Victor Borge and the Player Piano

We lived on Oak Street when one day
my father came home with a white piano
big and heavy as a horse that had
two large pedals under its keyboard which
if you placed a paper roll titled Lady of Spain
between two spindles behind a sliding door
above the keys like a wood block in a lathe
and pumped with both feet the avatar
of Victor Borge would come to sit and play,
blacks and ivories (some like bad teeth)
succumbing to the ghosts of his hands
as you watched ascending and descending
perforations in the roll's paper
pass over a horizontal row of holes
in the smooth brass bar at eye level
likes flocks of geese coming and going
the pattern of perforations sliding from
top roll to bottom orchestrating the piano's
robot rendition of Lady of Spain
while Borge slap-sticked and cracked-wise
seated right where you sat,
your fingers floating over the keys
performing furious air arpeggios until you
walked your fingers off the high end
and dropped from seat to floor
pretending to be that funny man
with fingers as facile
in the adult manner of a
brilliant Danish clown

by Jim Culleny
Feb 22 2010

Victor Borge at the White House

By Namit Arora

An egalitarian ethos has not been a prominent feature of Indian civilization for at least a thousand years, when Buddhism began losing ground in South Asia. The dominant Hindu sensibility has long held that all men are created unequal, constituting not one but many moral communities, and possess varying natural rights and duties. The anthropologist Louis Dumont saw hierarchy as so central to Indian lives, whether in the family, the workplace, or the community, that he titled his 1966 treatise on Indian society, Homo Hierarchicus. Indeed, a host of hierarchical relationships—framed by traditional norms of deference, authority, and obligation—shape most Indians throughout their lives. In the Indian social realm, the primary institution of hierarchy is caste, or jati, of which thousands exist today. But where does caste, a blight of modern India, come from?

The Origins of Caste

How the institution of caste took root and spread is still a hotly debated question among scholars, but its story begins c. 1500 BCE with the arrival of the Indo-Aryans into what is now Pakistan. Data from disciplines like linguistics, philology, and archaeology strongly suggests that these bands of nomadic pastoralists came from further west. Upon arrival, they encountered long settled rural communities, which were perhaps divided into subgroups based on occupation, much like guilds—they were not hierarchical, hereditary, or endogamous. The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas (‘color’): the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans). All four divisions appear in the earliest known Indo-Aryan text, the Rig Veda (but not the word ‘varna’), and were no doubt a feature of the emerging Vedic society. ‘According to the Mahabharata, the “colors” associated with the four [varnas] were white, red, yellow and black; they sound more like symbolic shades meted out by those category-conscious brahmanical minds than skin pigments.’[1]

As the settled indigenous communities became part of the early Vedic society, they also adopted its principle of hierarchy—interwoven as it was with its cosmology, gods, and rituals—turning their own occupational subgroups into castes, or jatis. The main organizing principle of this hierarchy, proposed Dumont, had to do with ritual ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’ that members of each occupational subgroup were assigned at birth. The highest ‘purity’ points went to those associated with religious, intellectual, and administrative pursuits, the lowest to workers associated with dead bodies, human waste, tanneries, butchery, street cleaning, and such—most of these were in fact deemed too low to be part of the varna system at all, i.e., they were considered outcastes. Stated differently, ‘purity’ became a means of codifying social power relations using Brahmanical ‘knowledge’.

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On September 1, 1969, the English singer-songwriter and guitarist Nick Drake made his recording debut as his album Five Leaves Left shipped to record stores. Released on producer Joe Boyd's Witchseason label with backing by members of Fairport Convention and string arrangements by Harry Robinson and Drake's Cambridge chum Robert Kirby, the album stands as a haunting, pastoral portrait of the 21-year-old artist as a very young but startlingly musically adept young man. In the four decades since, the record has enchanted new generations of listeners and made insatiable Nick Drake fans of many.

Colin Marshall originally conducted these conversations with Trevor Dann, Patrick Humphries and Peter Hogan, authors of the three books published about Nick Drake, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Five Leaves Left's release on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

Writer, broadcaster and head of the UK Radio Academy Trevor Dann is Nick Drake's newest biographer, having released Darker than the Deepest Sea: The Search for Nick Drake in 2006.

Can you give us a little background of the musical context of September 1969, the musical world in England into which Five Leaves Left was released?

I think that's a really good question, because people who write about the history of music tend to always concentrate on what was very popular at the time. They forget that there are always substantial undercurrents and smaller genres going on. 1969 people think of as being the year of the first Led Zeppelin album, the year of Woodstock and loud stuff, but aside from that there was a great fashion for rather bespoke, melancholy, quite, folk-y acoustic stuff.

In America, that was John Sebastian at Woodstock. In England, it was the folk revival of people like Cat Stevens. That's the genre into which Nick Drake's music fell, and it was a small market. It was not very popular. It became highly influential, but at the time, it was written about and talked about by the opinion-formers in music of the time.

Because so many of Nick Drake's current fans were, of course, not even around when his music was initially released, how different or similar was his music to that subgenre?

If you went back in time 40 years and switched the radio on, you would hear more music of the type you hear on Five Leaves Left than we now hear. I think that, although it's one of the great timeless records, it's nevertheless of its time more than historians think.

If you were listening to the John Peel show in England at the time, although you did hear what we would call rock music, even hard rock music, you also heard a lot of that kind of thing: John Martyn, even a rock band like Jethro Tull did a lot of acoustic-y kind of work. People were experimenting with what happened when you turned things down, after some years of experimenting with what happened to guitars and other instruments when you turned them up. Although it's become very timeless, I don't think it was as unique a sound as we now think.

