Doing Good and Living Well–Indian Music

 

In the Spring of 1966 I first heard Indian music – Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akhbar Khan – and was never the same.  It was passionate, evocative, sensuous, profound and climactic.   Where had I been?  Why had I not heard this music before?  How could such a powerful, intricate, complex, and challenging music have been hidden?

Indian music was not the reason I decided to go to India – that had been decided for me by the organization that sent me (and in fact until the last minute I was to go to Algeria because of my fluent French.  I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I discovered that India was the perfect place for me at the time – demanding, exciting, kaleidoscopic, and brilliant – and learned that three months after deployment to Algeria, all Americans were declared persona non grata and given 48 hours to leave the country. 

One of the first things I did, however, after getting installed in my rooftop flat on Peddar Road in Bombay, 15 floors up with a commanding view of the city, the Towers of Silence, the Gateway of India and the ghats climbing to Poona and beyond, was to engage a sitar teacher.  I had no previous musical experience, and I figured that at the very least I would be able to listen to this magical music.  It turned out that I had a very good ear, and before I could play note, I enjoyed tuning the instrument, strumming the principal strings and hearing the sympathetic vibrations of the thin strings beneath.  My guru (as I called him) bought me a Calcutta-made sitar, a finely polished, elegantly simple instrument that I kept in a specially-made covering. 

I didn’t stay in Bombay long enough to get into the music, for I was transferred to Delhi; but there I engaged a friend of my Bombay teacher – they both had been pupils of Ravi Shankar – and for three years studied with him.  I never learned well.  As I said, I have little musical ability other than a good ear, and although I managed creditably on the first, slow, contemplative movement, the alaap, I had difficulty with the syncopated rhythms of the second, the jhaala, and was totally befuddled by the complex 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 beat rhythmic cycles.  I told my guru that I would be quite happy if I left India with a decent understanding of the alaap movements of a few ragas.  At least then I would know the note scales and the tonal feeling of the music.  Each raga of course is different, major and minor keys, differing note scales, some played in the morning, others in the evening, and getting the feel of the raga and developing my own feel in the improvisational first movement would be a major accomplishment.

My Delhi guru bought me a new sitar, this time a gussied up, fancy hand-carved one again from Calcutta – the Cadillac of sitars, he said, and he was right – it was the chrome and fins version of Indian instruments.  However, it had an even more rounded, resonating sound, and it was magnificent.

My teacher and I had a true guru-chela relationship.  Basically in return from learning from the great man, I would be his slave.  I bought him whiskey, new synthetic Terylene pastel-colored kurtas with silver buttons.  I drove him wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, with whomever he chose.  I picked him up and a cluster of totally bagged up women from his house in the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi, saw a charming group of attractive young women emerge from the bags 100 yards out of the colony, and drove them all to musical events where my guru played.  It was wonderful, and the exchange was in my favor.

The best times were when I went with him alone, a sarod player and a tabla player for jugalbandi – two principal instruments playing together, or playing off each other in solo riffs, close fretting, tight, competitive rhythmic patterns….all until 3 or 4 in the morning.  Ragas never seemed to have a specific starting or ending point.  Tuning gradually and progressively turned into the first notes of the alaap, and the raga was over when it was over.  No rules.

My guru spoke very little English which helped out my Hindustani a lot; so by the end of my four years in India and three with him, my Hindi was far, far better than my music.  I also got to be a part of the Muslim community in Delhi, a very rare thing for foreigners, most of whom fit the stereotype of living within vast houses one no different from the next.  I somehow knew that this avenue of music would lead me farther into India than most.

About two months prior to leaving India in 1973, I was invited to a South Indian classical music concert in Delhi; and I had the same reaction as I did to my first raga in 1966.  Where have I been?  Where has this music been?  It was so different from North Indian music – different instruments, the veena, flute, mridungam, kanjira, Jew’s harp, various other percussion instruments, and a swaying, pulsing rhythm that had a completely different feel.  It was again, a magical moment.  I listened to nothing else during my remaining time in India, searching out South Indian concerts wherever I could.  My guru was not of much help, of course, but I was successful nonetheless.  I made a number of unnecessary field trips to the South just to hear the music.

