SOMETHING FROM THE RECENT PEN CONFERENCE...

Bernardo Atxaga
THE TALE OF THE HEDGEHOG

In his nest of dry leaves the hedgehog has woken
his mind so suddenly filled with all the words he knows.
Counting the verbs, more or less, they come to twenty-seven.

Later he thinks: The winter is over,
I am a hedgehog, Up fly two eagles, high up,
Snail, Worm, Insect, Spider, Frog,
which ponds or holes are you hiding in?
There is the river, This is my kingdom, I am hungry.

And he repeats: This is my kingdom, I am hungry,
Snail, Worm, Insect, Spider, Frog,
which ponds or holes are you hiding in?

However he remains still like a dry leaf, too,
because it is but midday and an old law
forbids him sun, sky and eagles.

But night comes, gone are the eagles; and the hedgehog,
Snail, Worm, Insect, Spider, Frog,
disregards the river and undertakes the steepness of the mountain,
as sure of his spines as a warrior
in Sparta or Corinth could have been of his shield;
and suddenly, he crosses the boundary
between the meadow and the new road
with a single step that takes him right into my and your time.
And given that his universal vocabulary has not been renewed
in the last seven thousand years,
he neither understands our car lights,
nor realises his forthcoming death.


Translated from the Basque by Amaia Gabantxo.

A NEW ARRANGEMENT

As usual, Mike made coffee for me. I complimented on her talents as a hostess. She graciously accepted my compliment. I cannot display a table with flair. How do they do these things?

Even as a child, I picked flowers from their natural and their not-so-natural arrangement in my parents' garden. Then I rearranged them in a vase. Gathered and displayed this way, the flowers took on a new beauty. And yet, one could still see in each the individual beauty that had drawn me into plucking it from its bed. The arrangement gave me a new, yet familiar, pleasure.

On the M66 crosstown bus over to Mike's today, I was thinking that my work these days has to do with rearranging. Perhaps a variation of remapping, I thought. For it was not merely showing my friends Manipur, but showing my Manipur, that was my intention during that wonderful, engendering field trip a year ago. But now it is more than that. I turned to Richard during the meeting and responded to his query about 24/7 security for our coaching program in November. The people will protect, I said. The leikais will protect, if we build our baseball project from the ground up. The same leikais, I say to Richard, that we discussed with Peter. And what I am urging Bidisha now to make the lynchpin of her public health model for us. The leikais are there and have been there all along. But now we will use them.

So, as with baseball, as with leikais, I will pick and choose what I like from my Manipur, to make a new arrangement.

Jim called in from Tokyo for the conference call. MLB International is on board. I must travel to Manipur soon.

BASEBALL:

Major League Baseball will send 2, maybe 4, coaches for the coaching workshop in November. This may be the turning point for the project on a long and winding road, both back and in front of us.

FRAMING/NAMING

If there is a theme that I have explored in all my work, especially now with the Manipur projects, it is cultural framing. It is why I do my baseball project without the least bit of interest in the sport. So I have been following the framing discussion in the political debate here, led by the linguistics guy at Berkeley. Lakoff is his name if I recall.

I recently read Paul Vitello, a NYT journalist, who wrote: “There is an almost magical power in naming things. To give a person, an act or a group its name is to define it, assert a measure of control over how it is perceived.”

Framing is core to my remapping explorations with their focus on the need to re-fashion a role and future of smaller, politically minor cultural traditions.

I have encountered the issue of naming literally, as in my use of Eastern Himalayas and Tibeto-Burman.

But it reaches into other areas as well. Just this past weekend I told Gary, apropos his desire to volunteer for a gay marriage organization, that the straight world would understand better, and we would be better served if we defined "gayness" not as sexual orientation but as affectional orientation. Being gay is about who you love, not merely about who you have sex with. It is about who you are emotionally and psychologically able to love; the sexual act is merely an expression of that.

I think this framing would raise less hackles, be more true and respectful of cultural history and conditioning, more accurate and therefore more useful.

In a similar vein, I mentioned to Gerard, I thought our perception of the political spectrum is muddied by terms like Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal. We need definitions that would put W. and Hillary in the same group.

Taking a leaf from Emerson, I suggested Establishment and Progressive. But would a Progessive not become the Establishment upon election to office and power, he asked? Well, so be it. There will always be new Progressives even as some in their ranks join the Establishment.

