My wife just showed me a post card announcing a most amazing and wonderful modern dance program created by Seattle choreographer, Donald Byrd of Spectrum Dance Theater. He has collaborated with Israeli choreographers Liat Dror and Nir Ben Gal, and Palestinian musician Wissam Murad in the world premiere of A Chekhovian Resolution on November 21-22 at the Moore Theater in Seattle.
Here is how the program notes explain the program title:
The Israeli writer and philosopher Amos Oz sees this conflict as a “tragedy in the exact sense of the word”–a “collision between one very powerful claim and another no less powerful.” Oz underscores that a “Chekhovian Resolution” (referencing one of Chekhov’s signature themes) might leave the antagonists embittered and in despair, but unlike the outcomes of typical Shakespearean tragedy, at least alive; with potential, therefore, for the return of hope and even redemption.
Another reason this event jumped out at me is Wissam Murad, who I’ve written about here. He is the founder of the Palestinian musical ensemble Sabreen and collaborated with David Broza on the first song written jointly by a Palestinian and Israeli, B’Libi (hear it). The song is a dark and powerful meditation on the power of the land and the human bond to it as reflected in the conflict.
The Israeli choreographers founded the Ben Gal Dror Dance Company, one of Israel’s premiere modern dance ensembles.
This promises to be an extraordinary artistic meditation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by four stellar artists committed to making a contribution to express the suffering and hope of both peoples for peace.
I hope to meet Wissam and maybe I can get him on KBCS if he has the time.
John Martyn may be the greatest English musician you’ve never have heard of, certainly one of the greatest of the last forty years. I wrote the article about him in the Encyclopedia of Folk and Blues and have loved his music since my college roommate introduced me to his first album in the early 1970s.
Martyn played a N.Y. concert last week, his first in ten years (he doesn’t get around much). Here’s what the N.Y. Times music critic had to say:
In the late 1960s it was a novel, far-reaching idea when folk-rooted guitarists in the United States and England began toying with the harmonies and syncopations of jazz. (Now such hybrids are taken for granted in the music of Norah Jones.) One of the most idiosyncratic British innovators, the 60-year-old Scottish guitarist, singer and songwriter John Martyn, made his first New York appearance in more than a decade with a brief yet heartening set…
Mr. Martyn’s style…mingles the modes of traditional Celtic songs, jazz chords, rural-blues fingerpicking, the otherworldly singing of Billie Holiday and the bluesman Skip James, a fondness for electronics like the Echoplex and, from the 1970s on, a touch of reggae. In his music, steady, precise, tightly wound yet eccentric guitar vamps — with chords and single notes ricocheting from off-beats — support waywardly improvisational vocals that are crooned with honeyed introspection or burred with a rasp.
Mr. Martyn’s own songs, among them “May You Never” (which Eric Clapton also recorded), juxtapose benevolent wishes with an awareness of darkness…
Personally, I think Martyn’s experimentation with jazz is among the least successful of his musical efforts. I much prefer his work that is rooted firmly in traditional music and the blues. But whatever you do say about John Martyn, he is a bold, almost fearless innovator. Yes, he blunders musically. But in a world in which musicians find a single groove and mine it ad nauseum, Martyn isn’t satisfied with sameness. And when he is “on” there is no one like him. His sound is unique. He plays with a studied joie de vivre that simply commands admiration. But that joy is well-earned through hard living and tough choices (or “a bloggy hard slog,” as the musician himself describes his life).
Martyn’s music makes no compromises for the sake of accessibilty. What you hear is what you get. He forces you to come to the music. He never comes to you. In that sense of musical commitment, purity and fearlessness, he reminds me a great deal of Van Morrison. Their singing voices both have the same bluesy, raspy, almost slurred sound the reminds you of many of the blues greats they admire. And it may be no accident that each hails from gritty industrial cities in the north of the British Isles: Martyn from Glasgow and Morrison from Belfast.
By the by, the N.Y. Times review, entitled Smooth Scotch Blend of Folk and Jazz, seems to have confused Martyn’s Scottish ethnicity with an alcoholic beverage, unless it’s a sly reference to the problems with the bottle with which Martyn has battled. At any rate, there’s never a good editor when you need one.
If you’ve never heard of him, you owe it to yourself to listen to May You Never and buy the DVD I feature here (or a CD). The video below is from a 1978 German concert (on which the DVD is based) in which Martyn performs A Certain Surprise. Enjoy the gift that is John Martyn.