And just before leaving, I had my final musical epiphany – ghazals – Indian semi-classical vocals.  We were invited via friends to a mehfil, a musical gathering at someone’s home, in this case a very wealthy Indian patron of the arts.  She had a protegee, a young girl from Bombay just beginning her musical career.  When she started to sing, it was angelic – as pure and beautiful a voice as I and the others had ever heard.  It was graceful and lilting, moving from high notes to lower ones with perfect ease and phrasing.  She sang two songs and stopped.  “More, more…Please!”, we urged; but that was all she knew, she was just beginning, and Mrs. Naag simply wanted us to hear the sweet voice of this girl she had found.

I had never paid any attention to Indian popular music.  It blared out from every tea stall and bus station; in every restaurant, from loudspeakers at all markets.  The female voices were always in falsetto and the vocals simply became part of the noisy street scene of India; but when I heard what real vocals were supposed to be, I was once again transformed.  I listened to nothing but ghazals, and over the years after India bought them in India and especially Bangladesh.

I spent only four years in India, but they were probably the most important or influential of my life.  India is still with me, very much alive, especially when I hear the music, or smell incense, or Indian cooking.  There is too much too tell because there was so much to see, hear, smell, and feel.  I had thought that I was through writing about India and my travels, but when I realized that I had not yet written about music, I knew that I simply had been tapping the wrong seam in the mine of my memory.

Tennessee Williams and Chekhov

 

Tennessee Williams revered Chekhov, especially The Seagull, and wrote his own version of the play called The Notebook of Trigorin. 

Before reading this review from The Independent (London) 2008, I re-read The Seagull, and drew my own conclusions about why TW liked the play so much. 

Here, then, is a London review (in italics) of a relatively recent production with my comments annotated:

The two main female characters of The Seagull also had much in common with Williams's archetypal woman and girl. Arkadina is similar to his domineering mother, Edwina, full of deluded grandeur, and Nina, whom Constantin loves and whom Trigorin seduces, recalls Williams's fragile sister, Rose, who inspired Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire….

I don’t agree with the reviewer here.  Arkadia may be like his mother, Edwina, and the closest dramatic representation of her is Amanda in Glass Menagerie.  However Amanda and Arkadia are very different.  Arkadia is if anything more like the Princess Del Lago of Sweet Bird of Youth, an aging actress looking for continuing recognition and acclaim and perhaps even love or some kind of mothering affection that she feels for Chance near the end of the play when she realizes, in a mini-epiphany, that she can care for someone other than herself.

Arkadia in a way is reminiscent of Mrs. Venable of Suddenly Last Summer, who has this incestuous love for her son, Sebastian; but it is Constantin in The Seagull, who has the stronger feelings and attachment to his mother than the other way around. Nevertheless she says to her son:

My dear, my reckless boy….you’re mine, mine.  This forehead’s mine, these eyes are mine, this lovely silky hair’s mine too.  You’re mine, all of you….I’m the only one who appreciates you, I’m the only one who tells you the truth, my wonderful darling….You won’t desert me, will you?

So, Arkadia is certainly responsible for encouraging the clinging relationship of her son to her, but she does not exhibit an “unhealthy” love in any other way.  She certainly does not travel around Europe with him, dominating and monopolizing his time like Mrs. Venable with Sebastian.

Nina is somewhat reminiscent of Laura in Glass or Alma in Eccentricities of a Nightingale in that all three women love or at least have a fantasy love for an elusive man; but Nina is stronger – she deliberately leaves her small town and follows Trigorin to Moscow.  She eventually returns after an unhappy relationship, but comes home as a refuge, probably temporary, rather than the the total emotional and psychological retreat of Laura or the promiscuous fugue of Alma.