I suppose this is the question Nick himself became obsessed with, but if it did fit into a genre, why didn't Five Leaves Left succeed as well as the average release in that genre?

Two simple reasons. One was, he didn't promote it. Even in those days, you had to make some kind of effort, even if your record wasn't being played much on the radio, even if you didn't have a single that could get you in the charts, you had to tour. And he hated touring. He tried it once or twice; he didn't like it. He was playing a kind of music that was very difficult to play in the student common room and at free festivals in those days, because amplification simply wasn't good enough.

He just didn't have the temperament, partly because he didn't have a very loud showbiz personality. Secondly, to be honest with you, he was rather arrogant about his music. I think he felt that it deserved to be listened to, and he didn't work hard enough to win an audience; he assumed that audience should be there for it.

The second reason is the number of problems the record had. It was promoted before it was available in the shops. The sleeve notes don't fit the track listing. The distribution wasn't very good. There were a lot of other technical reasons which meant, having committed everything he'd got to what he thought was this great work of art… it was like being Van Gogh. He'd given everything he could, and he wasn't popular. He hadn't made it. That was one of the reasons why he turned in on himself.
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Part 1 of “Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud – A Personal and Scientific Coward?” can be found HERE.

Note: Sources for this article, Part 1 and Part 2, can be found at the end of this article.

Questions, Questions, Questions!

In Part 1 of this article, I posed three questions:

1. How did Freud, with his collaborator and mentor, Joseph Breuer, and independent rival, Pierre Janet, discover the traumatic basis of hysteria, as well as its treatment?

2. Why did Freud repudiate his findings on the traumatic basis for hysteria?

3. In the face of his prior scientific investigations, how did Freud come to develop psychoanalysis? And to develop a psycho-sexual theory of development based upon the inferiority, mendacity, and erotic fantasies and desires of women?

I provided answers to the first two questions in Part 1. Here, in Part 2, I deal with the third. Freud repudiated his theory of the traumatic aetiology of hysteria, but as a scientist he still had to account for his data. The problem one confronts in finding an answer to the third question is this: How does one go from Freud's observations and recorded data to the theory of the Oedipal Complex – the cornerstone of his psycho-sexual stages of personality development, and psychoanalysis?

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By Aditya Dev Sood

You know, we all have our favorite seasons, our special days in the year. For me that has to be Holi. Today is all color and madness, the world is turned upside down, nothing is wrong, all is forgiven, everything is laughter.

These tents in pink and white are looking taut, expectant. What is it, ten, ten-thirty? Gaurang is over there setting up the DJ, Abhinav the bar, along with Kishan Chand, who is nailing down the table-cloths to the tent-house tables. I have to set up the chat-wallah-s, all along this back wall of the garden, far enough from the Holi playing action, but also away from the bar — we don't want to have to monitor the liquor too hard today.

Hari kulfi khaenge, sahib? The kulfi guy's brought the regular kesari kulfi, but also the one spiked with the green stuff. You should try one. Down the row we've got aloo-tikki-s on that enormous frying pan, and then the gol-gappa guy and then the fruit-chat guy, all from my Dad's contact in Chandni Chowk.

I always find thandai either too sweet or too milky and strange to the palatte, maybe like semen. But in the frozen cream of kulfi, the sweetness is blanched. Try it. It's quite refined and subtle, a bit like green-tea ice cream. The kick will come slow, but the layered joy that green kulfi opens out on the morning of Holi always makes me smile…

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by Shiban Ganju

Early in the morning, my cell phone rang. I looked at the screen. It was a call from India; Anoop was on the other end. “This training will not do well. The women don’t seem enthusiastic.” He was in Uttar Pradesh, in a small village – Mijwan, the birth place of progressive poet, Kaifi Azmi. I did not believe Anoop, his assessment must be wrong. The women of Mijwan must have changed in the past eighty years since Kaifi, the son of this soil had exhorted women to walk in stride with men:

Get up my love; you have to walk with me.

Emerge out of ancient bondage, break the idol of tradition

The weakness of pleasure, this mirage of fragility

These self drawn boundaries of imagined greatness

The bondage of love, for this too is bondage

Nor merely the thorns on the path, you have to trample on flowers too

Get up my love; you have to walk with me

[http://www.youtube.com/user/raajayshchetwal#p/u/1/w61ELibfQiY]

[http://crazymindseye.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/aurat-kaifi-azmi/]

But over many centuries, history has traveled by Mijwan without affecting it. Four capitals of ancient India, Kannauj, Kausambi, Magadha, and Ujjaini prospered within three hundred miles. Culture flourished only two hundred miles away in the city of Lucknow, just over a century back. Buddha walked on this land. Mughal emperors galloped across it. Mijwan has been a neighbor to riches, decadence, knowledge and enlightenment but has stayed frozen in poverty and ignorance.

When Kaifi Azmi was born, Mijwan was off the map. His tireless work christened it with a zip code and it got a post office; it acquired a tarmac road and a train station nearby. By the time he passed away and shortly after that, a girls’ primary school, an associate degree college, a computer training center and an embroidery school came up. Mijwan now attracts students from nearby towns.

Five hundred and fifty people live here. The local NGO, Mijwan Welfare Society, picks up their shredded ambitions and stitches them with a thread of zeal and hard work. India has 600, 000 such villages, home to over sixty percent of its population. Thousands of voluntary organizations – probably the largest number in the world – toil in these villages to usher development. They dangle the yarn of future possibility as their flag. ‘Save a Mother’ is one such small organization.

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