Mahmoud Darwish, the greatest living Palestinian poet, died after open heart surgery in Houston. He was 67, a heavy smoker, and had previously undergone similar surgeries in 1984 and 1998. He had a near death experience during his last operation. His loss is a deep and severe blow to all who loved his magnificent poetry and the example of humanity and decency he represented. I join the Palestinian people in their sadness.
For those who may not be aware of Darwish’s role in Palestinian culture and society but who may know something of Israeli society, the nearest poet I can think of in stature would have been Yehuda Amichai. And though the two came from different cultures, the roles they played as progressive voices of conscience and poets of their respective nations are quite comparable. In the U.S., you might have to go back to either Robert Frost or Ezra Pound to find someone of comparable stature.
One of the supreme ironies of Darwish’s career is that he should be considered a quintessentially Israeli poet, since he was born and raised there. In fact, the poet’s obsession with home, land, forced exile and national suffering are the same exact themes of some of Israel’s greatest poets. Chaim Nachman Bialik comes immediately to mind. Were Israel a country of all its citizens, Darwish would be a national poet not only of the Palestinians, but of Israelis as well. When Yossi Sarid suggested in 2000 that the poet’s work be included in the national education curriculum, prime minister Barak said it was “too soon.” This exemplifies how far Israel has to go before it encompasses all its ethnic communities.
It is sad that Darwish will not be buried in his native village as Haaretz reported initially. He will be given instead a state funeral in Ramallah where a monument will honor him.
Darwish was born in the upper Galilee village of Birweh in 1941. In 1948, Israel occupied (and eventually razed) his village and his former landowning family was forced to flee to Lebanon. A moshav called Amihud replaced Birweh in 1950. The move to Lebanon was the first of many such exiles for this poet of dislocation and uprootedness. His family eventually returned to Israel and settled once again in a village near Acre called Deir al-Asad. After graduating from high school, he moved to Haifa.
He published his first book of poetry, Wingless Birds, at age 19. The following year he turned to journalism, joined the Israeli Communist Party (Rakah) and became editor of its newspaper, Al-Ittihad.
During this period he published Identity Card, one of his most famous early poems:
Record!
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?
Record!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks..
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?
Record!
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew
My father.. descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather..was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house is like a watchman’s hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!
Record!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks..
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!
Therefore!
Record on the top of the first page:
I do not hate poeple
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware..
Beware..
Of my hunger
And my anger!
…While he wrote in classical Arabic rather than in the language of the street, his poetry was anything but florid or baroque, employing a directness and heat that many saw as one of the salvations of modern literary Arabic.
“He used high language to talk about daily life in a truly exceptional way,” said Ghassan Zaqtan, a Palestinian poet and a close friend. “This is someone who remained at the top of Arabic poetry for 40 years. It was not simply about politics.”
In the mid-1960s he joined Al Ard, an Arab nationalist movement founded by rebellious young Israeli Arab intellectuals devoted to the teachings of Gamel Nasser. The movement rejected the traditional Arab politics of the Communist party in favor of a more authentically nationalist politics. Israeli intelligence saw Al-Ard as a serious threat and when it put forward a list for the 1965 Knesset, the party was banned. The Shin Bet waged a war of persecution against Al Ard, a campaign it continues to this day against similarly nationalist Israeli Arab groups. Darwish was regularly imprisoned or placed under house arrest, experiences which also informed his poetry. Several members including the poet eventually went into exile.
In 1970, Darwish spent a year of study in Moscow and the following year he left Israel for good, moving first to Cairo to write for Al-Ahram. In 1973, he moved to Beirut where he became active in the PLO. In 1987, he was elected to the PLO executive committee, but resigned six years later in protest against the Oslo Accords.
Darwish says that real peace means [Arabs and Jews] being equal with[in] the Israeli society, and that the Palestinian people should have the right to return, that the question of the refugees, of Jerusalem, of the settlements should be resolved, and of course, Palestinians must have the right to self-determination.
In 1995, the poet returned to Israel for the first time for the funeral of a friend. But he was not allowed to visit his hometown for more than a few days:
He still longs to go home, “although I might realize that the harshest exile is in my homeland,” he says. Thus, Darwish remains a stranger passing through.
