like all those wishy-washy idiots who are so desperate for anything different they'll espouse 'truths' learned in India as often as possible. If I do, let the fruit be the judge--just wait a couple years until I've assimilated these concepts into my playing and writing. Then come up to me at a 2008 New Year's party and punch me in the shoulder, saying "you dolt--the stuff you're writing now is crap!" (you CANNOT be under the influence when you do this, to be fair). Next installment, I've been really affected by how personal Kala's teaching is, how GOOD it is, and I'd like to write about how my idea of teaching music is changing. For now, however, the stereo outside is screaming a techno version of 'Brazil', and I'm thinking of the final scene in Terry Gilliam's movie when the executioner says to Jonathan Pryce: "Don't hold out too long, sonny--it'll damage your credit rating." I think I'll go back to my microtones. Happy New Year

John Updike's "Marry Me" makes me happy my parents do so well together

2005-12-24T01:34:00.000+09:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!
I have yet to hear A SINGLE carol piped from a loudspeaker, I have not seen a flake of snow; the closest to anything Christmas related that I have seen was a group of Lokhandwala (an upperclass suburb) children doing the chicken dance in the mall. I was walking to the grocery store with Kala, my teacher, and surprised her by breaking into the chicken dance on our way up the escalator. We left the grocery store with no fewer than three kinds of milk. It's funny--not witnessing a single crippled attempt to show love by spending money, and not having one seasonal display of green and red consumerism assault my vision (and I have to say, I kind of miss getting cheesed off about them) has got me feeling like 2005 is not going to end. "How can it be the end of the year? It's eighty freaking degrees!" I do however, have one funny xmas story: My parents got each other the same gift, which, sure, happens all the time. But this gift is not your ordinary gift--it is a six cubic foot helium-filled mylar remote control blimp. Apparently it's huge, and Dad filled Mom's up before giving it to her; he was planning to bring it to grandmother's house surreptitiously in the car. The blimp turned out to be so large, however, that after filling it up at a local party store, he had no choice but to give it to her early. So yesterday he presents her with this blimp, the size of which amazes her, before she takes him upstairs to his wrapped box. He says "No, I don't want to open MINE early..." and she replies "note the exact size and shape of the box." And then they laughed until they cried. They even ordered them from two different catalogs, and as it turns out, the unopened one was more expensive. So, in my opinion, the moral of the story is to have a family so bizarre that even thousands of miles away on Christmas, one can still picture one's parents' mutual surprise at an occurence that probably happens as often as winning the lottery. Ahhh.

It's been a long time since I've updated the site, I know, and it's truthfully because my life is not as exciting anymore. I have a daily routine, that I'll describe in a subsequent paragraph, and a few friends with whom I hang out, but my life has definitely acquired something of the mundane. This is nice. I've got both focus and a timeline, and I think that's a recipe for a pleasant season. Kala begins her tour on Feb. 22 (during the first part of this tour she'll be accompanied by none other than Zakir Hussain!), and that's when I'll leave Mumbai. Until then, I'll work my hiney to the bone and learn as much as I can. I'm already garnering a reputation in my building as an oddity, because as a tourist (and an *American* to say the least) don't I have a responsibility to drink vodka and hang out with everybody? Americans are supposed to be more fun, I guess.

Each morning I wake up on a piece of particle board covered with a sheet (after discovering that my chronic back pain had been due to crappy matresses) and make a cup of Nescafe with my handy-dandy heating element that plugs straight into the wall (say what you like, 220v AC has some advantages.). Then I languidly take a tamboura box out of my metal cupboard, plug it in, and listen to its drone while I unpack my violin. I practice for an hour or so, stretching when necessary, and if my lesson is in the morning I hop on my bike and cross town. Usually, though, it's at 6pm, so after my first practice rotation I rummage in my neighbors' (Anshuman's and Keziah's) rooms to see which one of them has the paper. They're both usually half-asleep, recovering from their circadian torture at their respective call centers, although occasionally one of them will have a humorous anecdote about an 'escalated' call received the previous shift. I find the paper and tear the crossword out of the International section, which often has some surprising news about the weird things going on in the States, and take it back to my room to solve and use for hints to complete yesterday's, if I couldn't finish it. Then I practice and go out for lunch, maybe take a walk, and read a bit of a book. Then I practice again and leave Shere Punjab for my lesson in Lokhandwala, which is an 8km bike ride, every inch of which is frought with screaming, honking traffic. It is generally conceded that two wheels is the way to get around, and I travel faster than the speed of traffic when it's congested, and sometimes even when its moving. I pass an accident every now and then. I get to Lokhandwala early, and sit around with the building guards for ten minutes or so before going up. My lessons last between one and two hours, not counting warming up, going to the grocery store, or eating dinner and talking. It's dark when I go back to Shere Punjab, and I do one last practice rotation before going to eat. I have a favorite restaurant up the hill called Garnish, a vegetarian place, that for 50 rupees serves a thali that is undoubtably the best and most varied that I've had in India. This is 10-25 rupees more than the average thali, but it comes with two roti (flatbread) and small dishes of paneer in a sweet spicy sauce, vegetables, potatoes and chickpeas in a spicy gravy, a plate of rice, a bowl of dal, a papar cracker, and a tiny bowl of curd. All for $1.50 counting an extra roti. Mmmm. I go back to my place stuffed, and make tea and read or hang out until getting ready for bed. Then I lie in bed awake, waiting for the mosquitos to show themselves so I can kill them and laugh maniacally. Not bad, huh?

