tziteras

I am in a huge and expansive arts centre/cinema/cathedral, in ancient Monfalcone. It's Monfalcone so it must be the Valentinis disco, where all my school friends used to go when I was 16. and although we were in the same school it was unreachable, a world apart. But it's more than that. Other unreachable things are all around. We have come as buddhists or students to do a course and are here for a while in accomodation on the centre's grounds. I can't remember if it's with Soka Gakkai or as students of the UWC that we are here, but the accomodation is simple and functional, but I can tell that we are in a cheaper more day to day part of what houses much more valuable people than us. We are all teenagers and young adults. The course has now come to an end. I remember the rooms and the shared bathrooms, all very clean and well kept. I look out the window down the huge stone block walls worthy of an Inca city or Egyptian pyramid, and far down below I see some limousin...

As I write I'm compressing a file from a tabla practice. I am a student of a student of Pandit Shankar Ghosh . My guruji/master's name is Tapanji . I once told him I was a buddhist, and he told me this story in great detail about the way he would walk past a beautiful buddhist temple in his youth. And now you can't even see the temple for all the other buildings that now fill the land. And his mother used to use flowers, like the ones he pointed out to me in his garden - big bright yellow flowers - when he would hurt himself as a child. Homeopathic remedies. And the tabla classes. Always told with such feeling - his tabla master's strict classes where he wouldn't let you leave when your lesson finished, and you had to assist other student's lessons, or where he would say "put on that record" and they would listen to something - I think quite varied stuff, not just indian music. He told me of not being able to write it down, scolding me almost, for taki...

A huge storm chased me down park row, past the violin shops and the hospital, into the Cube Cinema yesterday Wednesday 31st for our first Cube Orchestra rehearsal after the Here Shop Gig. Present were Belinda, Tomoko, Gareth and myself. We took our time in setting up amplifiers, and finding some old drums for Tomoko to play, while we chatted. After some chat about what went wrong on Saturday, Belinda wrote down a list of points which I hope she'll send to the list - quite openly worded and focusing on the percieved problem rather than the percieved solution. I hope we can use all the problems constructively to refine our guidelines for new people and for participating and in preparation for concerts. Then it was time to play. One of the comments from before was "lack of conductor" or "limited ways of communicating during performance". Belinda suggested a great exercise where you appoint an "invisible conductor", disguised as one of the musicians and th...