On the anniversary of his death:

A tribute to Omar Azfar by Azra Raza, M.D.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’t is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Shakespeare, HAMLET, Act v. Sc. 2.

At the end, the readiness to face whatever providence had in store was there, both in the case of Omar as well as his mother Naheed. I only saw him two or three times without Naheed in the roughly 16 months of our acquaintance in New York, therefore it is hard for me to think of them separately. She brought her two sons to meet me in September of 2007 shortly after I had moved to New York. Omar, the 38 year old elder son, a graduate of Oxford and Columbia, had been diagnosed with a highly malignant osteogenic sarcoma of the left shoulder. He had received a round of aggressive chemotherapy a few days before and his mouth was a battlefield of raw ulcers, abraded mucosa, bleeding gums. As we sat down to an elaborate meal with family and a few close friends, Omar calmly produced a bottle containing some sort of a bland, soothing drink and sipped away as if it were an equally exclusively prepared gourmet meal, all the while entertaining us with his signature brilliant quips and observations. Such was his class, such his chic. My childhood friend and the current Consul General of Pakistan, Mohsin Razi and his lovely wife Sarwat were present at dinner that evening. Earlier this year, when Mohsin and Sarwat heard about Omar’s death, they rushed to offer their condolences to Kamal and Naheed, both tearing up in the car at the memory of this dinner when Omar had shown such an astonishing and calm acceptance of his condition.

Starting with the first note I received from Omar via cyberspace in the summer of 2007 which was copied to Ama, and ending with my last glimpse of him as he lay dying with his mother curled up next to him in bed, straightening his blanket, holding his hand, I was exquisitely aware of what a unique privilege it was to be witnessing this sublime relationship. Of course love is never quantifiable. In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 1 Scene 1, Cleopatra demands to know how much Anthony loves her.

Cleo.If it be love indeed, tell me how much.

Ant.There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.

Cleo.I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.

Ant.Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth.

The friendship alone that existed between Omar and Naheed would require new heavens and new earths to accommodate it.

Arz o samaan kahaan teri wusatt ko paa sakay

Mera hee dil hai wu kay jahan tu samaan sakay

Continue reading here.

There has been much concern in the American media about Jared Loughner’s sanity, lots of talk about the fact we cannot comprehend the mind behind that cold face, talk followed by overextended attempts to mine that mind’s deepest veins. “If you think what happened in Tuscon is incomprehensible…” a 60 Minutes piece from last week began, keep watching, we’ll help you comprehend. Is Loughner “disturbed enough to be found guilty but insane?” the New York Times mulled in the Magazine last weekend. The answer is yes, they hint.

But no one is calling Loughner a terrorist.

In May 1995, Time had a terrorist on the cover: Timothy McVeigh was shown with the caption, “The Face of Terror.” Time’s lede for another story on McVeigh is also pretty clear in its framing:

Terrorists succeed by remaining faceless. Their very anonymity allows them to move unnoticed among and around the people they plan, for reasons of their own, to maim or murder. But terrorists also occasionally get caught, although often, alas, after they have done their worst. And then the sight of their faces only deepens the mystery of their actions.

Like McVeigh, Loughner targeted a symbol of government power, and hurt innocent people. Like McVeigh, Loughner had a complicated relationship with the military and, like McVeigh, he apparently had a deep mistrust of the United States government. Jared Loughner, like Timothy McVeigh, “had reasons of his own,” which are and always will be inaccessible to the rest of us.

But we called McVeigh a terrorist. Why isn’t Loughner a terrorist? Has America redefined its criteria for who can be one?

This is not to say Loughner’s actions weren’t swept up into other people’s political frameworks. To be sure, after the shooting, there was a flurry of conversation about politics. Or rather, “politics.” David Brooks argued that mainstream coverage overemphasized possible political motivations, with all the talk of Sarah Palin’s map and the “violent rhetoric of the Tea Party.” Brooks describes “a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leads toward political explanations.” Brooks is right in his diagnosis, but I see the opposite symptom: the media may be psychologically ill informed, but that hasn’t stopped them from attempting to psychologize Loughner to the nth degree.

