they can't be serious

How weird is this?

do for yourself kid

Painted on the wall of the music school where I was giving my workshops.

mohinga

Yum.

This is what I ate for breakfast each day on my trip. My host's housekeeper (whose name is Margaret) went out to the street vendor on the corner to pick it up for me. She was just tickled that I wanted local food. Apparently most of the houseguests that stay there only want Corn Flakes.

It's noodles (rice-based, I think), which you mix with fish soup, lotus root, cilantro, red pepper flakes, fried stuff that used to be some kind of vegetable, and the juice of a local citrus fruit that isn't a lime, and that doesn't seem to have an English name.

Let me repeat:

Yum.

o beautiful, for spacious skies

I love America.

I love the First Amendment.

I love the democratic process.

I didn't know how much I loved these things till I saw what they're not.

Now I've seen the Army take over a government.

I've seen what a press that isn't free looks like.*

I've seen roadblocks and guys with big guns on the road where a Nobel Laureate isn't allowed to come out of her house. Ever.

I've played a concert at which some of the most honored and important guests were absent because they'd been "arrested."

I've seen a decayed and weed-grown university that was closed because the government could think of no other way to stop the students from protesting. (Other than mowing them down in the street like they did 18 years ago, of course.)

I've seen the message "Access Denied" when trying to get to my email because "subversive" websites like Yahoo! are banned.

*The previous comment was about Thailand, of course, but the rest are about the trip I just got back from. Email me if you'd like to hear more, or if you'd like to know why I'm being so circumspect. (If anyone's reading this who doesn't already have my email address, which I doubt, leave a comment and let me know.) I probably don't need to be quite this obtuse, but I'd rather err on this side than the other.

hne

This is an instrument that I brought back from my trip. It's for Husband, who likes to collect and play various wind instruments.

It's most closely related to the oboe, in that it's got a detachable reed that vibrates against itself inside the player's mouth, but that's where the similarity ends.

The oboe reed is in two parts ("double reed"): two thin pieces of cane tied together and vibrating against each other to create the sound. You can approximate this by putting your palms together, fingertips pointing up, and tapping your fingers together very quickly and lightly. Some Eastern instruments have quadruple reeds: two layers of reeds vibrating against each other. (Like having two left hands, one covering the other, and two right hands, one covering the other).

The hne isn't satisfied with two reeds. It sneers at four. The hne has TEN reeds! Five layers of cane on each side, all vibrating together. Before playing, you've got to soak the reed in hot water to make it pliable, then poke it down the center with a special tool to create a gap for the air to come through.

Also, the metal part isn't a stand for the instrument. It's attached by a cord to the wooden part, and it acts like the bell of a clarinet. I've never seen a bell attached in this way, nor one that's so different in diameter from the rest of the instrument.

The sound of the hne is quite loud and reedy. It's nasal and buzzy, and it's quite easy to slide the pitches by moving the embouchure. Apparently it's most often used as a contrast to the mellow, soft, airy-sounding bamboo flute.

betrofent and shubert

Husband and I try to be sensitive to our students' limited command of English. Specifically, we are much more lenient about correct spelling than we would be with native speakers. Call it "dumbing down" if you want, but the fact is that learning to spell "Scheherazade" is not how I'd like my students to spend their time.

So when I give listening tests (in which students must identify music by title and composer, based on a one-minute excerpt that I play on the stereo), I expect a little "creative spelling." I tell them that I have to be able to understand what they mean, and that they have to try to spell the whole word. (The first time I gave this sort of test, I didn't specify this, and for "Rimsky-Korsakov," I got Ri---unintelligible scribble---. Not acceptable.)

Usually I get results like "Simphonie" for "Symphony," and considering that this is a word that is spelled "Symphonie" in French music and "Sinfonia" in Italian music, I figure that's pretty close.

Last time I gave the test, though, I got the most creative spelling yet: "Betrofent."

Can you guess what that means?

Yep. Beethoven.

I gave the student credit, because it was clear that he could identify the music, which was the point of the test. I'm not totally comfortable with this, because I would never give an American student this kind of leeway, but considering that even the alphabet is foreign to these students, I'm not going to change the policy.

Recently Husband gave a listening test. Many of his students answered "Shubert" or "Shuber." I'd bet he would have accepted this if the correct answer had been "Schubert." Unfortunately it was "Schoenberg." No luck for students this time, although the names do sound quite similar.

self-reliance

Did you read Emerson in school? You probably remember at least the title of that essay, I'll bet. It's right up there with the Boston Tea Party, the New York Yankees, and Rosie the Riveter in the twentieth-floor penthouse of the American Psyche.

Quick, what action movie am I describing?

The Lone Hero struggles against the odds. He knows he's doing the right thing, but somehow no one Believes In Him. He's got to Go It Alone. The enemy is bigger, stronger, and better equipped. Everyone tells him he's Making a Terrible Mistake. But he Soldiers On, eventually saving the world.

