Richard Jeffrey Newman

This is absolutely marvelous:

I took my wife and son for their birth­days – which are a day apart – to see the Voca Peo­ple last night. It was a really won­der­ful show. This YouTube video doesn’t really do jus­tice to the full­ness of their sound – and every sound you hear is made with the human voice – but it give a good idea of what they do.

My mother sent me the link to this music video by 8^th Day. The music is great, but what made me smile the most was the lit­tle boy in peyos and a sweat­shirt with a Bat­man patch bop­ping to the beat. I also really appre­ci­ate the mix­ing of Sephardic and Ashke­nazic lan­guage and ref­er­ences through­out. Dis­cus­sion of lyrics, etc. is below the video.

Accord­ing to this dis­cus­sion on Jew­ish Lyrics, Ya’alili:

is a com­bi­na­tion of the sepharadic “Ya’lah”, a com­mon phrase in sephardic songs which roughly trans­lates as “come on”, and “li li li”, a com­mon filler in yid­dish songs (BTW, the word for ‘song’ in yid­dish is “leid”).

The lyrics – though it’s worth read­ing the whole dis­cus­sion at the above link – can be roughly trans­lated as follows:

Ya’alili, dance my beloved

It should be for­tu­nate, may it be,
G-d will­ing, it will be

The bride­groom, sephardi
the attrac­tive bride, ashkenazi

Mother Imeinu [our mother] sephardi,
Mama Rachel, ashkenazi

Baba Salli [a famous rabbi] sephardi,
Rabbi Nach­man, ashkenazi

It should be for­tu­nate, may it be,
G-d will­ing, it will be

Ya’alili, dance my beloved

Gina Gina sephardi
may we hear more ashkenazi

Yosef our father, sephardi
the eith day, ashkenazi

days for joy, sephardi,
have a good yom tov, ashkenazi

It should be for­tu­nate, may it be,
G-d will­ing, it will be

Brows­ing this morn­ing through Google Reader as a way of pro­cras­ti­nat­ing – I have some mun­dane but impor­tant work I need to fin­ish today and I just don’t want to do it – I found two posts from Vio­let Blue that intrigued me. One pointed towards dating-site OkCupid’s blog, OkTrends, and what it learned from min­ing the data it has col­lected from gay and straight mem­bers who have come to the site look­ing to meet peo­ple. Like Vio­let Blue, I found the “Gay Curi­ous” map per­haps the most inter­est­ing piece in the post, and I will let it speak for itself:

The other thing Vio­let Blue pointed me towards is an explicit erotic music video by the group The Good The Bad, whose music, now that I’ve lis­tened to a bit of it, I like a lot, espe­cially the fact that it is all instru­men­tal. The video, how­ever, which starts out as com­pellingly sexy, devolves into cliché when a porn-star-orgasmic-voice-over intrudes into what might have been a really inter­est­ing explo­ration – to the degree one could do this in a music video – of the woman’s rela­tion­ship to music and to the gui­tar as her instru­ment. Here it is so you can decide for yourselves:

‘030’ by The Good The Bad (UNCUT) from 030 on Vimeo.

This made me laugh out loud, and yet it is also a won­der­ful and bit­ing satire. I will be look­ing up more of their music.

Writ­ing in this past Thursday’s issue of The New York Times (Feb­ru­ary 4^th), Michael Kim­mel­man com­pares the Euro­pean tour on which the gov­ern­ment of Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad sent the Tehran Sym­phony Orches­tra to sim­i­lar tours on which the for­mer Soviet Union would send its own world-class per­form­ers, such Svi­atoslav Richter.[1. Inter­est­ingly, the piece has two dif­fer­ent titles: “A Swiss Con­cert For an Audi­ence Back in Tehran” is the print ver­sion; the online ver­sion reads, “The Sour Notes of Iran’s Art Diplo­macy.”] The con­certs these per­form­ers gave served both to dis­tract West­ern audi­ences from the dis­si­dents the Soviet gov­ern­ment was exil­ing to the gulags and to force those audi­ences into “the moral com­pro­mise [that] attend­ing such pro­pa­ganda events” would require. Given that the Iran­ian symphony’s tour took place “around the time the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment exe­cuted two more polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, charg­ing nine oth­ers with wag­ing war against God, a cap­i­tal offense,“[1. And some of them are likely to be exe­cuted as well, as the gov­ern­ment in Iran gears up to intim­i­date the oppo­si­tion fur­ther in the days before Feb­ru­ary 11^th, the anniver­sary of the found­ing of the Islamic Repub­lic.] it is likely that the Islamic Repub­lic was try­ing to imple­ment a sim­i­lar strat­egy. Indeed, the title of the music the orches­tra per­formed, “Peace and Friend­ship Sym­phony,” by Majid Entezami, would seem to make that strat­egy explicit. Kim­mel­man, how­ever, does not have kind words for the music, call­ing it “a four-movement jere­miad of mar­tial bom­bast and almost unfath­omable incom­pe­tence and silli­ness, orig­i­nally per­formed, accord­ing to Tehran Times, last Feb­ru­ary in Iran to cel­e­brate the 30^th anniver­sary of the rev­o­lu­tion [and] reti­tled for this occasion.”

What struck me most about Kimmelman’s arti­cle, though, was not what he had to say about the sim­i­lar­i­ties between what Tehran was try­ing to do last month and what Moscow did dur­ing the Cold War, but rather what he had to say about the differences:

The dif­fer­ence now isn’t just that the Tehran orches­tra play­ing a pathetic Peace and Friend­ship Sym­phony is such a far cry from Emil Gilels play­ing Beethoven’s Emperor con­certo. More fun­da­men­tally, it’s that a tour by an anointed sym­phony orches­tra from the other side barely reg­is­ters in the West­ern polit­i­cal con­scious­ness. In an Inter­net age when everyone’s sup­pos­edly savvy to crude pro­pa­ganda, the pre­sump­tion seems to be that the Iran­ian tour doesn’t even rise to the thresh­old of newsworthiness.