Moreover, such an excavation of Loughner’s mind as those extended by the Times and 60 Minutes seems to be a privilege the media only affords, in 2011, to some violent men. Men who are called terrorists are ascribed political, ideological motivations. Loughner’s mental illness does not preclude such motivations – but our media’s language does, dismissing his admittedly confused political logic as the babble of a madman.

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by Colin Eatock

Last year, in my essay “What’s Wrong with Classical Music,” I discussed the causes of the marginalization of classical music in the Western world today. That essay approached the topic from the outside, examining the reasons why people who don’t like classical music are put off by it. In this “sequel,” classical music is approached from the inside. To do this, I’ll take a more subjective approach, addressing those aspects of the classical music world that I personally find troubling.

I’ve been around the classical music block – as a composer, critic, scholar, educator, booking agent and administrator. As a result, I find that my own “issues” often differ from the concerns of people blissfully unaware of what lies hidden behind classical music’s façade. Yet even though some of the things I find problematic might not be readily identified as problems at all by many others, they have an adverse effect on classical music in the world today. I believe that if my various concerns were successfully addressed, the changes wrought would be beneficial in subtle yet far-reaching ways.

Fixation on the Canon

In the hyper-canonic world of classical music, there are only a few dozen composers who really count. All the rest – those composers you can’t buy a plaster bust of – receive little or no attention. I don’t have any great quarrel to the composers who have been accepted into the pantheon: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms wrote some wonderful music. However, I do question the idea that the formation of the canon was, as some people believe, a “natural” process caused by “the cream rising to the top.” (To accept this idea is to place far too much faith in the universe’s propensity for justice.) And I do have a quarrel with the idea that the composers who have somehow risen to the top are the only ones worthy of the world’s interest.

There are, to be sure, advantages to this star system. By focussing narrowly on a small number of composers and works, commonly shared tastes are cultivated, and a securely large audience for popular repertoire has been built up: a core audience for a core repertoire. Few musical organizations would dare to present a concert season that contained no widely acknowledged masterpieces by great composers, fearing box-office death. But they know they can rely on a handful of famous composers and works to sell their tickets.

On the other hand, fixation on “greatness” leads to repetitious programming. It’s also alarmingly unimaginative: for people to unquestioningly accept, holus-bolus, a repertoire based on decisions already well established in their grandparents’ day smacks of cultural sclerosis. One exceptional corner of the musical world – where a process of re-evaluation and enrichment took place throughout the twentieth century – is the early-music movement. But even the early-music specialists are losing their sense of adventure nowadays, and are settling into a core repertoire of their own.

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Photo Credit: Angie Hill

by Meghan Rosen

Last year, while doing our taxes, my husband and I were surprised to discover that we weren’t as poor as we thought we were. As lowly graduate students making a combined income of about $50,000 per year, I had assumed we were on the penny-pinching side of the national pay scale. But when I compared our income to the median income in the country, I found that we were sitting comfortably in the center. We had made it; we were officially smack-dab in the middle class. I thought it would feel different.

In the United States, nearly 25% of the population makes less than $25,000 per year. At this bottom level, a few households squeak by the poverty threshold, but just barely: in 2010 it’s estimated at just $22,314 for a family of four.

This year, 16 million children will be born into poverty (1 out of every 5 children born in the US). The lives of these children often follow a common stagnant storyline: poor nutrition, delayed mental and emotional development, academic deterioration, criminal activity, and frequently, early parenthood. As young parents, they are more likely to be unwed, more likely to drop out of high school, and more likely to stay impoverished. The cycle is vicious, and unrelenting. But is it possible to escape? How early is the influence of our environment engraved into the patterns of our development?

In 2003, a study from the University of Virginia showed that 7 year-old fraternal twins raised in families with low socioeconomic status had almost no variability in IQ. Why is this surprising? Fraternal twins are as genetically dissimilar as any other pair of non-twin siblings—their IQs should have been different.