However, for the past two days there's been no water in the building and everybody's a little on edge. I'll save describing the relationships between tenants so that I have something to write about in the future; suffice it to say it's colorful.
Thanks for reading my dang blog, guys. Merry Christmas from India.

It begins...

2005-12-14T01:38:00.000+09:00

I've now had one introductory lesson and one real lesson. These next months are going to be difficult, but unbelievable. Today I went to Kala's house at the same time as her other violin student Siddharth, to begin learning raag Bihar, which has already shown a number of its idiosyncracies. Siddarth lives at a gurukul of Hariprasad Chaurasia's (His brother studies with the flute guru) and has been learning under Kala for a few months only. The lesson consisted of Kala's improvised lines within the alap (rubato thematic introduction to the piece during which the ryhthmic accompanist is silent) that Siddharth and I would repeat as well as we could. I taped the lesson and spent all afternoon wrestling with these phrases, and they're very descriptive and precise. It's an exciting road I'm looking down, and my next lesson is tomorrow night. I've spent the last three days in a routine of practicing for an hour, then hopping on the bike and grabbing a snack of something, and coming back and practicing more, then dinner, etc. It's very painful to hold and play the violin in the Indian posture, but I'm told this will ease.
My floor mates in my new place are pretty cool, if a bit weird. There's Anshuman Sharma, a 31-year-old night manager at a call center (Providian/Washington mutual) in Malad (a long ways away)--he leaves for work around five-thirty pm and comes back around five in the morning. His sole outlet for relaxation, it seems, is alcohol; last night he ordered a bottle of Bacardi and a Domino's pizza, of which I had a shot and a slice after my fourth practice rotation. When I awoke this morning he was gone and the bottle was empty. He may have gotten some help, however, from Keziah, a 21-year-old Goan who's working 2am-11am shifts at an American Express call center not too far away. Last night when she arrived to hang out she brought chocolate mousse from Birdy's, a sweet shop around the corner, excitedly saying to Anshuman and me, "Do you fancy chocolate mousse? Do YOU fancy chocolate mousse?"
There is also a guy from Bhopal (his wife and daughter are still there), a couple of other guys who have motorcycles, and a girl who didn't want to hang out last night because she has a boyfriend somewhere. There's a guard who's left shoe has a pocket of air in it that refills in between each step, which is hilarious, and a couple of kids that I played 'cricket' with yesterday in the street. I lost but I'm not exactly sure how. I'm just barely understanding the version on TV, and the version kids play is some sort of Home Run Derby that's incomprehensible if you don't speak Hindi.
Please don't feel compelled to read the following, I just felt like writing it and it's blogging of the first order: a waste of time to anyone who has stuff to do.

I've also finished 'The Grapes of Wrath' and it's got me a bit puzzled about literature in general. Steinbeck is consistently making moral statements and judgments throughout the book, but he's conveniently made his characters so archetypal that inner conflict is a nearly a farce and social conflict is black and white! Arguably, one of the primary foci of the book is sin--what it is, how we deal with it. A washed-out preacher (who washed out because he couldn't stop date-raping girls after big tent meetings) decides that there's no sin, just actions. His theology eventually makes room for his Henry VIII behavior as well when he declares "it's not a God, it's just one Human soul", intimating that 'sin' and evil are really perpetrated against that soul, instead of a sort of standard (metaphysical, social/moral, or otherwise). What am I getting to, you ask? (Especially those of you who don't know the book) This: the moral universe built into this novel is designed to function around these conflicts--mass poverty, social injustice and upheaval, the plight of the family man against the corporations and organizations that scheme to rob him and leave him for dead--and this it does. Poignantly so, to the point that it's regarded as calling for social change, hailed as whistle-blowing, and has left an indelible mark on the twentieth century (or at least some sort of mark). But the good guys, poor as they are, are morally validated at every turn! The main characters, even as they die off, give all they have and act with such charity that it breaks the heart. The cops, organized farmers, and private corporations never miss a chance to kill somebody or waste untold amounts of food or just generally act reprehensibly. There is no visible source in the individual human being to account for the evil that develops when humans form organizations. It is my feeling that an omission of this obvious sort (and the engineering of events to display a moral viewpoint) instantly moves a story into parable, or myth. And this is how 'The Grapes of Wrath' has me puzzled about literature in general: does every author do this, all the time, in some sense? Do they intentionally (or even, I suppose, accidentally) skew the events of the story, or the makeup of the characters, to present a moral image that couln't survive outside of a storybook, no matter how accurately thay wish to present the world around us? I've always divided books into two categories: those that break the laws of physics and those that don't. Use of lierary devices doesn't count, only the events that actually transpire in the story. Haruki Murakami breaks the laws of physics, but it always surprises his characters. Salman Rushdie does it a lot, but for his characters, it seems normal. Borges has lots of magic in his stories. Steinbeck doesn't. The stuff that happens could happen to you. You wouldn't disbelieve these events if they unfolded before you. But the fabricated moral framework (a construction used by Ayn Rand, and Dostoyevsky too) has me wondering if, because it's all imaginary, my distinction doesn't matter. A book is impossible, and if you can't tell how, then look a little harder or come back to it when you've changed your opinions or something. Oh well. I'll figure something out eventually. Check back in a year or so. I'm going to eat a thali tonight!