But this pre­sump­tion is a result of what the Amer­i­can musi­col­o­gist Richard Taruskin calls a com­mon fal­lacy. The fal­lacy, he has writ­ten, con­sists in turn­ing “a blind eye on the morally or polit­i­cally dubi­ous aspects of seri­ous music,” as if “the only legit­i­mate object of praise or cen­sure in art” is whether it’s good or not.

“Art is not blame­less,” Mr. Taruskin writes. “Art can inflict harm.”

We take the blame-worthiness of art for granted when it comes to pop­u­lar cul­ture, crit­i­ciz­ing Avatar, for exam­ple, for being yet one more movie about a white guy who saves a nature-loving peo­ple of color or the writ­ers of a show like Bat­tle Star Galac­tica for how they write rape into the show’s nar­ra­tive; but it is good to be reminded that no art, not even clas­si­cal music, is with­out polit­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance, that it too can be used as pro­pa­ganda, to rein­force, or to sub­vert, the sta­tus quo.

In the con­clu­sion to his review, Kim­mel­man quotes an Iran­ian busi­ness­man liv­ing in Geneva. This man was angry because he kept “see­ing Ahmadinejad’s face in the music.” He said, how­ever, that his heart “goes out to the musi­cians. They’re vic­tims like the rest of us.“

A friend of mine who does not like jazz – espe­cially any­thing that has a sax­o­phone in it – told me once about a con­ver­sa­tion she and her ex-husband, a seri­ous jazz-lover, had over din­ner with a cou­ple, the male half of which also loved jazz, while the female half felt sim­i­larly to my friend. This sec­ond woman defined her dis­like by say­ing some­thing along the lines of, “I don’t need to sit and lis­ten to a bunch of men mas­tur­bat­ing,” a ref­er­ence both to the empha­sis in jazz on the impro­vised solo and to the fact that most jazz musi­cians – or maybe most well-known jazz musi­cians – seem to be men. My friend said she felt an imme­di­ate click of right­ness when her din­ner guest made this state­ment, which led to a long dis­cus­sion about the com­par­i­son between music and sex, between impro­vi­sa­tion and solo sex – though, of course, jazz impro­vi­sa­tion is not usu­ally done in soli­tude. I have writ­ten else­where about the con­nec­tion I made early on in my own sex­ual awak­en­ing between the orches­trat­ing of sex­ual plea­sure dur­ing love­mak­ing and music, but what my friend’s story made me think about was how, say, a cer­tain kind of jazz solo, where the musi­cian explores sub­tle nuances of melody and har­mony, or the var­i­ous ways in which you can slice up a beat to cre­ate dif­fer­ent rhyth­mic tex­tures, cor­re­sponds to the kind of mas­tur­ba­tion in which you use the plea­sure you are giv­ing your­self to explore your­self, either through the fan­tasies that arise while you mas­tur­bate or through the dif­fer­ent kinds of aware­ness your solo love­mak­ing gives you of your own body; and then I thought about how rock solos or blues solos or the large solo con­certs that Keith Jar­rett once gave all have an ana­log in mas­tur­ba­tion, from the kind that is just a release of sex­ual ten­sion to the kind that is an affir­ma­tion in deep sad­ness and/or joy – and/or the entire range of emo­tions it is pos­si­ble to feel dur­ing sex, which means pretty much all the emo­tions of which human beings are capa­ble – of the fact that you are alive, which for me is what defines the sound of the blues, to the kind that is large and com­plexly moti­vated and that you may never fully understand.

Mas­tur­ba­tion is, as all sex is, a work­ing through of who we are and how we feel about our­selves, of what we wish for, of what we wish to avoid, of the his­tory of our bod­ies, of every­thing that makes us human in the capac­ity of our bod­ies to expe­ri­ence that human­ity; and there is a way in which sex is the cre­ation of a sym­bol of that human­ity: in the plea­sures we move through on our way to orgasm, not because orgasm is the only and nec­es­sary goal of sex – though in mas­tur­ba­tion orgasm usu­ally is the point – but because each orgasm, whether we are con­scious of it or not, is some­thing to which we have to give mean­ing, and mean­ing requires his­tory, not only the spe­cific his­tory of the sen­sa­tions that brought you to this par­tic­u­lar orgasm, but the larger per­sonal and cul­tural his­tory that each of those sen­sa­tions taps into. I know I’ve had orgasms that changed me. Some were soli­tary and some were shared, but all of them cap­tured a truth about myself that I needed to face if I was going to grow, sex­u­ally and otherwise.

This sym­bolic aspect of sex – which may or may not be an accu­rate way of talk­ing about these things, but which makes sense to me – reminds me as well of some­thing I read a long time ago in Suzanne Langer’s book, Feel­ing and Form about how music is the sym­bolic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the process of human emo­tion and that it is this sym­bol which the com­poser cre­ates on the page and that the per­former plays into exis­tence when he or she per­forms; and so it occurs to me that sex, solo or oth­er­wise, is the play­ing into exis­tence of that part of our­selves that is wait­ing to become, and some­times we will under­stand what we are becom­ing in and through sex, and some­times sex is what opens us up to the fact that this under­stand­ing is what we need to find.

So I am won­der­ing: What have peo­ple out there under­stood? What have they found? Which are the orgasms that have changed you?

Cross posted on Alas.