DIStraction

The courtesans are turned out in their best,
How delightfully they speak and laugh along the lovely green river.
They call out to gentlemen the day long,
And tempt them with songs that charm the hardest heart.
They mince about with flirtatious glances so difficult to resist.

Someday, though, even these captivating women will have nothing left,
And they will be left out in the harsh cold.

Leave off your mad rush for gold and jewels,
I've got something far more precious for you:

A bright pearl that sparkles more brilliantly than the sun and moon,
And illuminates each and every eye.

Lose it and you will wallow in a sea of pain;
Find it and you will safely reach the other shore.

I'd freely present this treasure to anyone,
But hardly anyone asks for it.

Some day you will die.

Lying on your sick bed about to breathe your last, you will be assailed by every kind of pain,

Your mind will be filled with fears and anxieties and you will not know where to go or what to do,

Only then you will realize you have not practiced well.

The skandhas/aggregates (matter, sensations, conceptions, impulses and consciousness) and the four elements in you will quickly disintegrate, and your consciousness will be pulled wherever your ancient, twisted karma leads it.

Impermanence does not hesitate.

Death will not wait.

You will not be able to extend your life by even a second.

How many thousands times more will you have to pass through the gates of birth and death.

If these words are challenging, even insulting, let them be an encouragement for you to change.

Practice heroically.

Do not accumulate unnecessary possessions.

Don't give up.

Still your mind, end wrong perceptions, concentrate and do not run after the objects of your senses.

Practice diligently.

Be determined not to let your days and months pass by wastefully.

Thirteen years ago I made my first trip abroad - three weeks at a language school in Brighton, UK. I had to obtain a British visa. It took two interviews and two visa officers to grant a visa. The second officer started the interview with a let's-get-to-the-heart-of-the-matter question: "Why did you give our visa officer a cookery book?"

It wasn't a cookery book. It was the project that I was working on - relating culinary traditions and culture, showing food as an integral part of history, culture, and ultimately language use. What better way to savor them than through food?

I was happy to find out that my two favorite things from Portugal - fado music and port wine - are related, too. Let me tell you how.

Fado is at least a couple of centuries old. It has its roots in Afro-Brazilian music (Brazil being a Portuguese colony at the time). It means fate or destiny in Portuguese. Fado develops in Lisbon and Coimbra in bars, taverns, and brothels - a folk tradition yet a distinctly urban one. Almost always performed in a minor key, it is a melancholic song with profound lyrics about life, love, and death.

Fado singers can be accompanied by various instruments, but almost always by two types of guitar - the familiar Spanish six string version (against the common wisdom of Northern Portugal that only bad wind and bad marriages come from Spain*) and then a more exotic twelve string Portuguese guitar. This instrument is a variation on the English lute - it comes to portugal via Porto, the port city at the mouth of river Douro, a trade center. Porto the city is known best for its eponymous staple - the port wine. The port wine growing region (a time-honored tradition, demarcated a century before Bordeaux) is the upper basin of Douro, in the mountains near the Spanish border. For centuries, Britain was the chief consumer of port wine; British merchants took great care to control not only wine trade, but wine production as well. The names of the major port houses bear witness to it to this day - Graham, Warre, Dow, Taylor Fladgate, Churchill, Sandeman, Smith Woodhouse.

Port deserves its own story - at least one, possibly many - best told by the port makers, such as the Symington family. Let's get back fado. There are many phenomenal fado singers, past and current; my favorite is Mariza. Her 2008 concert in Lisbon is superb. You can find it on iTunes, and have instant gratification; but it is best to have patience and get the CD version because it comes with a second disc - a DVD with a documentary called "Mariza and the story of fado".

The second visa officer understood the fun of relating food and culture. Before long, I had her laughing and smiling. When the ice was broken, I knew for sure my visa application would not be rejected.

*De Espanha, nem bom vento, nem bom casamento

When presented with a problem, you have to find a solution. Sometimes it is straightforward. You walk up to a store, the door says "push", you push and get in. Other times it is a little trickier - there is no sign, but you can observe the people coming and going and note which way the door is flapping and apply the observations to get in. Still other times it is trickier still - there are no signs and no people - and maybe three different doors. Which one do you pick, and do you push it or pull it? Do you enter quickly and recklessly - or carefully pausing to close the door as silently as possible?

The tricky problems are usually the ones requiring cultural knowledge. The locals and the insiders have the knowledge, you don't. Feeling like an outsider sucks; besides it costs money. The locals know all the tricks: where to make a short cut, where to park for free, where to buy discounted rail passes.