See ya!

argh

2005-12-14T01:37:00.000+09:00

never look at these things after writing them, but Emmet's addition to my guestbook inadvertently highlighted a typo, and a cursory look over the last few entries has bared a few more. DangIT! I wish I could go back and fix them but there's no way to do so without destroying their chronology. So, for the record,
I'M SORRY THAT THERE ARE (AND LIKELY WILL BE MORE) MISSPELLINGS IN MY BLOG ENTRIES.

The interface I've left myself is exactly the same as the one for guestbook entries. I should jump ship to wordpress one of these months. Argh.

now I live in the shere-punjab colony DEC 7

2005-12-08T01:40:00.000+09:00

Well, I've more or less settled into the building I'll be living in, but for now I'm sharing a room with a night shift call-center worker while I wait for the present occupant of my future cell to disembark for his home country on Saturday or Sunday. It's going to be lonely; I hope I meet some good folks in this neighborhood, because otherwise I'll rarely talk to anybody. I'm probably a little over-sensitive to this notion as I've just read Death in Venice and a couple of other stories by Thomas Mann, who targets not only lonliness but, ironically enough, the futility of artistic endeavor, in each of these them. This evening over a thali at an expensive neighborhood restaurant I began 'The Grapes of Wrath' and am really looking forward to it. Even the first few chapters forecast a really beautiful book.

I've spent so much money today! I gave the landlord half of his deposit and rent (the balance due when I actually move into my room) and promptly went and purchased a brand-new "Atlas Goldline" bicycle. It's frame geometry makes it hard to pedal while turning sharply, it heaves and creaks up hills and over bumps, the brakes are spongy (due to the fact that they're controlled by metal rods instead of cables) and the seat is very uncomfortable; in short, it's a dumb bike and I don't know why it's the most popular model (by far over 80%) in India unless it's the rs.2500/- price tag. (about $60) It's colorful and it even has a hood ornament--a little 'A' in a circle sticking up from the front fender. It also came with a lock, a bell and a rack. The prospect of exploring Mumbai by bike is exciting. I'll take pictures of both the room and the bicycle in due time.
The thought of staring down three months here is kind of daunting; I'd rather be studying in some lovely out-of-the-way hamlet that's abolished motor vehicles. However, I've attended one of Kala Ramnath's concerts here, and met her backstage afterwards, and the thought of studying with such a great violinist is mind boggling. She's unbelievable--how quickly she can play and move past notes while still imprinting them on your mind as they pass--I should aspire to this. I'm going to ride over to her house, pull out the fiddle and not even know how to hold it! (In this style) Nor do I have the proper strings on my instrument; she's tuned hers to a low D flat, and my thickest string is too floppy at that pitch, so I've got to figure this out too. The amazing thing, though, is that we are going to have lessons every day. Oh how I hope I rise to the occasion!

Hope everybody's having fun getting ready for Christmas.

MUMBAI (Bombay)

2005-12-02T01:41:00.000+09:00

Well, today's been a real cracker. Ugh. I had four glasses of beer last night (small glasses, though) with a couple of travelers at Alp's restaurant, around the corner from the Salvation Army Red Shield house in the Colaba district of Mumbai, and today when I woke up I was so dehydrated (forgot to drink water before bed) that I, without thinking, filled up my bottle at the UV-Filtering tap in the hostel lobby, and quickly downed nearly a liter. Within minutes I was rushing to the bathroom. I took a train ride up to Andheri station, the area of town I'm probably going to live in for the next few months while I'm studying with a violinist named Kala Ramnath. I was supposed to meet a realtor to show me a couple of paying-guest properties (that clock in at between $60 and $110 a month), but I couldn't reach him and needed to find a bathroom too badly. I tried to drink a few sips of 7up, but started feeling worse and worse, so I went right back to the train station, trying to get back to the hostel. Going out the train (and this is a real freight-gauge train, mind you, used as public transport--just huge cars, eight lanes of tracks, and express and local trains, called "fast" and "slow", respectively) had been empty from the Churchgate terminus near Colaba, but going back there were whole crowds of people violently pushing each other into the train screaming "cello, cello, cello!" or go, go, go. I braved the mess for one express stop, during which I could not find anywhere to put my other foot down on the floor, but soon got out because I was scared I'd vomit all over people who wouldn't even be able to lift their other arm to wipe it off. I soon, however, developed a strategy: the doors to the train are left open so as to cram a few more people in, and so I waited until everyone had done their cramming and I forced myself in so that I was grabbing the handrail but was really half hanging out of the train (which is all above ground, if you hadn't guessed), a position much more confortable than as an ingredient in a sandwich.
I jumped off the train as it was slowing down and promptly ran to the other side of the platform where I vomited my breakfast and the offending liter of water onto the tracks. It was barely even a spectacle. No one even looked, much less talked to me afterwards. Which makes sense! What's so strange about some tourist spewing all over the tracks at the station when beggars with no arms and tumors the size of golfballs on their head have been pestering you for money all morning? Ha!
So I spent the rest of the day in bed, and eventually made a run to the 'chemist's' to get some rehydration salts and some aspirin. (And also to the convenience store for water and toilet paper.) Rehydration salts, a collection of the minerals your body loses under conditions like mine, are great. They taste like Alka-Seltzer (hmm...) and have aided me in keeping water down, although so far the paracetamol I bought hasn't done anything about all the muscle aches. Oh well, I just hope that I can get my place before my week is up here at the Red Shield house.
Mumbai looks very much like an American or European city, on the surface. There's even a garbage-disposal system at work, at least for the business and tourist districts. Taxis outnumber regular traffic, kind of like Manhattan, and booksellers and clothing merchants line the streets, which are wide and clean. There are very tall buildings, if not skyscrapers, and many buildings have well-dressed guards outside them, many of whom speak great English. Not so further north, though. Up in Andheri it looked just like Calcutta, and on the train ride, one could see slums that lined the tracks for miles on end. The smell of gross junk was evident even from the 45km/hr ride, and once again naked kids bathed themselves in water pumps positioned very near latrines and garbage dumps. (I should mention also that the water pumps in the poorer sections of town are not connected to the city's water network, but rather are wells drawing from filthy ground water contaminated by faecal coliform and often, arsenic.) It floors me to think that these people's bodies have to deal with my ickyness, and much worse, regularily.

