Foggy mirrors

Dance is a form of expression reflecting the culture, value and symbols of its genre(s).  My home town, Karmiel, Israel, is blessed to host a dance festival every summer in which not only people can dance for two and a half days straight but visitors have a wide choice to view dance forms from all over the world (at a reasonable price). This year, my wife and I chose three very different styles: a (subcontinent) Indian modern dance group, Sarit Hadad and a Columbian Salsa group.  In each case, we were given in a peek into worlds far away from our own.

The Indian group, the Nvdara India Dance Company, performed something called Agami. It was an hour-long series of movements, generally but not always accompanied by music, some of it Indian-like, by some talented and well-condoned dancers dressed in dark, gray clothing. To be honest, they spend a lot of time rolling on the floor.  I know very little about Indian culture and not much more about modern dance. During the whole performance, I strove to try to identify the story and interpret the movements.  Alas, I did not succeed. Still, I left with the feeling that the performance has some content, even if I could not perceive it, and had gained from the exposure to a very alien world.

That evening, we saw the Israeli singer Sarit Hadad at the amphitheater. She is well-established singer famous for her love ballads, Arab style in Hebrew, I would describe it.  I have to admit, to quote from the name of an Israeli play, that I was there because of my wife. In any case, her fans, most of them female, quickly were near the stage singing, swaying and interacting with her.  I felt like a non-smoker of marijuana at a college party – missing the whole point.  Despite our good seats, it was quite hard to understand the words, which I was told was no great loss, similar to the love songs of the 1950’s. Although the genre was Israeli and lyrics in Hebrew, the content was in many ways as alien to me as the Indian dance.

The next day, we saw a Columbian group, Salsa Vita.  They performed various salsa dances with a short taste of tango.  The dancers were incredible, energetic and captivating.  The costumes were extremely colorful and sometimes quite minimal.  The variety of colors in the faces of the dancers, music and costumes made sure that there was never a boring moment. It was possible to see the open sexuality and Spanish colonial background of Columbia, something so different from the Middle East.

All in all, regardless of how much I enjoyed any of these performances, I was given the opportunity to expand my horizon. The reality may be distorted by the performer and the form. Still, I am much richer than before and look forward to next year’s looking glass.

Three dimensional moving objects

When I was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960’s, every “mom” (but not mine) seemed to have a station wagon, a long vehicle with an elongated open trunk. The reason was quite obvious: due to the baby boom and carpooling, everybody needed a car in which you could throw four kids, 2 bicycles and a dog in or put some 20 paper grocery bags. Dad’s fancy car was clearly not relevant nor did anybody worry about the price of gas. Alas, OPEC and the end of the baby boom killed off the station wagon.

In Israel, the vehicle of conveyance was the Subaru station wagon, occasionally still seen in some Arab vehicles. While it was true that if you merely gave the car a dirty look, you would create a dent in the metal, the material was so thin, it served the same purpose for many a family.  It was mechanically reliable, not too expensive and very practical.  It met the need for a family vehicle.

Today, the people mover of choice is the SUV, a squarish, jeep-like vehicle with a high center of gravity.  From Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, everybody and their cousin seems to own one or want to own them. They come in all sizes and types, from mini-SUV to massive Hummers, from diesel to hybrid. Even Mercedes Benz has a version. They are filling up the roads and parking lots of the world.

On the one hand, I can understand their popularity.  People still have kids, bicycles and dogs to transport.  Families do not eat any or travel less.  They are safer than a standard car due to their higher vantage point and greater weight. I imagine some of the them are quite comfortable.

Still, I dispise them both in theory and practice. They create a lot of pollution, except for the hybrid version possibly. They also create the ability to go off road, irresistible to some people. I love nature as it is, not with 4 by 4 tracks stamped on it.  The biggest problem is their dimensions.  They are higher than standard vehicles, giving the driver the feeling of confidence and encouraging aggressive behavior on the road. They are wider than other vehicles, paradoxically creating uncertainty in regards to lane position.  That means that they frequently are on or beyond the dividing line. They are also in many cases longer.  The practical effect is that parking lots, many of which were planned before the era of SUV’s, pose a challenge to them.  Even in more recently planned parking lots, too many drivers have no sense where the nose of the car is and park half a meter, 1.5 feet for North Americans, from the edge, causing the car’s ass to stick out in the traffic lane.  In the worst case, the driver takes no chances and uses two parking places, the great faut pas of modern city social etiquette. 

I may one day have to eat crow and buy one but still, to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, I do not like SUV’s, Sam-I-am.

Uncertain measures

Words are inheritance of previous generations.  Like diamonds or furniture, several generations down the line, few appreciate their value or history. This phenomenon can be clearly seen in measures.

A common currency in the world is the pound or lira. Whether UK or Egyptian, it defines a value of a good or service.  What is forgotten that the pound actually refers to gold.   In the centuries before “greenbacks”, paper money, money was coined from precious metal, usually gold or silver, and worth its weight in that metal. By the way, due to the constant shortage of those coins, especially in the distant colonies in North America, people turned to barter, in particular “buck” skins, which could be sold at trading stations. The modern buck is certainly much lighter.

On that same note, something of little value is worth “grushim” in Hebrew.  This coin was actually the small coin of the Egyptian pound from 1918-1927. Of more value were “asimonim”, phone tokens, used in Israel until phone cards came in.  They formally were not coins but coin-like disks with a notch going through the diameter. They were purchased at the post office and were considered a good value as they were less affected by inflation.  When young Israeli say, נפל האסימון [nafal haasimon], the assimon dropped, meaning at last someone understood, they don’t really understand that they are talking about.

In terms of power, people talk about the horsepower of cars forgetting that it literally means the power of a horse.  Since no two horses have the same power, there is more than one time of horsepower, the two most common being mechanical (745.7 watts) and metric, of course, (735.5 watts).

On the subject of relative measures, everybody has a different size foot, which created great problems for creating a standard measurement.  In fact, archaeologists have found a stone with three different “foot” lengths, apparently used as a conversion tool by artisans.

At least most people know how long it is. It is true that Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers but how many pickled peppers did he really pick?  The answer is around one quarter of a bushel or nine liters.  Now, we all know how much a peck is, right?

Speaking of right and wrong, as any stylish person knows, it is quite important to buy the real McCoy.  Why buy a fake Gucci when you can afford the real one?  As a matter of historical record, McCoy was an alcohol smuggler during Prohibition (1920 – 1933) in the United States, who made a good living boating in real rum from the Caribbean to the Florida, a bit like today’s drug smugglers. After getting caught and a short stay in prison, he changed his route to the Great Lakes, joining Joe Kennedy, the father of the JFK, in the profitable Toronto-Detroit booze run.

He must have had a good life, working bankers’ hours, i.e., short work days. Yes, once upon a time, banks did you a favor by opening a few hours each day, five days a week.  For the tellers of the world, it was a far better world then. 

Admittedly, knowing that your great, great grandmother wore those pearls at your great grandmother’s wedding is not that interesting but it does add a little shine to them.  Likewise, knowledge enriches our use of words, a bit of certainty in an uncertain world.