Living Cinematographically

I have begun experiencing my life as if it were in a movie, after spending hours and hours watching films in the past week and a half at the Jerusalem International Film Festival.
The first movie we saw was "Tikkun," directed by Avishai Sivan, which eventually won a lot of prizes at the festival. It was shot in black and white and depicts the Hasidic community of Jerusalem from the outside, though it pretends to see it from within. It was thought-provoking, very slow moving, laconic, and not entirely convincing to me (though I appear to be in a minority).
We then saw "The Assassin," a Taiwanese film directed by Hou Hsiai-Hsien, which was slow-moving, boring, laconic and engimatic. I strongly recommend that you avoid it.
Another slow-moving film (maybe films shown at festivals have the right to be slow-moving, as it were, because they are addressing an audience committed to film), but an excellent one, was "The Pearl Button," directed by the Chilean Patricio Guzman, whose earlier film, "Nostalgia for Light," we had seen a few years ago at the film festival. Guzman moves from the element of water through the indigenous people of Patagonia, who were almost entirely exterminated by white colonists, to the Pinochet regime: nature and politics.
Another Chilean film that we saw was "The Club," about a group of defrocked Catholic priests in a coastal village. Harsh - I don't think many committed Catholics would enjoy it - but original and, again, thought-provoking. The high level of these two films indicates a sophisticated film industry and a society concerned with probing its own dark areas.
I went to see "Dreamcatcher" by myself, because my wife was deterred by the subject. It's a documentary about Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute and drug addict who now devotes her life to saving other women from that fate. One admires Myers-Powell greatly from start to finish and feels nothing but empathy and sadness for the victimized girls and women she reaches out to. However, the movie barely touches on the victimizers, the men who rape girls and traumatize them, so they turn to prostitution, and who patronize prostitutes, often beating them up and sometimes murdering them.
We saw one Indian movie, "Umrika," which was charming but slight. We liked it because it showed us India again.
We also saw "I Smile Back," because it stars Sarah Silverman in a serious acting role, not as a comedian, and we were sorry we saw it (though I have to admit that I was impressed by Silverman's acting). The film had two major problems. Rather than a plot, it had a situation: a wife and mother was mentally unstable and dependent on drugs, did irresponsible and self-destructive things, and there seemed to be little hope for her rehabilitation at the end. Also, because Silverman is not just an actress, but a comedian with a persona, it's very hard to see her as not in the role of the raunchy, irreverent stand-up comic.

We would strongly recommend "Iraqi Odyssey," a documentary by Samir, about his own family, scattered all over the world, like millions of other Iraqis, by the violent politics of their country. Samir manages to bring out the vivid personalities of his relatives and reminds you of the catastrophic history of his country, tying it to their fate.
We also saw the last documentary film made by Albert Maysles, "Iris," about Iris Apfel, a nonagerian New York Jewish woman, who talks just like everyone I knew when I was growing up, a woman who has devoted her life to style. Unlike the other movies that we chose, which mainly make you feel sad about the state of the world, "Iris" was cheerful.
"Land and Shade," a Colombian film directed by Cesar Acevedo, was another slow-moving movie, but one that didn't get very far. At most it makes you think about the oppressed workers who cut the sugar cane to sweeten your food.
I think the best film we saw was "Song of my Mother," directed by Erol Mintas, about displaced Kurdish people in Istanbul. The hero, an elementary school teacher teaching Kurdish children, is torn between the demands of his mother, obsessed with returning to their village, which has been destroyed, his pregnant fiancee, and his ambitions as a writer.
On top of these eleven films, we got hooked on a twenty part Danish thriller, "The Killing," which is much better than the American version, which we initially started to watch by mistake - I downloaded the wrong series.
So no wonder I am looking at my life as if it were a slow-moving movie, which might be more of a situation than a plot.