When you are a cultural outsider in a new country or a city as large and complex as Moscow (where you don't visit for two years and it changes enough to be confusing), you are constantly presented with these tricky cultural choices. And unless you stay for a while, you only get a single trial on solving each one of them correctly.

That means you will make mistakes and make inefficient choices. You will open the wrong door, take the long way around, and buy expensive tickets. It will cost more than it would cost a local. You might even get into some embarrassing situations. But you just have to let go. Enjoy the few that you get right, and don't judge yourself for the ones you don't. Enjoy the new ride and ignore the bumps. One day you will be experienced enough to get almost everything right on a single attempt, and composed enough to meet the few occasional failures with a smile.

When I was seven, I listened to Paganini Fifth Concerto for violin and orquestra on a vynil disc. When I was fourteen, I was playing a tape of Kitaro's Dream over and over again. When I was seventeen, I'd browse the catalog of a "sound recording" shop in Moscow and order a tape of Paco de Lucia's Siroco copied from a CD. A year later, I spent an unthinkably huge amount of twenty dollars on a disc with Mozart's 25th symphony and the Masonic Funeral Music. In the university, my friend Pere Campos introduced me to Hiru Truku, Mikel Laboa, Vinicius de Moraes, and Maria Creuza. All were dutifully transferred to tape.

I even brought a tape of favorites with me when I came to the US in 2000. Then in 2001 I got my first computer, a PowerMac G4. iTunes came out the year before; and since then it has been a project of finding everything in digital format. Like an Israeli special force agent hunting terrorists, I searched for them everywhere, taking them in one by one, until I had Paganini, Kitaro, Paco de Lucia, Mikel Laboa, and Maria Creuza in digital format. Some were bought on CDs and transferred, others found free online, still others bought on iTunes or similar music stores.

They were all herded in, except one - Pablo Guerrero. There was one song from his A tapar la calle disc called Si volvieras otra vez that I could not hunt down. So I took a roundabout way:

- find the song on YouTube
- play the clip in HQ
- launch Audio Hijack Pro and capture the sound from the browser
- import the recorded sound into iTunes
- trim the silence on the ends by going into song info (Apple + I on Mac / Command + I on Windows) and setting the start and stop play time (the last tab on the right)

The result will not please audiophiles; but it pleases me. It transfers me back to 1999, and that makes me happy.

I have become fascinated with Dmitry Hvorostovsky. I particularly like his recording of Russian folk songs and romances. Most of the songs on it I have heard before; but one was new to me. It is based on a poem by a little known Russian poet Nikolay Grekov (Ð?иколай Греков (1810-1866). The song is about the loss of his wife. It is pure anguish and longing; performed beautifully by Hvorostovsky.

Here's the Russian original; I am not aware of existing English translations.

Ð’ чаÑ?, когда мерцанье звёзды разольют
И на мир в молчанье Ñ?он и мрак Ñ?ойдут,
С горькою иÑ?томой на душе моей
Я иду из дому на Ñ?виданье к ней.

И Ñ?виданье Ñ?то в тишине ночной
ВидÑ?Ñ‚ до раÑ?Ñ?вета звёзды лишь Ñ? луной.
Ð?ет в нём ни лобзаньÑ?, ни пожатьÑ? рук,
И хранит молчанье мой прекраÑ?ный друг.

Ð?е пылают очи у неё огнём,
Ð’ них разлит мрак ночи Ñ? непробудным Ñ?ном,
И тогда приду Ñ?, тихо к ней Ñ?клонюÑ?ÑŒ,
Ð’Ñ?Ñ‘ её бужу Ñ? и не добужуÑ?ь…

I normally don't write poems, and in the rare cases that I do, I don't share them. Today I will make an exception - these are old, from a love that is no more, as if from another life... Sending happy thoughts to everyone I have ever loved and to all of you, my readers!

To make a caipirinha it takes some brown sugar
And shiny crystal glasses
So you can watch the liquor
Flow over cubes of ice
You make a caipirinha
The way she made it for you
So you can fill your soul
With memories and tears

Like a tiny inquisitive creature
You roam the streets of my soul
Looking in every corner
Till you fill me completely

Across the table
You are speaking softly
Looking away
As your thoughts unfold
Trusting me with them
You don’t see
The way I admire you

When you spoke
Their eyes were on you
And I could hide among them
And let your voice caress me