I see nothing of Blanche in Nina; and Trigorin did not seduce Nina.  She left because she was unhappy with the tame pursuits of Treplev and feeling constrained as an actress with the provincial character of the town.  She returns unhappy and “tired”, but she is not the defeated, totally disillusioned person as Laura or Blanche.

Williams's resentment of the overbearing woman who demands love but doesn't give it emerges in an Arkadina who, rather than sumptuously self-absorbed, is blatantly exhibitionistic and cruel. When, in this version, Constantin presents his play on a makeshift outdoor stage, Arkadina actually climbs onto it and, declaring that it is dangerous, tries to stop the "worthless" play. Later, while denying her son and brother the money they need to live with dignity ("my son is handsome enough to be attractive in rags"), she prattles about her Paris hat, a necessity for "an actress in my position," and says she would rather appear naked than in costumes that displease her...

Once again, this seems off the mark.  Williams never in his memoirs or other confessions, ever held the resentments of his mother suggested here.  Yes, she was as conservative and demanding of him as the pastor fathers in his plays, but she was not the overbearing woman who dominated his life.  Amanda, Laura’s mother, was the same way, and she certainly reflected the character of Edwina – she wanted, through her conservative views, to protect her daughter.

Arkadia is simply not the overbearing character described in this review.  She is eccentric, but far more self-serving and egotistical (as The Princess Del Lago) than overbearing or domineering.  

While the relationship between Arkadia and her son, Treplev, is reminiscent of TW and perhaps the most characteristic of all, as I mention above, it is more the problem of Treplev than his mother – she is not out to destroy, denigrate purposefully, than she is trumpeting her own successes or validating her own greatness.

This new, fiercer Arkadina is matched by a Trigorin who bites back. When Arkadina claims that she meant to help Constantin by being truthful, Trigorin retorts, "Since when could you take truth?" He tells everyone that the bottle on her dressing table, labelled "elixir," is actually hair dye. Trigorin's sex life is also more complicated. When Arkadina fears that he will leave her, she tells him that she has come across a love-letter and a sexy photo from a "a long-haired youth," but that his secrets "will remain my secrets... until the day you betray me."

The implications that Trigorin is bi-sexual suggested here may be reaching a bit far; for it is clear that he has strong heterosexual feelings both for Arkadia and especially Nina.  Arkadia is simply playing whatever card she can to keep Trigorin.  She is not Blanche or Maggie who betrayed homosexual lovers and destroyed them.

Crocker [Director]is less interested in that aspect than in what he feels is a legitimate addition to Trigorin's personality: "In The Seagull Trigorin is weak and submissive, he doesn't himself understand why he stays with Arkadina. Here he has a more highly developed feminine side, he's bisexual, and she is given a hold on him."

Don’t agree at all.

Besides the sex and verbal violence, there's an elegiac, even despairing tone to much of the writing. The lake takes on a greater symbolic weight of death and mystery: "What the lake tells us is what God tells us – we just don't know his language." The most extraordinary change is the ending, which not only goes beyond the point at which Chekhov stopped The Seagull, but alters the nature of its reality, suddenly dissolving the separation between actors and audience.

"It's one of the things that most excited me about the play," says Crocker. "It goes into an entirely different dimension." It is a moment in this story of people who love and destroy one another which sums up what Williams described as his "longing... to bring [Chekhov] more closely, more audibly to you", when we can almost see him reaching out his hand.