Difficulties - Dietary and Musical

Another reason why losing weight is challenging: you aren't called upon to do anything so much as not to do something.
Doing something can be difficult, of course: getting yourself to exercise, to make unpleasant phone calls, or to get around to an errand you have been postponing. But not doing something is even more challenging, unless it's something you don't do anyway. I've never been a smoker, so not smoking is no challenge for me, and neither is not shooting up with heroin. But everyone eats (except anorexics), so not eating at all is not an option.
The challenge is turning abstention (I won't eat any more chocolate ice cream) into a positive action. Could it be that re-framing abstention as action is a way of making the process easier: I am changing my eating habits.
Is this related?
Yesterday I played flute duets with a friend, who has been playing flute for a lot longer than I have, though it isn't his primary instrument, and I played below my ability. Why did that happen?
It's always harder to play with other people than it is to play by yourself. You have to listen to them, keep up with them, and be listened to by them. You're playing under pressure, even if the people you are playing with are friends and supportive. When I play alone, I'm not self-conscious. I assume that anyone who can hear me is trying hard not to pay attention. But my friend and I were paying attention our own playing, and attention is critical (if not necessarily judgmental). Also, we were sight-reading a bunch of duets that neither of us had practiced, so we naturally made mistakes (my friend was also playing below his ability).
The difficulty in playing an instrument in a new situation, with other musicians, is in collecting yourself, remembering to do all the things that make your playing passable: breathing, embouchure, fingering, feeling the music and playing it correctly. Paying attention to all of these factors is easier when you don't have the additional distraction and pressure of playing with someone else.
So maybe it's a matter of re-framing again. The presence of a fellow musician, rather than distracting you from what you need to bring to your playing, should focus your attention on it.

Thoughts About Losing Weight (Again)

Until I was about fifty, I was a jogger, and my weight wasn't a problem at all. We didn't even own a scale. But I got lazy and heavy.
For the past twenty years or so, I have weighed about eight kilograms more than I wanted to, and I somehow thought that I could will the excess weight off very gradually, without making any drastic change in my eating habits. Indeed, my weight fluctuated between two kilograms below my ordinary weight to one or two kilograms above it, but it always settled back to the same number. I wasn't gaining weight, which is apparently an achievement in itself, but I certainly wasn't losing any.
Essentially, I wasn't seriously motivated to put myself on a diet. Sure, it would be nice not to have the paunch I was carrying around, but most men my age have a paunch, usually quite a bit bigger. It goes with the territory. Also, the articles I looked at casually seemed to say that being moderately overweight wasn't much of a health risk. But perhaps that's a tautology: if you aren't so fat that you're endangering your health, you aren't overweight.
A couple of times I did manage to diet and lose those eight kilograms, but, while my attention was directed elsewhere, as it were, my weight crept back up to what it was before I dieted. That's a blow to one's motivation.
But about two months ago I had some alarming results on a blood test, which gave me a strong motivation to reduce the carbohydrates in my diet very drastically. On top of that, my knees have become arthritic, and carrying excess weight isn't good for them. Since then I've lost five of those eight kilograms. Let's see whether this time, once I get down to my target weight, I can stay there.
My strategy is not to count things or weigh things but to eliminate certain foods, especially bread, as completely as possible from my diet, and, when I'm hungry, to eat foods like vegetables, fruit, and nuts, which are good for me. Or I drink a cup of coffee or tea (without sugar or any artificial sweetener, of course).
While subjecting myself to this regimen, I've noticed some things:

• Carbohydrates are habit-forming and eating them stimulates the desire for more. Conversely, refraining from eating them reduces the desire for them.
• In order to lose weight (or change one's diet for any other reason), you must believe what should be obvious, but which most people deny: what you eat really makes a difference. It's so easy to say: "What harm could a mouthful of halva or a couple of cookies do?" (It helps if you congratulate yourself for not giving in to temptation.)
• If you watch what people eat (at a buffet or party, for example) you can generally see a strong correlation between what they eat, how much they eat, and how fat they are. But you have to remember that it's not immoral to be fat, and it's not virtuous to be thin. Eating is fun, and if some people want to enjoy themselves, it's up to them.
• There is a difference between real hunger and simply wanting to put something tasty in your mouth.
• There are times when I feel like eating something in some generic way, but I stop myself and compare my present, dieting behavior, to my former eating habits. So that's why I couldn't lose those eight kilograms!
• Oddly, when I weigh myself in the morning and see those low numbers, I sometimes feel alarmed. A couple of people have noticed that I've shed some weight and have asked my whether I'm ill. We're conditioned in contradictory fashion about weight. We think that slim people are pretty, but we think that thin people are unhealthy.
• Being too strict with yourself is counter-productive.
• Nothing is more boring than listening to someone talk about their food obsessions. Enough of this!