Israel did allow him to return to the Occupied Territories and he moved to Ramallah. But he only rented a house and even there felt in exile.
Darwish supported a two-state solution (Bronner typically writes, “he said he fully supported a two-state solution” as if the reporter didn’t believe him) and rejects Palestinian terror. But he understands that the motivation for such a heinous act springs from the desperation of Palestinian life under Occupation:
Darwish insists that terror is not a means to justice. “Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism,” he wrote, condemning the September 11 attack on the United States in the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam.
Concerning the current situation, he tells me: “We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair.”
… I ask whether a Palestinian state will exist. In a firm voice he tells me, “A Palestinian state already exists.” He adds, “The Palestinian people feel that they are living the hours before dawn. Their national will is stronger in reaction to the challenge. They do not have another option but to continue to carry the hope that they are going to have a normal life.”
He says there is a simple solution that only seems complicated and that the two sides can resolve the questions of the borders and all the other issues under negotiation. He repeats a number of times, “There is hope.”
Darwish believed at one time in poetry as an agent for social change. But he now has a more chastened view and believes itq can only change the poet and as we say during the seder: dayeinu (“and it sufficed for us”):
On many occasions he has expressed the notion that only poetry can bring harmony to a world devastated by war: “Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by,” he has written. I ask him if he still believes that.
“I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe,” he responds, “but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.”
One of Darwish’s most productive artistic collaborations was with the Lebanese oud-player, Marcel Khalife. He composed music for many of the poems and recorded an entire record devoted to Darwish. Among the most tender (listen as the singer repeats the plaintive words “Umi, Umi”), touching, and heartbreaking is My Mother (hear it), whose lyrics are:
I long for my mother’s bread
My mother’s coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother.
And if I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
With a lock of your hair
With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a God
If I touch the depths of your heart.
If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand.
I am old
Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest.
In 2001, Darwish received the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. It is a pity that he now has no opportunity to win the Nobel Prize he deserved.
Last year, he returned to Israel for what turned out to be the last time and gave a reading of his poetry. The YouTube video above is one of the multi-part videos from that reading. It has been uploaded to the site in approximately 12 parts. AFP describes the event:
In July 2007, Darwish decried the Islamist Hamas movement’s bloody takeover of the Gaza Strip a month earlier in his first poetry recital in Israel since quitting the Jewish state in 1970.
“We woke up from a coma to see a monocolored flag (of Hamas) do away with the four-color flag (of Palestine),” Darwish said before some 2,000 people who attended the reading in the northern port city of Haifa.
“We have triumphed,” he said with thick irony. “Gaza won its independence from the West Bank. One people now have two states, two prisons who don’t greet each other. We are victims dressed in executioners’ clothing.”
“We have triumphed knowing that it is the occupier who really won.”
I would’ve given much to have attended. I never heard Darwish read his poetry and it is something I will always regret.
A condensed version of this post has been published at Comment is Free.
Thanks to former NPR reporter and former ABC news producer and bureau chief Deb Amos, who forwarded to me this wonderful YouTube video which I’d never seen before. The graphic technique has been used often before, but it tells a wonderful story of Arab-Americans who are just like you and me, while being of another religious and ethnic tradition. The differences between us are no more nor less than the differences between any one American and another.
You almost have to watch the film and devote your attention fully to it and then do the same for the song because each make very strong statements. The latter is especially interesting I think. You have a Muslim-American writing a country music song that affirms traditional Muslim values that are also traditional American values. It’s really quite masterful. Another beautiful irony of this song is that it adopts the same musical genre, country music, which after 9/11 inserted so much jingoism and Islamophobia into American popular culture.
A few weeks ago I read that Seattle’s Medieval Women’s Choir would be performing Sephardic music tonight. That was a good reason to go since I love early music and Sephardic music. But an even more important reason was that I saw my old band mate, Shira Kammen was performing as accompanist. Way back in the early 1980s when we were both UC Berkeley grad students, my brother and I formed a Jewish music ensemble, Yasmine, which played in the Bay Area and recorded one audio tape, Jewish Songs of Celebration and Struggle. We also performed at the first Bay Area Jewish Music Festival which I founded with Gerry Tenney. When we first conceived of our group, Todd decided to invite Shira to join. She was a consummate fiddle player with a wonderful alto voice.