I'd like to think of a fluid and dynamic categorization with good and bad people in both and not about damning one side or the other.

WORLD MONUMENTS

Met with Henry and David today. Gave them a PPT presentation. Good meeting. Hopefully something will come out of it. Least of which, I hope we can get Kangla on their 100 Endangered Watch List.

KHADISHOP SHOOT

Poured. A lovely temporary waterfall under the Manhattan Bridge that Steven and I loved. But it was too gray and messy. we all had to move indoors for the shoot. A drag, but it turned out well I thought. Finally we will have some regular pictures for our website.

DIGITIZE!: Met John today. His library is willing to be a repository of the electronic library of manuscripts. I hope that I will be able to also find a university that will be the locus of scholarship for a new area of Asian studies. Or these manuscrpts will just lie there all nicely digitized.

I had a great talk with Evelyn a week ago and took up where we left off last November, threads of our discussion on transnational mountain cultures. She will present this digitization idea to their humanities digitization personnel today. They are working with Cotton collection of burned Beowulf manuscripts so some fitting but unfortunate analogy. Evelyn liked the idea of a Hillbilly International!

John confirms that US universities that have an interest on Tibeto-Burman languages focuses more or less on Tibetan only. Being an atheist is even lonelier than I thought.

Our collection of manuscripts could very well be the cornerstone of an academic process of enlarging the scope of Tibeto-Burman studies once we start the process of digitization. My desire is to see Manipur at the cultural and intellectual center of this new area of studies. John was amused I gave a linguistics professor fifteen guesses which Tibeto-Burman langauge I spoke and he never got to the most advanced and contemporaneous of them all!

John also thinks we might work with the Library of Congress' Overseas Operation. That they can disseminate folios to member libraries all across the United States is an idea that overwhelms me with its boldness and generosity of thinking.

I have had a copy of my proposal couriered to the Oja , so let's see what he says first. That, and of course, getting some more tech information. And man I gotta do an exhibiton of these manuscripts at the library down the line. Must keep at it with John.

MOZART'S 250TH: I was beginning to feel like a little boy who knows there's a birthday party happening but had not received an invitation. Relieved when Raphael invited me to the last of the Berlin Philharmoniker's concerts at Carnegie Hall celebrating the miracle of Mozart. Rapture!

[Also relieved I didn't have work out meeting Philip, after his inelegant dinner invitation. Ha!]

Interesting programming: a young Brit called Thomas Ades and Maurice Ravel to round off the program. New York audiences so embarrass me with the self-congratulatory and obligatory standing ovations and drawn out applause. Even Simon Rattle, who i assume is more the reserved Englishman back home, hammed it up to the gallery. But we got a lovely Satie as encore. So the audience's lolling labrador behavior did yield a dividend. I felt ungenerous.

End of a full day. A grest conversation taking up where I left off with Evelyn in Lexington last November about the Appalchian Center perhaps being the stage for a study of the Northeast. Has possibilities.

BASEBALL: Finally, a personal Holy Grail of sorts. Mirra and I went over to the Natural history Museum where Naomi had set up a screening of the Cutting films in the Northeast. I had heard of this since the early 1990s when I showed the Cutting films on his expedition to Tibet in the Tibet Film Festival.

Valrae thought it was just Assam, since the description of the 19030 silent film told merely of a British military expedition to the Naga Hills. I told her I'd still want to see it as I suspected it might have Manipur in it, Assam being the larger adminitrative term the British often used when referring to the area between India and Burma. And I was right. Half way through the film, Cutting and Teddy's son? brother? Kermit Roosevelt descend into the valley and shot scnes of boat races, wrestling, foot hockey, polo and a bunch of anthroplogical shots. Amazing stuff.

The film itself is a curiosity. There was a flawed and amateurish narrative about two Sema Naga boys. Charming but a bit embarrasing considering we sat under an original poster of Nanook of the North. Flaherty must have rolled his eyes if he saw the film then. And surely he rolled in his grave today.

GANDHI / KING

Met with the new Consul General here. I have had not truck with the legation here since Nengcha left. Perhaps something to do with the political climate being represented here before this new administration. I remember Indrani made a comment to me as about the difficulty of connecting with the revivalist mindset.

I had gone to talk about baseball but ended up proposing a program celebrating King and Gandhi. It was sparked by my puzzlement at being given an appointment on King's birthday. Should not the conculate be closed, I had wondered, while waiting in the reception area under a large painting of Gandhi.