Creativity and Dreams

The most creative moments in our lives are dreams, and there is a strong connection between art and dreaming. For me, the best part of art is the inexplicable part, as in this famous, enigmatic painting by Picasso, where the figures appear to be floating in a dream.

A while back I proposed giving a talk entitled "Translating Creativity" at the annual translators' conference in Jerusalem, but we were going to be in India when the conference was held, so I withdrew my proposal. But I'm still deeply interested in the topic.
When I was taking clarinet lessons in high school, my teacher, Irving Neidich, told me that the greatest music is that which surprises you every time you hear it, which makes sense. How else could a soloist play the same piece time and time again and not be bored and not bore her listeners? Only because she discovers something new in the piece every time she plays it.
I did a brief search for "creativity" on the Internet and ran across a "creativity test," which, being a sucker for that kind of thing, I took. It turns out my creativity is significantly lower than average. Troubled by that result, I took another look at some of the statues I have made, and I realized that the people who designed the test had a rather different idea of creativity in their mind.

It was fairly dumb of me to bother taking that test, when our house is full of concrete evidence of my creativity.
If I ever get around to writing that paper on "Translating Creativity," it would have to begin with a section on recognizing creativity. And, since you can't recognize something you can't define, I'd have to define it.
And that would bring me back to the subject of dreams, which are undeniably creative. If you look up "dreams" on the Internet, you'll find dozens of articles about "How to Harness Your Dreams" to succeed and make a lot of money. I'm not interested either in that or in dreams as a key to one's personality. I'm interested in the feeling you have when you dream: you are in an invented world, which you invented, and things happen arbitrarily there. However, you accept those events as if they were ordinary. A person you haven't thought of for years shows up in your dream, but he or she doesn't look at all the way they did in real life - but you know who they are! You also find yourself in inexplicable situations. In my anxiety dreams I discover I had been supposed to teach a college course in calculus and forgotten about it, aside from the fact that I've never studied calculus and could not more teach it than I could teach Sumerian.
Recently we heard performances of Beethoven string quartets. In a way, the late ones are like a stream of consciousness, the volatile flow of moods, as in a dream. Obviously Beethoven didn't record his moods in real time. But he remembered the flow and put it in musical form, highly complex, carefully planned, but sounding spontaneous.

Thinking in the Languages of Music

It's a good idea to take a simple melody, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," or "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," and play it in all twelve keys, or to take a phrase you made up, a riff, and play it in all the twelve keys.
Usually I do it using the circle of fifths, so that the tonic of the tune becomes the dominant next time around, but once in an informal music group I was attending, we were challenged to play "Autumn Leaves" twelve times, each time going down half a step. We started making a lot of mistakes when we got to the keys with lots of sharps and flats. Jazz musicians commonly play that trick with "Mack the Knife."
Another good idea is to play through all seven of the modes in one key, starting in the Lydian mode with the sharp fourth and then flatting each note in proper order till you get to the Locrian, with the flatted fifth, then flatting the tonic and finding yourself playing the Lydian mode in them in the next key, and so on until you get back to the first key. E.g.:
C - D- E- F# - G - A- B - C (Lydian)
C - D- E- F - G - A- B- C (Ionian or major)
C - D- E- F - G - A- Bb - C (Mixolydian)
C - D- Eb - F- G- A- Bb - C (Dorian)
C - D- Eb - F- G- Ab- Bb - C (Aeolian, or natural minor)
C - Db- Eb - F- G- Ab- Bb - C (phrygian)
C - Db- Eb - F- Gb- Ab- Bb - C (locrian)

then when you flat the C, turning it enharmonically into B, you have the B Lydian scale:
B - Db (=C#) - Eb (=D#) - F (=E#) - Gb (=F#) - Ab (=G#) - Bb (=A#) - B


This kind of exercise is valuable because it's interesting and forces you to pay attention to what you're playing. It's a bit like changing sentences from one tense to another when you're learning a language or moving from singular to plural verb forms.