Oh, wait...that's pretty much...all of them.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, both as it pertains to my job and in general. My image of learning to be a musician involves hours upon hours shut up alone in a little room, practicing. My students see it differently. They practice in groups: instead of going into the practice rooms, they sit out in the hallway together, each practicing his/her own music, but all listening to each other with at least half an ear and helping out from time to time. When one person is having rhythmic trouble, the others will clap the beat and be his (thinking of a particular student) metronome. They share music too, and all of them spend at least as much time practicing each other's solos as they do their own. But when the time comes to perform (as in juries, which I'll be hearing today), they're terrified to stand up in front of the room alone.

In American music schools, you find almost the exact opposite. Practicing is private, almost ascetic. You don't open the door. You don't practice in the hallway (if all of the practice rooms are full, you wait). You don't practice with your friends (a practice room with more than one person in it? looks like screwing around instead of working to me!). But when you perform--you're the diva, you're the prima donna, you're the Lone Hero Fighting Against The Odds.

Who's to say which is right? American students have bigger egos, and probably practice more efficiently (based on what I've seen my students do). They're more comfortable with performing as soloists. But Thai students understand the value of cooperation. They Play Well With Others. Chamber music (in which you've got to look at your collaborators more than you look at your music, and play so as to match what you hear from them, even if it seems to contradict what you see on the page) seems to come more easily and naturally to them.

Seeing the way they interact makes me realize just how American I am--I would NEVER have lent my clarinet/mouthpiece/ligature/reeds/music to another student; they do it routinely. I would NEVER have shown up to a lesson with someone else's music.

• "This is not yours. Where is your music?"
• *smile and shrug*
• "Whose book is this?"
• "This Dae. I borrow him."
• "OK, where is yours?"
• "Toon borrow me. Then Moo borrow him."

I write in their music. I write comments that are specific to them; more than once I've had a student come in with someone else's music and try to adhere to someone else's markings.

• "Why are you playing so loud there?"
• *points to music, where I've scribbled something*
• "But this is not your book. Do was playing too softly there, so I told him to play louder. But you don't have that problem, so you don't do it."

This sort of thing still surprises me; I still find it foreign.

But, as usual, I've digressed far, far from what I originally wanted to tell you about Self-Reliance. With all my characteristic wit, grace, and total lack of transition and flow, I'm just going to lay it down now.

Back in July I met Chen Yi. (Loyal readers will remember this, I think.) In the course of our conversation with her and her Thai grad student, we asked Narong (her student) how he likes living in Kansas City (where she teaches). He doesn't have a car, and we expressed surprise that he was able to get around without too much trouble--having lived in Tucson, we understand what a city without good public transport is like. Narong said that he just asks his friends to take him where he needs to go. He said that he was sure we'd do the same in his situation. Then he grinned (he's Thai, and so of course he punctuates every sentence with a grin).

Dr. Chen looked at her star graduate student and said to him, in the mother-henniest, don't-you-know-anything-about-the-worldiest voice I've ever heard, "But they're Americans! They don't ask for help."

great big farang lady

I seem to know a lot of pregnant people lately. Talking with one of them recently reminded me of an incident that happened about a year ago. I'll just lay it out for you simply.

Petite Colleague Who'd Recently Given Birth to Twins: maikaojai, would you like to have some of my maternity clothes? I think they're about your size.

maikaojai: Uh...*sucks in her gut and tries not to pass out from embarrassment*

till you make it

Today I introduced one of my graduate students to the ancient and noble art of faking it, also known as Just Play Something.

He's been called in to play a series of chamber music concerts with a group that's been rehearsing for months--he's replacing someone who got a full-time orchestra job and had to quit the group. The first concert is tonight, and the music is really difficult.

He played some of it for me in his lesson today. After giving him the standard I-could-have-been-more-help-if-you'd-shown-me-this-three-weeks-ago-when-you-got-it lecture, I settled in to help him get through these concerts.

He can't play the music. Can't. That's not to say he never will--it's perfectly well within his capabilities and given some more time, he'll play it great. But he's got to play it tonight. When he played it in his lesson he was doing all of the things I've taught him about practicing--playing slowly, isolating difficult passages, stripping the music down to only a few elements to work on, the whole routine. But (and I think I may have mentioned this already) the concert is tonight.

So I showed him how to cut his losses, essentially: simply white-knuckling and Trying Really Hard isn't going to substitute for the extra months of practice that everyone else has had, so he's got to figure out what's really important and focus on those things. For instance: if he's got to play 7 notes in one beat (and in this music, one beat lasts less than half a second), I told him to get the first note and the last note right, and Just Play Something in between. I told him to make sure that the style and rhythm were correct at all times, even to the exclusion of right notes in the very fast passages. Let's face it: certain mistakes are more noticeable than others, and when it's obvious we can't do everything right, we've got to do the important things right and not worry so much about the rest. I call it pragmatic; I think he felt shocked and a little dirty.