I am happy the Ambassador, an urbane and cultured lady, responded ao favorably. Not only will it express the ties between the two countries in a constructive way but it will also be a way of participating in an American debate. I want to say, Look here guys, King is not just a Black and White issue. He is more than that. Ideas are not just about which state closes their libraries in honor of King and which refuse to. The thoughts of the two statesmen drew from all, belong to all and can be used to the benefit of all.

I will speak to Richard about Lincoln Center and Linden about The Asia Society.

1891: A very productive day. Ima is disappointed that I am staying away so long this time but she knows a lot of things are happening. She would have enjoyed the meetings I had with Robert and Esa.

Robert wants to bring Laihui to the US in Spring of Fall of 2007. I suggested that we do Khongjom Parba using the photographs at Alkazi’s collection. He loves the idea and will talk to Ralph, Rachel and Tim McHenry. Funny thing, I set up my meeting with Esa at Sepia without this in mind but jazzed things are clicking into place.

Esa offered use of the Manipur pictures even before I asked her. We looked at the Johnstone album together again. Too bad the 1891 album is in New Delhi but she will get it scanned and loaded up on the server. So I will ask to use the pics for WMI, the baseball film, Ima’s book on Idhou Sanakhya.

I am thinking Eigya Syam for direction, Ima for script. Excerpts read onstage from Mrs. Grimwood’s terribly self-serving but charming memoir? I will also talk to Jim Ivory about doing the show here. Maybe Vanessa Redgrave I am thinking.

Can Laihui do Khongjom Parba? Will it be only percussion? How about Pena? Do we need Ibeni or Manimacha? A counterpoint of perspectives of two divas at their peak of their craft might be fascinating.

ON BASEBALL: Bob had been maced and mugged in Red Hook the night before. But he gamely made it to the Cafe La Fortuna. I didn't know John and Yoko hung out there. Charming that they sat there writing under the framed pictures of opera stars.

First time I had actually thought through the baseball ballpark idea. Out loud. My baseball folks probably won’t get it or find it very interesting but Bob followed me I think. That I am for creating a new framework I find a better fit; activation not preservation, the use of information and media technology. For me, tthe ballpark is much more than a chain link fence around a playing green; I want to create a new architecture. The elements are all there: the shaman rituals, the geomancy, the materials, the need, and the use. All we need to do it to chart and shepherd an organic process.

Bob's work has mostly been in unbuilt architectural competitions. Interesting work in Hungary, NYC, Barcelona. He has ideas and works solo. But the more we talked the less the idea of an architectural competition like May suggested seemed the way to go. I should find a way to retain the PR value.

Perhaps a multidisciplinary approach based in an educational institution? Language, Literature, Religion, Anthropology, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Bob seemed to like the idea. But perhaps more Middlebury rather than Cooper Union? I like the idea of Middlebury, esp. with World Learning being nearby too.

If not Vermont, then who?

M&M: I wore my Macedonian flag scarf to the airport. Bibi thanked me. Everyone should be a nationalist for a country other than his own.

M&M: Some German dance authority decreed that at 2 million, Macedonians do not have the critical mass for a national dance form, Bibi said. That he was German seemed to add to the authority, her tone implied.

But Manipur has less than that yet has a dance form. And 15 films a year to Macedonia’s one or two. Sure, they are junk. But genius can spring anywhere; only a discrete culture can produce junk.

I realized during my travels that Manipur is an extraordinary place. I know of no smaller culture that has all the defining expressions of a culture. I tried saying it is culture that keeps people going in hard times but it sounds too sentimental, though it may have some truth to it.

Manipur has a culture of culture.

M&M: Nicola’s Tour

The City Castle's open air stage is dramatic, with a picturesque ruin as the back drop just so. Wonder if it might make too much of a visual statement for Yoshiko. A stray dog with a cataract in one eye befriends us. He hungers for affection but the guide books warn us against petting him. He looks much too dirty anyway.

We walk down back towards the Old Bazar, drop into a generations old shop where they still make guitars by hand. Then to the national gallery and to an old courtyard house that had become the city’s art school. The old nude model was a bit startled and I definitely crossed a line there with my video camera. But I have started my documentation of Yoshiko’s journey.

Not sure what Yoshiko is thinking. Her thought process is different. I worry how far this project will take her art as I think I am more ambitious in my goals. It is just as well she does not quite understand it anyway; it is evident she has not read my articles on re-mapping.