Incidentally, while I was checking on the nomenclature, I ran across a valuable chart of scales.

Who's Doing the Playing?

My flute teacher tends to work more with my imagination than with the mechanics of playing, and sometimes his instructions mystify me.
From the start, more than two years ago, he has been telling me to put myself into the notes that I play, and I have been struggling with that metaphor.
In a way, it's no different from the general message of Buddhist meditation. One should always put oneself into where one is and what one does.
My teacher also speaks of being aware of reality while one is playing, being attentive to what comes out of the flute and also to what one is putting into the instrument, and how (the quality of the breathing, the vibrato, the shape of one's lips, the tension in one's fingers, how one is standing and holding the instrument, and so on). This is clearly another way of saying that one should put oneself into the notes one plays.
His main criticism of my playing is what I might call timidity. I want to avoid making mistakes, so I don't take chances. I hold back and don't play with confidence. (Naturally, at the beginning, when I was never sure whether a note would come out of the instrument at all, I lacked self-confidence, but by now I am closer to being able to produce a reasonable sound every time I play a note, so I should get past that timidity.)
At my last lesson he told me that my alter-ego should be playing, because playing a musical instrument is one of those rare opportunities that life gives one to express what one ordinarily keeps under wraps.
This not an easy instruction for me. I am in fact not big on alter-egos. I'm not an actor by nature, though I could think of a few situations where I do let my alter-ego do the acting: mainly when I participate in religious services.
So, this morning, I decided to imagine an alter-ego who could play for me. I was very surprised by the figure that appeared in my imagination, not Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, but large, rather corpulent man in a tuxedo, light on his feet and very assertive. This morning he didn't play much better than I do, but he has potential.

Piano

I had to have some oral surgery, and the doctor said I wasn't allowed to play a wind instrument for a week or ten days, so I've been playing a little piano, very badly, instead.
The piano makes me think of a lecture-demonstration we just heard. Gil Shohat was ostensibly talking about madness in modern Western classical music, but it was mainly Shohat being his charming self (I am a big fan of his).
He started by playing a CD of the first Prokofiev violin concerto, with a mainly sweet and melodic first movement and a manic second movement, leaving me puzzled. How could Prokofiev have thought up that music? How did he plan it out?
Later Shohat was joined by a fabulous pianist, Dorel Golan, whom I had heard before and remembered. Her performances of extremely difficult etudes, entirely from memory, were extraordinary.
So, from piano to piano, there was a clip on the NY Times web site about an eleven yeard old jazz prodigy from Bali (!) named Joey Alexander (check him out), who plays better now than most pianists can ever hope to play.
One can only marvel at such a gift, be grateful for the rejuvenation of jazz, and hope that he develops into a mature artist (or, for that matter, that he takes up theoretical physics or whatever he wants to do).
No matter how wonderful these musicians are, both the prodigies and the products of long, disciplined practice, they don't make one's own meager efforts to produce music any less valuable to ourselves. One can't have a world where only one in ten thousand does what he or she does on the highest level, and all the rest of us sit in awe.
True, a lot of modern music (actually since the beginning of the nineteenth century) can only be played by virtuosi, and this might be a flaw in it - hard to play and hard to listen to. Last month I heard a performance of a string quartet by the Israeli composer, Tzvi Avni, much farther away from the conventions of classical music than Prokofiev's work, and I wondered how the musicians learned their impossible parts separately and then put them together, a truly astonishing feat - to say nothing of the composer's work. How did he hear the music in his mind and notate it?
We humans are capable of such wonderful things, and just a few hundred kilometers north of where I am, in Syria, we are treating our fellow humans with ferocious cruelty, and "the world" (whatever that is) can't or won't put a stop to it.