Part of the problem is that playing this way is tantamount to admitting you're not perfect. Even making a statement like, "OK, I've got to get the beginning and the ending of this right" is a tacet admission that there may be some problems in the middle. And it's true that faking doesn't sound as good as real, practiced accuracy, and that discerning ears can tell the difference, but it's also true that it's better to cut your losses than to fall apart completely because you're trying to do everything before you're ready.

Did I mention the concert is tonight?

washing dishes, or, Yes, My Life Really Is This Boring

I often wonder, as I wash dishes, whether I'm not actually making them dirtier by washing them in tap water.

Washing dishes is quite a procedure here. First I pick up the plastic tub full of accumulated dirty dishes...

(Wait, no, scratch that. This is my blog, and I'm going to take you to a magical fantasy land in which I wash every dish the moment it becomes dirty, and never, ever let them accumulate.)

Washing dishes is quite a procedure here. First I pick up the plastic tub full of dishes that have just now gotten dirty and pass it out the window to sit on the shelf of the kitchen sink, which is on the balcony. Then I put on my dishwashing outfit--flipflops and a big apron. The flipflops are because I don't want my feet to get wet, and the apron is because I'm incapable of using the sprayer on the sink without spraying myself. Next I gather up my sponges and dish soap, and head outside.

The first order of business is to clean out the sink--it is outside, after all, and is often graced with...well, bird droppings. One of my sponges/scratchy scourers is only used for cleaning the sink. Instead of a faucet, we've got a spray nozzle on our sink. It's very convenient and very strong, and I'm glad we bought it. We saw it at Tesco Lotus and bought it, not realizing (as we figured out when we got it home) that no Thai person would EVER attach this sprayer to a kitchen sink. It's for...um...a more personal purpose: it's meant to be attached to the bathroom plumbing and hung on the wall next to the toilet, and provides the water for the cleaning that Thai people do instead of using toilet paper. I bet that any Thai person who saw our kitchen sink would think we had truly gone off the stupid-farang deep end. Oh well; it works for us. (We do have these sprayers in our bathrooms too, but we only use them to clean the bathroom floor. Very handy, actually.)

After I wash the sink, I wash the plastic tub. After I wash the plastic tub, I wash the dishes. To keep our sink's drains from getting clogged with old food, I spray the dirtier dishes and rinse the food into the drain in the floor, which has a little trap. Generally I accidentally spray the pigeons sitting on the ledge while I'm doing this, making them mad and causing them to fly away for about 10 seconds before they come back. Once I sprayed a gecko. By the time I'm done washing and rinsing dishes, the floor is soaking wet (and would be even if I wasn't pre-spraying dishes onto the floor--my acknowledgement that the floor was going to get wet anyway was what led me to start the pre-spraying in the first place).

I carry the tub of clean dishes back inside and set them into the dish drainer (which is really just a set of wire shelves), where they drip on the floor.

If I were Thai, this would be a lot simpler: I'd wash the dishes directly in the plastic tub, which I'd fill with soapy water. Then I'd rinse them in the tap in the bathroom. This is actually what I did for the first six months we lived here; believe me, the sink is better.

monitor

I've mentioned before that we have a moat. Well, what would a moat be without a monster?
This is a monitor lizard, spotted in town and chased down by Husband. I hope you can get some sense of scale from this picture--this is an average-sized monitor, about 4 feet long. They can get bigger, though.

There's one really big one that lives near the College of Music. We call it Moatie.

Monitors usually leave people alone and keep to themselves, but it's not too rare to see one walking down the sidewalk or swimming in the moat or one of the other khlongs or ponds on campus. Swimming monitors keep almost their entire bodies submerged--only their heads are visible above the murky water, and they glide along very smoothly like periscopes. Even when they're not in plain view, we know they're there--quiet and graceful they're not, and we'll often hear one crashing along, hidden by tall grass and bushes.

seasons change

Today Husband and I went to see the Thai film Seasons Change. (Here's the movie website and a quick synopsis.)

This movie was takes place, and was filmed, at the university where we work. The main characters are pre-college music students. It's a very cute high-school romantic comedy, and it was especially fun for us because we got to do some people-watching. In addition to being shot in our building, the movie used many of our colleagues and students as extras. Our boss, the Director of the College of Music, was played in the movie by an actor who actually looks a little like him, and the real Director made a cameo appearance as an audience member at a concert. I think that a large proportion of the people who went to see the movie today are either connected with the university, or with the Bangkok music scene, or both, because when this guy's face appeared on screen there was a collective "Ooooh" in the theater.

I don't think this movie is likely to be released widely in the U.S., but if you do run across it it's definitely worth seeing.

robots in disguise

The power was out at the College of Music for two days this week.

This time, the cause of the outage was an exploded transformer. Husband actually heard it from his office.