And then it floors me to think that American cities, importing so much from so many places, have managed to survive without their own slums of this magnitude. It makes one wonder if India could even approach the ideal of building an infrastructure capable of supporting itself without millions and millions of destitute citizens who are constantly doing jobs no one else wants. And then the subtext: could American cities maintain their affluence without millions of citizens of third-world countries making shirts, cars, and other goods for them? I'm sure there is an answer somewhere in the bowels of Global Economics; hopefully I'll run into a knowledgeable Econ prof who has statistics. It's gotta be right in front of us, and likely such a distasteful notion that it is not taught in our schools. Hmm.
Either way, even homesick as I am, it's good to be out here and doing what I'm doing. I'll try to get some pictures of Sikkim up on Flickr over the next few days. Cheers--

Varanasi again

2005-11-28T01:43:00.000+09:00

I've only got fifteen minutes to write and proofread (you think I have the luxury of spellcheck on this crappily coded site?) this entry, so it'll be short, but it's been an interesting day. Yesterday I ran into Emily and Simone, two Australians I met in Delhi, and we had a very enjoyable pot of chai together. Today Emily and I took a boat ride past, among other sights of town, three public cremations, sparking some rather personal conversation about death, God, society and faith. I'd like to write about how India isn't as afraid to face death as the U.S. is, and how, even though everybody dies alone, the open recognition of death seems to bind people together, but I don't have time. Instead, I think it's amazing how much can be taken for granted in traveler's conversation. There is a subtext of agreement about the importance of honesty and curiosity that has consistently enabled me to have very personal conversations with complete strangers. When I have identified this element (let's hope it's more than loneliness or a burning need to speak english), I'll write about it in detail, but for now let's just say that "East of Eden" managed to stretch out of its covers and wrap itself around my weekend. I can't wait to go to bookshops tomorrow looking for something to read on the way to Mumbai (where, as far as I know, I am going to study for the next few months with a fantastic teacher). I'm hoping to find Milorad Pavic's novel "The Dictionary of the Khazars", which I hear is not only Borgesian in style but actually presented like a nonfiction work. Ooo...

My quarter hour is up, it's eleven p.m., and it's been one good, solid day.

VARANASI, friday 7 pm

2005-11-26T01:43:00.000+09:00

I spent the afternoon on the banks of the Ganges today, recovering from a sixteen hour ordeal with Indian Railways and an unreserved ticket. Yesterday found me tired from four hours in a share jeep and really wanting to get out of New Jalpaiguri, which is a dusty hole full of vultures. So I queued up with the Indian nationals, paid rs150/-, waited three hours for the late Guwahati-Bikaner Express, and squeezed myself into a sleeper car already bursting with people. Ugh. After a couple of hours on the floor by the [smelly] toilets, a conductor had mercy on me and secured me a berth. Twenty minutes of glorious slumber were destroyed like the cabin scene in "A Night at the Opera" when at Katihar we received more people with more luggage than I could have imagined in one car, and I laughed out loud for perhaps a full minute while honestly twenty shouting Indians tried to fit into a single six-pack of berths. It's a shame that there was no conceivable way to have reached my camera through the sea of bodies. When the laughter subsided I was three-up in my berth with two Rajasthani guys, one of whom kept sneezing and only covering his nose about half the time.

But now I'm in Varanasi, a city I've barely explored, but I can tell you this: there are so many frigging animals here--cows, dogs, goats, on the rooftops, in the winding alleys, crapping everywhere. Also, a boat went out into the river at dusk to release a thousand candles, and both the Lonely Planet and the vishnu rest house say it's not safe to be out after 10:30 or so. Tomorrow I'm going to watch a cremation, visit Benares Hindu University, and buy a bona-fide reserved ticket for Mumbai, where I'll likely be studying for the next few months. I'll fill in the details later, but for now I don't want to press my luck (and fantastic luck it's been...) so hang on.