My brother is an excellent musician, far better than I. But Shira was the true professional among us. She was an elegant accompanist, never missing a note, never performing off key. She was always prominent in the mix but never too forward and never too far back. Not only that, but when two brothers perform together while their voices mesh wonderfully their personalities don’t always. Shira was the calm middle whenever there was tension. She had that wry, self-deprecating sense of humor that so many Jews share. She’s gone on to a professional career performing on medieval stringed instruments though her original one is the violin. Among the distinguished early music groups she’s belonged to are Ensemble Alcatraz and Ensemble P.A.N.
The concert was delightful. Here are Margriet’s insightful program notes. The choir was quite good but the soloists and accompanists were even better. Linda Strandberg had a vibrant soprano voice that conveyed the passion and intensity of the Sephardic melodies. I especially loved her opening the concert standing at the entrance to the synagogue’s sanctuary singing a very slow, resonant version of La Rosa Enfloresce (“The Rose Flowers”). The notes were piercing. The melody gorgeous. For my wife and I this was a special moment since this was the music we chose to walk down the aisle at our wedding. I first heard the song from a Hesperion XX record I bought while a grad student at UC Berkeley, right around the time Shira and I were in Yasmine together. I also note that Shira has performed with Hesperion XX, another indication of the high musical regard in which she is held.
Shira had great attack during her solos and accompaniment bringing gusto to the music. Her duets with Margriet Tindemans (also the Choir’s director), who played medieval fiddle, were exciting to listen to. The concert even featured two songs on Yasmine’s cassette, Dodi Li and Et Dodim, both from Song of Songs. During several songs, notably the sinuous vocal ornamentations of D’ror Yikra, it was all I could do to stop myself from joining along with the singing.
When I introduced myself during intermission I was delighted to find that she remembered me and our collaboration. It was so good to see her.
For anyone from Seattle, my wife and I ate at a new Asian noodle place called Boom Noodle on Capitol Hill. While the ambiance reminded me of a college cafeteria (big open tiled space with lots of reverb and noise of diners). People eat at long common tables so you don’t get a lot of privacy. But the food is quite extraordinary along with being relatively inexpensive. We had an appetizer, two noodle bowls, dessert and sake for $50 including tip. I had a seafood noodle soup with udon that included ling cod, penn cove mussels and shrimp. The mango mousse was delightful, closer to pane cotta than mousse. While Seattle is a good city for restaurants I’ve never been impressed by most of the Asian offerings. It’s great to have our first superb noodle house. Here’s the P-I review.
The bodily function that dare not speak its name in the pages of the NY Times
Pissed, pissed, PISSED. There, I’ve said it and I feel so much better. But Ben Ratliff can’t say it in the NY Times. The music critic wrote a review of a rock concert that contained one of the oddest locutions I’ve ever read in a newspaper. A picture of the lead singer printed the band’s name thus: ****** Jeans. Here’s what followed:
His band, from Philadelphia, has a name that lies just on the other side of what’s printable here; it describes a basic bladder-related humiliation, something that happens to the drunk or scared or infantile. As it happens, that described some of Friday night’s crowd at the Silent Barn, a little performance space in Ridgewood, Queens.
Has it really come to this? The Times can’t publish the world “pissed” in print?? What is God’s name is wrong with pissed? Is there a problem with acknowledging the human function of micturation in a family newspaper? I’d like to ask a Times editor what is so bad about this word. And further, this Google search of the Times site brings up scores of references to the word ‘pissed’ in the Times. The difference is that these seem all to be quotations from books in the Times Book Review. But seriously, what’s the difference?
I know Jon Stewart is going to have a field day with this one on his show. This is one of the things that makes me happy I’m a blogger and not a professional journalist. In case you’re interested–Ratliff liked the concert.
The Times ran [an] article…about its new owner, Sam Zell. A photographer at one of his other newspapers had asked Zell about the type of coverage he expected from reporters. In responding, Zell apparently became angry because she turned her back on him before he was finished, so he directed what the paper called a “two-word obscenity” at her.
…The Times’ coverage of its loose-lipped boss is…hilariously dowdy. Seriously, Spring Street: a “two-word obscenity?” What on Earth did Zell say? “Darn tootin’? ” “God dammit?” (Or is that one word?) “Mitt Romney?” If the story deserves to be written, don’t we deserve to know what it’s really about? The Chicago Tribune did a slightly better job describing Zell’s snafu, describing his jab as a “four-letter” word — and as weak as that description is (was the offending term “poop?” “Hell?” “Hola?”), it’s still much better than what The Times allowed.