I would like her to develop her own creative process without getting a lot of my inchoate ideas. I guess what I am seeking is a collaborative process than the artist/producer one she has with Bonnie. I keep asking her where she thinks she is in her career as an artist.

On one hand, her integrity as an artist must be preserved; on the other, On some level I feel she needs to find her own way to appeal to a larger audience, a mature one that goes beyond the heroic challenge that artists necessarily make to established art forms. That by itself is more becoming to youth. Maturity comes down more to craft and having something specific to say, Too often is the modern artist either a propagandist or a navel-gazer. Where is the delight, wit and beauty?

I thank the Intelligent Designer (whom I’ll call Bob) I am not an artist.

M&M: To the Old Bazar with Maria

Maria and I crossed the old stone bridge into the poorer Albanian part of town. Gypsies strewn along the way. Smoky kebab stalls on either side of the twisty, cobbled streets. Not quite yet the tourist haunt this may well become. I suppose it depends on how the Islamic schools do their job. Money comes in from the Arab countries I am told and trouble is brewing. But for now, there is mere suspicion and hostility but at (the contested) 35% of the population, the Albanian problem has spilled into Skopje from Kosovo, from Greece and of course from Albania itself.

Bought a Tito-era army surplus jacket whose multiple pockets, if not the cartridge holders, will come in useful on the flight back. And a woven leather bracelet that looks like a cock-ring for Kieran.

M&M: Jazz @ the Jukebox Café

Of course Olivier the French violinist had lived in Williamsburg, where he met the Macedonian NYU film student who became his wife. Of course the guitarist Toni had lived in Boston. Even here in Skopje, in the surprisingly unknown Macedonia, does the world come crowding in. The jazz trio was great. Watched the table next to us fill, empty and refill a few times over. Jovica was a charismatic host, a bon vivant in his own way. Drank too much, smoked too much and closed the place down.

M&M: Bibi Takes up to the Mountains

The monastery to St. Pantalemion is closed. It is a Monday. So we miss seeing the pre-Giotto frescoes, especially of the nude Jesus, or rather of him wearing transparent clothes. We sit in the large empty restaurant overlooking the darkening city. The pita pie with stuffed sheep cheese id delicious. The rakia is excellent and the Macedonian wine is better today.

Bibi is a wonderful and knowledgeable hostess. I am slowly disentangling the information about Kosovo, the Albanians, the bombing of Belgrade, the siege of Sarajevo. Macedonians are very into their own problems, and they do have more than their share. There is not much lay curiosity about the outside world and I am past being an exotic foreigner. Yoshiko and I are the only two Asians we have encountered in Skopje so far.

A GERM OF AN IDEA

A note I wrote today:

Rajeshwar:

I've been thinking a bit more about the idea I tossed out to you earler today. The Manipuri-American IT get-together. I think we should do it, with all the various IT people attending to discuss how we can connect and interact and see what comes of it. Connectivity and network can play a special role for the future of small cultures. I would like to explore that.

How many IT people do you think there are here in the US and Canada from Manipur?

Let's you, Nick and I sit down sometime.

BTW thanks for the software handholding. I upgraded to OS X Tiger!

Tamo Somi

BI-CONTINENTAL SHOOT

Hot again on Fifth Avenue yesterday, even tho it was 7 when we started. Dusk over here, dawn over there; HD crew here, miniDV over there. There were joggers round the reservoir - at eye level, through the trees. Wondered if this is where Kieran runs.

Mirra thinks the dawn breaking over there will be nice. i agree. Always astonished how she (and other filmmakers) can keep that artistic eye in the middle of all that techno-logistical stuff.

I hope the footage will match if Mirra decides to us this in the final film. First time I have actually be the subject of a filmshoot. I had so much work to do really, I forgot about the camera. But I even went Jewish with an few "Oy vey"s trying to get thru on Ragini's cell phone. Mirra thinks my frustration looked good in the shot - hah, I could've done without it.



Anyway, went over the whole meeting planned with the US Consular team. Logistics and possibilities apart, my main concern was to make sure they don't request, they conduct themselves as equals, realize both sides gain and not just simply as Giver and Receiver. Happily Ragini is like me. She gets it immediately, as I knew she would. After all, it was Pabung Gambhi and Imasi Radha's style too.

Took almost 2 hours for something that might not even be in thr final cut.