I've been reading Steinback's "East of Eden" over the train ride, and it's really beautiful and really creepy. Some of the chapters are full-fledged short stories in themselves, and the whole thing is so archetypal (based on all of the Adam/Eve/Abel/Cain stuff) that your skin crawls when you begin to see what he might be up to. I'm hoping the ending isn't as depressing or shocking as it likely will be, but suffice it to say that so far it's brilliant. He has yet to break the laws of physics, but you feel like there's a lot of extrasensory weirdness going on anyway. I feel bad I've always sold Steinback so short.

I'll try to get some more pictures up soon, or at least some good stories.Cheers.

DARJEELING NOV 22

2005-11-23T01:44:00.000+09:00

I keep running into these two guys in all sorts of random places: a frenchman named Alain who works for the French railway and a Scotsman named Paul or possibly Cole. Alain I met in Gangtok on the share jeep to the Rumtek Gompa, and Cole/Paul I met in a restaurant in Pelling, a town composed almost entirely of hotels. We're all meeting up in the Kunga restaurant here in Darjeeling this evening.

Sikkim (the Indian state I just left) is beautiful and weird. It seems everybody in the whole state is employed in road construction, from the mothers tinking away at stones with hammers, turning them into pebbles, to diggers (two to a shovel--one to hold the shovel and another to pull an attached rope at the appropriate time, so as to lighten the load), to the actual rock-layers. Everything is done by hand except for the rock compacting. The roads are terrible everywhere, and the situation is rather exacerbated by the constant construction, because what traffic there is doesn't stop to make things easy. AND, the jeeps are always crammed to the gills--my personal record is FIFTEEN people in one SUV sized jeep, with packs and bags of rice on top. That was the jeep going to Yuksom, the town I visited after Pelling. Yuksom is a real Lord-of-the-Rings type place; back in 1701 these three exiled Tibetan lamas met on a hilltop, where masons had built a coronation stone, bringing water and soil from all over Sikkim, to crown Sikkim's first king, Phuntshog Norbugang. That name still cracks me up. The coronation stone is still there, with a gigantic chorten in front, believed to hold the soil and water; there's also a gigantic tree directly behind the tri-throne that, rumor has it, was planted at the ceremony. Now the town of Yuksom is just a pretty village, with a few hundred inhabitants scattered around the hill and the nearby lake. Thousands of prayer flags adorn the town, stretched between neighboring structures and across streets. The effect is lovely. There's also a restaurant in town (one of three) called the Gupta restaurant that serves fantastic fali, a style of Tibetan bread. After two nights in Yuksom (the first of which Paul Cole and I spent hanging out with three US girls and a South African guy, laughing our heads off while watching a cricket game), I decided to trek to Khechopalri lake, a 12km hike away. What I didn't really process before strapping on the pack is that it's in the fricking Himalayan foothills, and there was no level surface to be found--the trail was nothing but switchbacks the whole way. Ugh. I eventually arrived at a "trekker's hut" and spent the evening with a guy named Nirin and his friends down by the lake. Nirin spoke almost no English, and of course my Nepali is nonexistent, so we sat around laughing at my feeble attempts to learn two lovely Nepali songs (that thankfully I taped Nirin singing). I then went and got my violin from the hut and played a few tunes for the gathered friends, including one of the Nepali songs I had just learned, Ris-om-pee-dee-dee, which apparently is about a hankerchief. The mini-concert went very poorly. It quickly became clear that nobody knew what to do in this situation. They didn't know the songs, and they had no desire whatsoever to listen to Bach and Vasen or really anything they didn't already know. They had likely never been to a concert of any kind that wasn't a town festival, so they were talking very loudly to each other while I played (which of course disturbed my concentration) even though there were only nine of us crammed into the shack they lived in. They waited after the songs in silence until it became clear that you can't just do nothing, so they all kind of started talking and clapping a little. Oh well. Two nights prior I played a little bit at the Gupta for the gathered trekkers and Nepalis, and a nice house concert ended with a rousing singalong version of Gershwin's 'Summertime', so I'm not too bruised up.

Thanks for all the notes in the guestbook. Have a happy thanksgiving, everybody.

GANGTOK NOV 16 7pm

2005-11-17T01:45:00.000+09:00

Of course I left the CD with photos on it in Kolkata so I can't upload any more of them, and I've already deleted them from my camera because I'm a total nimrod. It's 45 degrees F out here in Gangtok, Sikkim. (Tomorrow when it's warm I'm going to the roof to play a scale or two, and then a couple bits from the Romanian Dances so I can say I played Bartok in Gangtok. That'll really impress the girls, gangs and bars. Ooo.) I just sent out some emails to people who may be in the know as far as teachers go, so we'll see what happens. In the mean time, I'm going to stay here until I can finish my dang book about Indian classical music because I would like to dump it from my luggage.

