If my Nani was a Sahani and she married and became a Chadha and my mother was a Chadha and she married and became a Sahani, then that means that I would be Dr. ??? ... aahhh.. too much to think... but, hopefully--not stupid enough to get married!
Why is my mailbox being infiltrated with "GirlF***Friend" emails???
Anybody else find it odd that my 40 year old standardized patient for my physical diagnoses exam today looked at me funny when i asked him if he knows about condoms for protection after he told me he was happily married,... darn.. i spend so much time practicing, expecting a 15 yr old girl... it had to come out! glad i didn't ask him when was his last menstrual period...!!! --it was just at the tip of my tongue! :-) heheh....oh, joys of med school! okay....A-a gradient, pulmonary function tests, sarcoidosis...why do we need to know so much about the lungs anyway...? oh, reminding self to: exhale now...1,2,3...breathe...
so much we take for granted...
;-)
Friday, October 27, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Banana Anyone?
I LOVE BANANA NUT CRUNCH CEREAL!!! :cP~
Did you know that it is the black part of the banana that we consider "spoiled," is actually the part that is used to make banana pudding?
Did you know that it is the black part of the banana that we consider "spoiled," is actually the part that is used to make banana pudding?
Monday, October 23, 2006
Friday, October 20, 2006
Hi-Ho--It's off to jail We Go...
Can you make out the suited figure lurking in the mist?
Ten brave souls set out on a journey to the Eastern Penitentiary yesterday night. This massive edifice is said to have been the site where thousands of prisoners had been tortured, including the notorious, Al Capone. America's ghost hunters have picked up strange magnetic fields and have taped voices in several rooms of this prison. Now, our inquisitive medical minds set out to do some exploration and hunting on our own. What we saw and heard was not captured on film but will forever be embedded into our brains to haunt our dreams. I wish I could show you even a tenth of what I saw, but this is all I have to share as Canon doesn't fancy the dark...
So, I hope you enjoy and leave a comment or two...
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/parita_sahani/album?.dir=/47c5re2&.src=ph&.tok=phVM3rFBj7YXiPts
I guess you'll just have to check it out for yourself...
Go Here: http://www.easternstate.org/halloween/
and click on "Real Ghost Sightings"
Brrrruuuuuuuuaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
This inmate tried to jump out at me!
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Old people...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/18/health/18aged.html?hp&ex=1161230400&en=ea6a36c0084d2d05&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Monday, October 16, 2006
Featured in the New Yorker...
HARD AND FAST
What an Indian tradition can do for modern dance.
by JOAN ACOCELLA
Issue of 2006-10-23
Posted 2006-10-16
Globalization may have its downside, but it could do something for modern dance that a lot of people would appreciate; namely, restore musicality. Early this month, Pandit Birju Maharaj, the reigning guru of kathak—a dance form that grew up in the Hindu temples and the Mughal courts of northern India—gave a concert at the Peter Norton Symphony Space that may have been the most remarkable display of musical chops to hit the New York dance stage this year. Maharaj is sixty-eight, and he has slowed down. In this show, he was spelled by two disciples, Saswati Sen and Mahua Shankar. Nevertheless, he was soon demonstrating the advanced-math rhythms that kathak is famous for. He showed us how to lay a three-count foot-stamping phrase over a four-count musical phrase, and how to fit fives into sixteens. Saswati Sen did a dance to a count of nine and a half, a feat few people would have dreamed of. She accomplished it by taking some of the beats at double speed, and that is something else about kathak: how fast it gets, with no sacrifice of clarity. The dancer may be spinning like a rotary blade, but, from second to second, the head and arms are making exactly this shape, then exactly that. You can’t believe it—that so many different things are coming out of one source. And that’s not to speak of the mime dances, usually based on Hindu mythology, that are done in alternation with the rhythm studies. In these routines, the kathak performer often plays several characters. In a tale from the Ramayana, Sen was now a virtuous wife, now the god who seduced her, now the enraged husband, and also the river flowing by. Kathak is probably at least eight hundred years old, and in that time it has developed extraordinary subtlety.
Occasionally, for this reason, it is confounding. Maybe a jazz musician could have counted out Sen’s nine-and-a-half-beat phrase, but I couldn’t. Likewise with the stories. That milkmaid Maharaj portrayed at one point: what was she doing, so interestingly, with her hands? Petting a dog? Making dinner? Because kathak is such a perfect, specific flower of Indian history and religion, it looks foreign, like Kabuki, and therefore it might seem that, despite the large Indian populations living in Western capitals, this form could have no effect on Western dancing. You can’t just pick it up. People say that it takes six years to learn.
But you can now learn it in the West. Akram Khan, currently the most bankable British choreographer on the international dance scene, is, artistically, the grandson of Birju Maharaj. Born in London, of Bangladeshi parents, in 1974, he was taken by his mother at the age of seven to that city’s Academy of Indian Dance, where he studied with a famous kathak master, Sri Pratap Pawar, who was trained in India by Maharaj. Until he was twenty, he says, kathak, together with music videos (he adored Michael Jackson), was all he knew. He had no idea that there was such a thing as “modern dance.” Then he went to college, where he studied Martha Graham’s technique and Merce Cunningham’s, and he came out jumbled. He started choreographing in the late nineties, and his style, he told an interviewer, was “eighty percent kathak and twenty percent modern dance.”