There is a great difference between the writing of Chekhov and Williams.  Many critics have noted that Chekhov has a flat, prosaic style, which engages the reader/audience progressively, but has none of the theatrical (some say melodramatic) turns of Williams.  I prefer Williams, perhaps because he is closer to my culture and times, but more so because there is more connection between his characters as I have suggested above, more explicit emotional reasoning.  It is not at all clear to me why Treplev should have committed suicide.  There was nothing compelling about his frustrations with his writing (he apparently was not as good writer, not as good as Trigorin at least, and knew it, and should have accepted it); nor his pursuit of Nina – if there are any dubious sexual relationships in the play, the Nina-Treplev one is the one most notable.  Trigorin is no real mystery – full of himself at the beginning, and presumably at the end (we lose sight of him).  I have discussed Arkadia at length above, and find her less interesting than any of Williams’ women.  Doctor Dorn might be a Val who is the sexually attractive male, but nothing is made of it.

The other love relationships appear more like a Shakespearean comedy without the wit and pith.  Yes, as one character comments, everyone is struggling with love – Arkadia for Trigorin, Masha for Treplev, Nina for Treplev and Trigorin, Polina for Dorn – but nothing ever really happens.

There is more to the Williams-Chekhov literary relationship – symbolism, staging, etc; but I will write more about their thematic similarities in a later blog.

Ribs

 

As many of you know, my love of oysters has no bounds.  I am magnetically drawn to them, pulled towards them at any time of day or night as I pass restaurants that serve them.  If they are piled high in a storefront window, like a few in Georgetown, it takes an effort not to stop. 

One of my favorite pastimes in Paris (or any other city, for that matter) was to stop in every fish market.  I wanted to open the oysters right then and there and suck them down – the briny, succulent Fines de Claires, the meaty Belons, the Praires.  My fantasies wouldn’t stop there.  I wanted all shellfish – the wonderful phylogeny of shrimp - ecrevisses, crevettes, langoustine, langoustes, homards – each bigger than the previous, fresh, delicious.  Or the hundreds of types of fish, all attractively laid out; and the octopus, squid, clams, mussels, sea urchins.  When I went into the many brasseries of Paris, I always ogled the seafood platters ordered by large groups of diners – all the above-mentioned seafood piled high on a bed of ice garnished with seaweed. Yummy.

Chinatown markets have fewer shellfish, but they are wonderful, and seem to have more tanks with fresh fish in them.  There are many in the Richmond area of SF and in downtown Chinatown.  The smell is funkier, the fish are grosser looking, but I can’t resist, and head for the nearest restaurant to eat them.

Which leads me to ribs.  I am spending the summer in Mississippi, participating in the Tennessee Williams Centennial festival in Columbus, and loving every minute; and I eat ribs almost every night.  To me, they are the oysters of the South – such variety of taste, texture, consistency.  I have travelled 50 miles to get the ribs at the Central Service Station Restaurant in Eupora, a converted gas station that serves delicious ribs.  I have eaten them at the Pit and Cone, and especially at Hanks, my favorite.  His ribs are smoked just right, the meat falls off the bone (you can eat them with a fork, favored by this New Englander), there is relatively little fat (relative is the term for fat in the South), they are tender, succulent, and absolutely perfect.

The ribs at Pit and Cone are tighter, more heavily smoked, almost like ham, and delicious, a totally different taste than the others.  I don’t mind working at them a bit to gnaw off the meat, it’s well worth it.

Because the ribs are so delicious, I have rarely moved off that mark, but tonight I want to try the brisket.  I am looking forward to it – the beef is smoked until tender, then pulled (apparently pulling is far better than slicing because it keeps the moisture).  I have tried he smoked turkey, and it was delicious, but turkey having relatively little fat, it was a bit dry. 

I still have the pulled pork BBQ which I know is different from state to state.  I first had it in North Carolina, and it was tangy and vinegary.  I had it in East Tennessee, probably the best I have had because it was the juiciest, most smoky and tender.  Love it.

After every rib meal, I keep thinking that I really shouldn’t eat this stuff every night, and I think up all kinds of rationalizations for the fat – I won’t be down here forever, I eat no breakfast and a tomato salad only for lunch; well, there’s really not that much fat on Hank’s ribs…but the real reason is the blinking neon sign in front of Hanks:

LIFE IS TOO SHORT NOT TO EAT RIBS

Amen.