The roads around here are often suspect, so everybody does the long distance stuff in Jeeps--well, not real jeeps, but Marutis (Suzuki's foray into the Indian market) with 3L engines and stronger leaf springs. From New Jalpaiguri, the target of my sleeper ride from Kolkata, I caught one of these jeeps to Gangtok, and we sat FOUR-UP in the seat, of which there were three, not to mention a couple more seats crammed behind the last rank. All together, there were eleven people crammed into this SUV for the whole four-hour death-defying mountain road voyage. I paid rs.120, just under three dollars, for the ride. I heretofore claim that India is the home of the world's cheapest and most uncomfortable transport ever.

Today I woke up at five a.m. to see the sunrise, climbed to the roof of the building (ok to do) and looked out to realize that the whole city faces west. I saw the most scenic moonset of my life before going back to bed. At nine or so, I went to the jeep stand and caught a 60 cent hour-long ride to the Rumtek Gompa, a large Tibetan Buddhist monastery 22km from Gangtok. I took a few pictures, but largely just walked around. It was very quiet, ornately decorated, and every now and again a series of novices would dart across the courtyard in their maroon robes and playfight or jump around. Actually, it seemed like a heck of a cool childhood. There's an education involved (something that tens of millions of Indian children do not get), all of your chores take place in front of a breathtaking vista, and you get a bit of a respite from poverty. Sikkim is India's most affluent state, mostly by virtue of having so few inhabitants--although because China has never officially recognized India's claim to Sikkim, India is constantly pumping lots of rupees into its infrastructure, presumably trying to Indianize it as much as possible.

The whole city is on a steep hill, with open-water channels running downhill next to crazy staircases that go very far down. The city's water pipes jut out of the concrete at impossible angles, but seem to reach every building regardless of all the obstacles. My grandmother would take one look at Gangtok's unique beauty and declare it Hell. I'm going back to my hotel (50 rupees a night!) to eat my dinner now, probably vegetables and rice, perhaps some dumplings, and some Tibetan bread that tastes like the dough used in big pretzels, although with a far more pleasing texture and none of the excess oil. :)

To Siliguri tonight!

2005-11-15T01:50:00.000+09:00

I'm bidding farewell to all of my Kolkata friends, including Max and Willem. Max has become very, very ill and will probably return to Austrailia after arriving in Chennai. Willem is off to do a documentary in South Africa (yes, he will eventually interview Mandela); Danny and Kate, a couple more acquaintances, are off to Beijing, and Martin leaves for Bangkok tommorow. I made a crack at dinner about how womens' cycles align in shared apartments, and everyone agreed that a similar force seems to hold sway over backpackers' schedules.

This update won't be very long, because I'm currently uploading PICTURES to my flickr account. So please, follow the photos link, and I'll prove it to you that I'm not just sitting in a hut in Minong, Wisconsin, inventing fictitious stories to cover up my ties to the criminal underworld.More soon.

Oh, p.s., the music festival was great, if a bit demanding on the old patience. I thought Hindustani Raag Sangeet was a long song form on CD--40 minutes a song; here in India they take an HOUR AND A HALF to play a raag. It's nearly impossible for me to zone in for that long, so I kind of drifted in and out of amazement. The music is completely antithetical to the culture, it's obviously a product of a different time. Ok to the photos.

See you there,

Kip

Nov 9, 7:26pm

2005-11-10T01:51:00.000+09:00

All the Indians say Kolkata and all the westerners say Calcutta. Either way, it's a big sprawling mass with traffic like a grand prix, horns and street noise that never fully stop, and all sorts of amputees walking up to you or just flopping about on their blankets. I'm lodging at the Centerpoint guest house just off of Sudder St which is the backpackers' hang. The dormitory beds at Centerpoint are rs75/-, or about 90 cents a night, and they're up six freaking flights of stairs. My roommates this time are a Frenchman named Jean-Marie, and an Englishman named Martin. Jean-Marie has driven overland from France to India five times, through Syria and Iran and a mess of other weird places. He and I are going to play chess once I've finished this entry. Martin (who endured the 24-hour train ride with me) is a guitarist who is living off the interest of his invested money, about as simply as one can. He has traveled extensively throughout southeast Asia. Both are in their late fifties, I would imagine.
I've managed to secure a pass for the concerts this weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing/hearing an India that's patient, collected, and linear: an apparent antithesis to the India I see around me--obsessed with selling and money, disorganized, inefficient. I'm also excited to see what the performer-audience relationship is like; this is the only thing I've permitted myself to imagine as an ideal (thank God, or a few ideals would have been dashed by now) and nothing would make me happier than to envy their rapport. Finishing up the weekend is santoor guru Shiv Kumar Sharma from Kashmir, a man who has more or less legitimized the santoor (a sort of hammered dulcimer) in Hindustani music. The only thing I'm apprehensive about is that Willem, the fellow traveler I met in Delhi, is anxious to come to Calcutta and gatecrash the concerts. Ha! Max the Australian warned me that this might happen. Willem is a great guy (and quite intelligent), but I'd have to agree with Max that issues of consideration often do not register for him.
I've formulated something of a game plan: eager to get out of the big cities, (I still have a constant sore throat and phlegm due to the acrid, dusty air) I'm going to Darjeeling while I still have my sleeping bag (I'm going to mail it home as soon as I can. It's too warm, and it's winter), and then get a Sikkim travel permit and head for the mountains. Sikkim is a state/province of India, but it's nestled between Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, so it's a bit calmer of a culture, and the weather is much colder. I'll get a 15-day travel permit, then hopefully a seperate North Sikkim permit, which should enable me to get pretty close to Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world (after Everest and K2). Then it's going to be another long train ride that bypasses too much (like Bodhgaya and Varanasi, two cities I'll visit eventually) to attend the Tansen music festival in Gwalior during the first week of December. So everything is swimming along so far. I played my fiddle for the first time over here today, and it sounds like a toy! The wood has swelled suddenly and choked a lot of the sound. Thankfully, my audience of Bangladeshi hostel mates haven't heard any great violin soulds to compare it to, otherwise they may not have been willing to sit around exchanging songs and clapping earlier today.
Cheers, everyone.