Unlike identical twins, which come from the same blend of a single sperm and a single egg’s DNA, and have matching sets of genes, fraternal twins are completely unique. Two eggs and two sperm form two separate embryos: two genetically distinct individuals that share only their time and space together in the womb. The height, build, athletic ability, and IQ of one fraternal twin can be as different from the second as any of their other brothers or sisters. In fact, differences between fraternal twins are not only common; they are expected.

Why then, were these differences not reflected in the mental abilities of the 7-year olds? Is it possible that variation in IQ doesn’t occur until later in childhood? Or did their low socioeconomic environments somehow mask their inherent genetic potential?

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A fair amount of teasing from friends has nearly weaned me of the impulse to rush to the aid of every Japanese salary-man I see passed out on Tokyo’s late-night streets. These men, always men, of all ages, used to cause me a great deal of concern. I try to fold my concern inward now, in a way that doesn’t slow my step or disturb the flow of my thoughts as I pass by. Or I give myself over to observation: of the jacket loosely enveloping a thin middle-aged man balled up like a black seed against the bathroom wall – a little kernel destined no doubt to sprout into domestic trouble the next morning. Or of the tailored suit holding itself up against that building, the man inside it swallowing air loudly to prevent vomit from rising up from his stomach. The vomit rises despite his efforts, and soon – very soon – I think to myself, he’ll be horizontal on the street, passed out on those stairs over there where I had seen a man passed out the previous week.

There was a late-night television show where a microphone had been set up in front of a bustling subway station. A sign posted in front of the unsupervised amplifier read something like “The Drunk’s Sermon: Please Step Up.” The speeches were all variations on the monstrous condition of salary-man life and the restorative properties of alcohol: “Life is hell…drink to forget.” “Drink is the only escape from this hell.” “Drink makes life worth living.” “Kids,” intones one older man whose eyes reveal that he has a few children himself, “You may think I am repulsive but soon you will be just like me.” So unoriginal, so badly executed, so hackneyed and broken were these rants, that they couldn’t help but touch on some larger if also colorless truth about Japanese men and their relationship to alcohol.

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Fire in the Brain

God is a fire in the brain Nijinsky said
which is as close to the truth as
anything a dancer might dance
with a bonfire burning in his head

God may put you in a trance
with the fluttering of cardinal wings
or with the way the moon looks
mounting the mountain’s back
on the other side of the river
—a bright hole in the dark
a splinter of hope
a sliver

Sometimes beyond the blazing bars
of your incarceration
you hallucinate stars

You surmise the sun’s a substantiating eye
but fear that every distance is not near
(not close enough to make the untellable clear)

You dream days
You dream nights

Sometimes you lie without a clue
in the hour of the wolf
waiting for the wolf to bite

or you wait for the blue to light
When it does you see crocuses

You taste a sweet cloud of honeysuckle
that drifts across the yard
where at a certain spot
between the garden and the shed
you swear paradise was there
—precisely there where a skunk
had shred the grass the night before
grubbing while you were in bed
; grubbing with a skunky conflagration
in her head

God may burn a brain and brand it
God may shrink it or expand it

This is the bed in which
our ignorance reposes which,
by every blister on our brain,
is both a bed of coals
and roses

by Jim Culleny, 1/22/11

by Hasan Altaf

Several years ago now, in one of those brown-meets-white movies whose titles are as impossible to keep straight as their plots are predictable, the brown girl attempted to explain Bollywood movies to her white boyfriend. He asked, “So they’re like soap operas?” and she replied, “Basically… just with bigger bubbles.” I’ve forgotten all the other details of that particular movie, but the line stuck with me as an apt description of the genre. No one watches Bollywood movies for “reality” – we watch for an escape: More than anything else, the movies, offering a little something for everyone, are fantasy.

