Stranger than virtual

In Oman, TV channel hopping, we land on the Qatar channel. Camels are racing in one long straight course. Alongside them, on either side of the roped-off course, are 2-3 wide columns of cars, 4×4s. The camels are galloping, with an occassional one or two trotting – very fast. For a moment I’m confused. It looks like they have no riders. Then our eyes catch the strange-looking contraptions tied on the camels back. Believe it or not, the contraptions are little robots. The one function we see them perform is occassionally whipping the behind of the camel, as a camel jockey would. We’re transported into a futuristic world – I could imagine seeing this in Second Life, but instead these are the sands of Qatar, a hop skip and jump from our physical location in Muscat.

But the robots feel doubly strange, like something somewhat familiar, with a twist that throws one completely off. And then it sinks in. The robots are short and squat. In fact they look like children. The robots are in fact a replacement of the terrible practice of roping in children, sometimes forcibly, as camel jockeys.

Here’s a piece in the National Geographic about the shift in Qatari camel-racing practices. They also have a clean shot of the robot.

Bulla & Everyone Else

Everyone sings in India. Birj mentioned this in passing. I had forgotten it. This is the song, he said, that all the kids on the streets were singing when I was last there.

Friday morning, I put on Rabbi in the car. Bulla streams out as the sun glances off downtown San Francisco. I’m approaching the city, on the bay bridge. Rabbi’s sound, Bulleh Shah’s words, kids with nothing who keep singing the words of a Sufi poet from the mid-18th century.

Nor did I create the difference of faith
Nor did I create adam-eve
Nor did I name myself
Beginning or end I know just the self
Do not acknowledge duality
There’s none wiser than I
Who is this Bulla Shah
Bulla! I know not who I am

Lost & Found in South Central

As those who know me are well aware, one of a triumvirate of things I ‘Don’t Do’ is Nature. Give me a glass-walled house with me on the inside, and nature on the outside – thats the way I like it.

But this urban hound stumbled into nature more spectacular for its unexpectedness, more devastatingly sorrowful because of its limited life, more hopeful in its fleeting glimpse of an alternate urban vision, and for this bourgeois gourmet, most delightfully heady in its introduction of a new world of exotic Mexican tastes and flavors

- all from South Central Los Angeles.

Dizzy with Muezzins in Calcutta

The chairs were wooden. The stage was rudimentary. We sat under blurred Calcutta skies. But the sounds were heavenly.

Dizzy Gillespie was throwing his trumpet’s innovations to the self-professed cultural capital of India, Calcutta. Jazz. It may have been music, but for me it was everything – everything that was different from my teenage perception of straitjacket India and our old masters, stodgy rule-ridden backward and aristocratic England. Instead, it was America.

And all this before the real hallelujah moment.

A pause. The next number’s coming soon. The trumpet is at Gillespie’s lips. When suddenly another sound fills the air. It’s the muezzins from Calcutta minarets hailing prayer-time for the city’s Muslims. Clashing sensibilities – how dare our native sounds interrupt this 1st world gift!

But Gillespie, my American hero, is not thrown. Gillespie, he pauses, trumpet to lips, allowing his craven audience a moment to distance it self from coarser instant reactions. We begin to hear the muezzins anew. As mostly non-muslims, the sounds finally take on a haloed tone, framed as they are this evening by a foreign meter and a foreign man. As always in India, if the Western master honors, so do the colonial servants.

The muezzins’ melodies tail off. (Had I never noticed before that muezzins’ called out together, their voices interlacing in what seemed, through my overblown teenage imagination, to be in fact – Jazz?) And as the audience slowly readjusts, my American hero’s innovations take off. Gillespie takes the muezzins’ lead, picking up their melody, then taking it away to somewhere else.

And what an amazing place that was. The ascendance of America for me, was confirmed. Where else, I asked, who else, could produce this strange and wonderful music in this unpredictable manner. Who else could produce this ability to be so fluid with boundaries, driven only by the sense of possibility, and creating something unconscionably new.

[Post script: Of course, today I know that my foreign inability to parse out the different Americas allowed me to lump this uniquely African American musical tradition with it's built-in openness and innovation, with a monolithic perception of America. ]

Tomb’s Day

Artist: Atul Dodiya
I saw a show of Dodiya’s in Mumbai many years ago – that show was one that reimagined Gandhi. This piece though reimagines my head and points a laser-focused light right at it’s most discombobulated moments.