monday Nov 7 12:15p

2005-11-08T01:51:00.000+09:00

I just picked up a volume of Rabindranath Tagore's short stories to read during my 24-hour train ride coming up this afternoon. Supposedly he's the Shakespeare of India. I'm also traveling sleeper class, which is one class lower than I intended to travel (3-tier AC was full) so I'm in for a lot of jostling. Yesterday I took a long walk from Connaught Place to somewhere across the Yamuna river. On the way, I passed a whole community of people who appear to make their living disposing of the city's garbage. There are no garbage cans anywhere, and quite honestly I don't know what the residences do. Many of the businesses and tenants in the part of town I'm in use as much as they can, and throw the rest on the street, where it gets intermittently cleaned up by various people. These people seem to live by the river under and around two giant conduits (that presumably carry power, phone, fiber optic cabling, etc). The conduits provide the structural backbone for hundreds and hundreds of tarp/plastic lean-tos and shacks constructed with bits of the garbage that the whole place swims in. The flies are terrible because there's so much cow dung and human dung in places. On one side of the camp, there's a crew that sifts through the city's garbage, using what they can, and bundling the rest into large sacks. The funny thing is that the kids really don't know how substandard their living conditions are. We were smiling and waving at each other the whole time I walked through. One of the kids had even fashioned a raft out of a garbage sack, and made an oar as well, and tied a bunch of saris together to climb down from the bridge. There is a very good reason that no one sees tourist photos of these neighborhoods; how can you pull out a camera in front of someone who knows very well that it's worth their whole year's salary? I also came across a fifty story building, gutted, that had been claimed by the government while it was being built. It's still in litigation (many years, said the caretaker). The crew installing the new subway line was really cool, though. So far, it's much easier to ask forgiveness than ask permission when it comes to places you're not supposed to be--people keep assuming that confidence equals a right to be there! I'd like to keep writing but the waiting line for these computers is getting a little long. See you in Calcutta.

day three

2005-11-06T01:52:00.000+09:00

I don't plan on updating this page this often, but the door to the freaking internet attic is seriously three feet from the door to my hostel. Today I hopped the subway to Old Delhi, where you can barely move for the throngs of milling people, cycle rickshaws, and cars. I had the best samosas EVER from this guy who wouldn't even acknowledge me until I put money in his hand. The food is so good and so cheap. Dinner has consistently been around .50-.75: Biryani (rices with bits of veggies) and Dhal (lentil/potatoes/spices) and Chai. I haven't gone for the real good stuff yet cause I'm waiting for my gut to adjust, which it's doing pretty well at so far. After a walk through the Red Fort, I came across a fantastic garden featuring Samadhis (worshipful monuments?) of Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Ghandi, and Rajiv Ghandi, erected on their cremation sites. Hundreds of huge unique rocks surrounded them in a multiple-acre verdant garden. I also found (well, it wasn't really lost) a hydroelectric station near the Yamuna river. Adjacent to it was the cyclerickshaw driver enclave; just hundreds and hundreds of bikes, cows, naked kids, flies, and not another westerner in sight. Everybody was very nice there, and it's the first part of Delhi I've been to where I haven't been constantly hassled for money.
Earlier today I met a guy (15 yrs old) named Ajay, who wanted me to go to his boss's shop to look around. I didn't want to go, but we went to a nearby eatery and I got him a pakora and a chai (less than a quarter). He was appreciative and stopped badgering me to go to his shop. I ran into him this afternoon as well, and he was at it again; after enduring a bit more badgering, I just decided to get overly self righteous and say to him: "See that man, that woman, those kids? They ALL tell me to visit their damn shop and dish me sob stories. I thought YOU were different, seeing me as a flesh and blood person not a stack of dollars. I know you're a good guy, but c'mon!" He understood that his touting cost him a pleasant aquaintance. He didn't try to follow me as I slowly walked off. I hope I see him again, he's a nice guy. I also had a tea today with a guy named Sanjeev, who tought me a few Hindi words. Tomorrow I'm bearing down on the industrial zoned areas; I have a suspicion they'll be cool. I'm pretty sure I'll leave on Monday for Calcutta with a stop in Varanasi to scope it out (I want to spend a good bit of time there later on). I'll go with one of the Australians, named Max. We've had a few more conversations, and he's an all right guy, if a little strange.