I readily admit to a deep and abiding fondness for Bollywood; my experience with soap operas, on the other hand, began this past summer, when I spent two weeks in Lahore visiting my grandmother, who had been bedridden for a few months and spent her time watching Indian soaps. The TV in her room was always on, and it was soaps, soaps around the clock, Star Plus and Colors, sometimes the same episode repeated innumerable times in a day. Only when the power went out was there a brief hour of silence.

The soap operas were, to put it mildly, an education – and a shock; for some reason I had expected them to be more or less like the movies, and I was surprised at how different they were. In many ways, the first issue I had is still the one that bothers me the most: Why do the women all sleep in full makeup, wearing pounds of jewelry, wrapped in fabulous saris? This happened on every single show, without fail, and it seemed neither practical nor comfortable. I might have been willing to let this one thing go, but the more I watched, the more questions I had. Why do the women never seem to work? Why are men essentially absent? Why are all the characters, always, without fail, Hindus – and Hindus, at that, of the same caste, culture, and language? How many small towns exist in the world in such a state of homogeneity?

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Mixcloud.com is a site for radio DJs with no place to go. I like it because the idea is to be legal and upfront about the whole business, paying royalties to artists just like real radio. Sets stream at a reasonably high bitrate, and there are some very talented mixers who post there. I post there too, occasionally, and I have just put up two sets of space music in the style of Star's End, a spacemusic radio show broadcast in Philadelphia on WXPN-FM since 1976. I used to do the show in the 1980s, until 1993 in fact. It's still running, and can be heard on the 'net in real time every Saturday night/Sunday morning, thanks to the capable custodianship of longtime host Chuck van Zyl (an accomplished space musician himself, I might add). Here are some notes on these two rather different sets, which I mixed on Garageband (!) and which work pretty well if I do say so myself.

Star's End Annex set 49 can be found here.

Artist – Track Album (Label)
—————————————————————————————
David Tagg – Pt. 1 Fundamentals of Orchid Biology (Second Sun)
Lähtö – Drift Leaving behind the sun (self release)
Tuu – Gangiri The Frozen Lands (Amplexus)
Thomas Köner – 43° 42' N 7° 16' E (Hour Two) La Barca (Fario)
Uton – Ay Um Au Lam 6 Whispers From the Woods (Last Visible Dog)
Akira Rabelais – 1382 Wyclif Gen. ii. 7 And spiride in to the face of hym an entre of breth of lijf. Spellewauerynsherde (Samadhi Sound)
Steve Roach – Deep Sky Time New Life Dreaming (Timeroom Editions)
Yui Onodera – Untitled (track 3) Entropy (Trumn)
Xiphiidae – Untitled (side B) Stardive (Cloud Valley)
Aglaia – Untitled (track 1) Three Organic Experiences (Hic Sunt Leones)

Guitar droners are a dime a dozen nowadays, but David Tagg is one of the very best. This is from a recent disc, available here for only $8. While you're there pick up Waist Deep Seas Of Milk, which is very nice and not at all as gross as the title makes it sound. For more guitar drone than you could possibly listen to and live, check out Alan Lockett's monumental six-part series of Great Axescapes: an Archaeology of Drone-gaze Tone-haze Guitar-wrangling.

Our next track is pretty drony too. Lähtö is Tyke Chandler, who is not a Finn at all, that band name notwithstanding, but hails from Louisville, Kentucky. On his myspace page he lists his influences as “tim hecker, andrew chalk, bohren & der club of gore, port-royal, eluvium, the conet project, double leopards, grouper, max richter, jesu, ulver, [and] mogwai.” An eclectic chap! As I mention at the Mixcloud page, this record is freely downloadable from his website, so check it out.

Tuu were a fairly typical but very well-regarded ethno-ambient group, led by drummer Martin Franklin. They came out of the ambient techno scene, but they soon left the techno elements behind (less drum, more gong and clay pot), eventually releasing discs on such worthy ambient labels as Hic Sunt Leones and Fathom. According to Wikipedia, The Frozen Lands (1999) was their final release. Too bad, they were pretty good. See also Franklin's disc Maps Without Edges (1996), released under the name Stillpoint.

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