…The silliest part of all this? Anyone can easily find the unexpurgated Zell and Butz quotes on the Internet in about three seconds. Curious readers like myself will merely forsake The Times and other such prudish newspapers and go directly to news organizations with no such compunction. The Times doesn’t have to insert bad words in every story to remain relevant; just print the news…
The fact that I can’t print…Zell’s f-bomb in a Times column criticizing The Times for not printing them in the first place is ridiculous.
Hey, Zell: I hear you love to curse. How about making this paper reflect your saltiness, you (same word Zell uses to insult reporters, no doubt appreciated by him, but that can’t appear in the Los Angeles Times — yet)?
Haaretz just featured a profile of Mira Awad, an Israeli Arab Christian who appears in a new hit TV comedy called Arab Labor. Awad began as a professionally trained musician and recorded demos which no Israeli record company wanted to touch with a 10 foot pole because they are petrified of Arab music. Not necessarily petrified in an overtly racist way. Just petrified of its supposed ‘alienness’ from Israeli pop culture and of their inability to market it to the public:
In guitarist Amos Hadani’s small studio in downtown Tel Aviv she is completing the recording of her debut album, which will comprise songs whose lyrics and music she has written herself, mostly in Arabic.
The long road she has traveled until arriving at the final stages of the album began during her days as a student at the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat Hasharon. “Eight years ago I already had demos ready and I tried to interest several people in them. But it didn’t really work out, and at a certain stage I got tired of trying and abandoned music for a number of years,” she recalls. “Arabic is apparently a language that still arouses fear and reservations in Israel. The fact is that no one jumped into the cold water, no one took a risk with me. Most of the reactions about the album had nothing to with the music or the production, and this began to affect me. My career in theater began to gain momentum and I said to myself, ‘Thank God, at least there is another place where I can express my creativity.’”
But as sometimes happens, the mass market may be far more ready to embrace “the other” than the doyennes of pop taste recognize. Visit her MySpace site and listen to Bahlawan and tell me she’s not ready for Israeli prime time. Azini is a song with more rock-pop “chops” recorded with the enormously popular Idan Raichel Project. Awad also recorded a duet with Noa of the Beatles We Can Work It Out that’s making the rounds of YouTube. It’s cute and makes a political statement but doesn’t showcase either of them to best effect. Far more compelling musically are these videos of more “hard core” Arab pop performances featured at MySpace video. As far as I’m concerned Awad has all her bases covered and if an Israeli record company can’t take a risk on her then they can’t take a risk on anything.
One warning: this is a woman who speaks her mind. Hearing Hatikvah doesn’t make her heart beat pit-a-pat. It makes her sad as one might expect coming from an Israeli Arab:
Mira Anuar-Awad was born in an Arab village in the northern part of Israel and has a full Israeli citizenship. She will sing Zman (Time) in the Kdam-Eurovision, combining Hebrew and Arabic. “There will probably be some people thinking I am not eligible to represent Israel at the Eurovision Song Contest because I am not Jewish, and I do feel, to some extent, that this country does not represent my true being” says Anuar-Awad. “When the Israeli national anthem is played I am usually sad and embarrassed cause it doesn’t stand for anyone of my national symbols” Mira adds. These statements by the star of the musical My Fair Lady have caused quite a commotion in Israel, just 5 days before the contest.
In certain Israeli nationalist circles, they can’t understand why Israeli Arabs don’t just shut up and get down on their knees and thank Jews for putting up with their endless whining and carping about discrimination and inequality.
KBCS has been playing Tracy Grammer’s cover of The Waking Hour (hear it) in heavy rotation and it is ravishing. David Francey, who wrote it, is a fine Scottish-born singer-songwriter who now lives in Canada. Among his other extraordinary songs is Redwing Blackbird. While Francey’s version is entirely serviceable, Grammer’s takes it to its apotheosis. She slows down the original tempo and somehow makes it more sorrowful and lovely. What I especially love is the Daniel Lanois-like guitar accompaniment. It is haunting and soulful.
I started to describe the song’s storyline and realized that it’s too evocative to pin down to any single meaning. Best to leave it to you to listen and judge for yourself. For Grammer’s live YouTube performance check this out.
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The bodily function that dare not speak its name in the pages of the NY Times