day two

2005-11-05T01:53:00.000+09:00

It's four fifteen in the afternoon, and so far, it's been a great day. I'm staying at the Sunny guest house, a building that's made up of brick, concrete/rebar and wood, depending on what part of the building you look at. The dorm room is a covered section of the roof, but there were a lot of mosquitos last night. The other travelers there are a riot. I went to a revolving restaurant with a few backpackers last night and spent easily half an hour being grilled and teased about being an American. Today I went to the New Delhi station with Willem, a documentary-maker staying at the Sunny, to observe the train ticket booking process. (Aside: Willem carries with him a folio of pictures of himself with famous people, including Sir Edmund Hilary, Reinhold Messner, Bill Clinton, and Sachin Tendulkar, the most famous Cricketer in India.) It turned out that as a foreigner, you simply walk into a special tourist office, in which there are no lines, and they take care of everything for you. In fact, there is a special 'Tourist Quota' on the trains; a few seats that remain open so that foreigners can avoid the lines and madness of the reservation counter. Strange that the government of India so encourages tourism. Even in non-tourist parts of town, there are still shops with English signs and touts waiting to offer you everything under the sun--it blows my mind that the few tourists who get out there still provide the best odds for making a living.

After my trip to the station, an Australian backpacker named Emily and I went (after a complete autorickshaw debacle) to the house of one of her acquaintances, a guy named Tariq, from Kashmir, who cooked up a fabulous lunch with four of his friends. His family guides tours through Kashmir, and lives in a houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinigar. Kashmiris have a strange reputation in town, a reputation for being kind to a fault and then growing angry when you fail to patronize their business. I have yet to see this in action, but one of Tariq's friends did suggest I go immediately to Kashmir and forget about the rest of India, to the point of suggesting I return a train ticket to Calcutta.

Here's a good story: Max, an Australian guy who's been to the subcontinent five times, was hit in the face (on a moving train) by a big human turd. Somebody stuck their ass out the window and let one go, and the train was moving quickly enough to bring it back in. Everybody had a good laugh about that one.

I'm sure I'll have some stories of my own soon enough.

day one

2005-11-04T01:54:00.000+09:00

Well, I'm in New Delhi, and it's been a crazy day. I know that I'll figure out how to get stuff done soon enough, but the confusing interim has me a bit homesick. I did take a nice walk from Connaught Place to the parliament building/India Gate earlier, and am looking forward to visiting Old Delhi tomorrow, even though all of the monuments will be closed as it's Ead, or the last day of Ramadan. Some notable first-day sights were monkeys swinging from the power lines (and stealing food while sprinting on rooftops), a giant mess of a construction site that will soon be a metro station, a humorous assortment of vehicles (all of which seem to use leaf springs for their suspension, regardless of their size), and a snake charmer who couldn't charm his snakes but rather got them to fight. People are a bit on edge due to the bombings in Paharganj recently, but the Diwali folk are still lighting off their fireworks. I'm forcing myself to stay awake until a normal bedtime, so I'm going to go find myself something to do. What an amazing place; I'm completely confused.

expat-to-be

2005-11-01T01:54:00.000+09:00

Hello all, thank you for all your good wishes. I have little to say except that I am both excited to go and sad that it'll be a while before I see my family and friends again. To cheer myself up, I have surreptitiously placed a few Parisota Hot Club mp3s on the Archives page; they're all pretty dancey. I fly out of Mpls at 6:30am tommorow, then a 9hr wait in NYC and a 7pm flight to Moscow; I arrive in Delhi 12:50am on *thursday* morning. whoa. I may or may not make a run for the ITC Sangeet Sammelan in Kolkata that begins on the 9th--if I feel i've got enough time to get there, it would be cool.

Thanks again for all your support, I look forward to adding to this blog after I reach freaking ASIA!

muhuHAHA,Kip

sent not squeezed

2005-09-28T00:56:00.000+09:00

I'm just polishing up the site, listening to Pat Metheny Group "Speaking of Now", thinking about my sister getting married. There are a couple of stumps burning in the backyard this afternoon; a storm last week knocked a couple of big trees down, and as it turns out, this was the impetus for my roomates to get a dumpster, a bobcat and a chainsaw and make a strong step away from the white-trash picture our house had become. Thank God. Humorously enough, as EXCEL was restoring power to the neighborhood, a neighbor's tree decided to shed a large branch, ripping the power and phone lines as well as the box out of our house; we've got an extension cord hooked up to the Pust's garage next door.
I've never been a very considerate person (one of my largest faults) and it's only grace that I haven't burned or ignored every bridge around me. As a result, I'm trying to tie everything up as well as I can. Some of it's impossible, some of it is a lot easier than I thought, but overall it's going really well. I played my last weekend at Eagle Brook a few days ago (a huge growth-centered church) and humorously enough, got to improvise and really stretch out on the last song I played. I also just visited a great friend in Toronto and rode dozens of miles on mountain bikes all over the city, just like we used to explore Boston when we lived there together. I'm hoping that the poetic justice continues into my parting with my parents and sister and friends; Allie's wedding is great timing in that I get to see a lot of my extended family before going (and save money by not having to mail them the new record). Leaving this time feels like so much less of an escape than I imagined it would, or built it up to be; I feel much more sent out than squeezed out, initiative rather then reactionary.

Anyway, there are rough mixes on the MORNING ZEPHYR page, give them a listen.Have a great day.