You could see that in “Kaash” (2002), his first evening-length piece, which he brought to New York in 2003. This was kathak, but shorn of most of the elements that make it seem exotic. Gone was the Indian garb and the eyeliner and the ankle bells. Gone were the mime dances and, with them, the thing that most makes Indian dance look strange to us, its “facialism”: the rolling eyes, the fluttering eyebrows, the coy looks and pleading looks and angry looks. This facial acting is a whole art in itself, highly stylized, and it is part of the pride of kathak, but to untrained Western audiences—and possibly also to a young Anglo-Bangladeshi growing up in London in the eighties and nineties—it can look like silent-movie acting.
So Khan got rid of the plummy parts, and he hung on to the steely parts, the rhythms. Furthermore, he transferred them to his ensemble. Kathak is traditionally performed solo, but in “Kaash” Khan had five dancers doing the fancy rhythmic combinations. More than that, he made the mathematics visual as well as audial. Again and again, in a line of dancers working in unison, one would peel off, start doing something else, in counterpoint to the others, and thus introduce the seed of change. The resulting dances looked like some biological process glimpsed through a lab microscope—cell division, maybe—where first you have unity, then disturbance and metamorphosis. Another element of kathak that Khan kept was virtuosity. He himself is a firecracker of a dancer—small, tight-strung, but quick and wild. “Kaash” ’s ensemble was just as impressive. Khan had taught the dancers kathak, not for six years, obviously, but long enough. They acted as though they had been doing this dance forever.
And narrative? Earlier this year, Khan—speaking, I believe, for all dancers rooted in what was once called the Third World—told Claudia La Rocco, of the Times, that every dance he did was narrative: “I don’t believe in the word ‘abstract,’ in what I do.” To another interviewer he said that “Kaash” had a big story, combining modern physics with ancient Hinduism: it was about Shiva, the creator-destroyer god, seen as “a black hole in space that sucks everything in—light, matter, sound.” “Kaash” is Hindi for “if.” Presumably, the title refers to the indeterminacy of Shiva’s universe.
I don’t quite buy this explanation, or, rather, I see it as background. Choreographers often start a piece with a story in mind and then create a dance in which the story is completely absorbed, becoming a mood rather than a narrative. “Kaash” had a sinister feel to it. There was a solo for a woman who seemed like a wounded insect trying to find its legs. There was also a tense, erotic duet for Khan and a woman (big, strong, excellent Moya Michael) in which he covered her eyes with his hand, blinding her. But nobody talked about Shiva, or anything else. The piece was abstract, and it looked like modern dance. For many years, modern-dance choreographers have been making good use of African dance—which is not hard, since it is so much a part of our culture—but adaptations of Asian dance tend to look like dress-up: Barbie goes to an ashram. Khan, because kathak is native, not foreign, to him, was able to beat the odds. Last spring, three years after the New York première of “Kaash,” he brought us “Ma” (2004). This dance did have an overt story—indeed, a text by the novelist Hanif Kureishi—about Mother Earth, which is what “ma” means. But, as in “Kaash,” the soul of the piece was rhythmic dancing. These two works, both set to Indian-inspired scores (“Kaash” ’s by Nitin Sawhney, “Ma” ’s mostly by Riccardo Nova), are the only really successful fusions of modern dance with Indian dance that I have ever seen.
This month, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a celebration of the seventieth birthday of Steve Reich, Khan showed a new piece, “Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings,” to a Reich composition of the same name, and it was a surprise, because it was less kathak-based, less rhythm-driven, than anything else we have seen by him. It was a trio for three men—Khan; Young Jin Kim, a Korean; and Gregory Maqoma, a South African—and it had two themes. One was multiculturalism, as embodied by the three dancers (and Reich’s music). The other was the unity of dance and music. As the curtain rose, we beheld the London Sinfonietta ranged on two sides of the stage—violins, violas, cellos, pianos, vibraphones, plus the conductor, Alan Pierson. It was just an orchestra, but, displayed in that way, like a set, it was a heart-stopping sight, the cellos gleaming, the vibraphones winking at the lights. Khan was saying how beautiful music is, and how dance is nothing without it. But, as the piece progressed, it turned out that this was all he was going to say. The dancers did solos, duets, and trios, but eventually they gave up on that and began conducting the orchestra, along with Pierson. Kathak, with its rhythmic meditations, was nowhere in evidence. I think I know why. Given the multiculturalism theme and its casting consequences—three virtuoso dancers, from three different lands—Khan could not impose his own style. On the other hand, that style is his language. Without it, he didn’t have any ideas.
I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come. Khan has told the press that he is now taking time off from his company. He’s been making a series of duets for himself and other star performers, such as Juliette Binoche (a dance-theatre piece) and the ballerina Sylvie Guillem. This project may be, in part, a product of exhaustion. After “Kaash,” Khan became famous very fast. He was covered with honors—he got an M.B.E. last year—and invited everywhere. To directors of dance festivals, there is nothing more attractive these days than a talented choreographer of bicultural origin. Khan recently said that for the past few years he has been touring ten months a year—a punishing schedule. If, as a result, he is now doing side jobs, that is understandable. It’s easier than running a company.
But, without a company, Khan will not be able to go on exploring kathak, and that would be a terrible loss. “Kaash” may have looked like modern dance, but in one sense it departed from the main line of that tradition: it was musical. Modern dance arose partly in opposition to ballet, and one of the fripperies of ballet that some early modern dancers were determined to throw off was subservience to music. We tend to locate modern dance’s split with music in the nineteen-sixties, with Judson Dance Theatre, but it began early in the century, and it hasn’t gone away. In every downtown dance venue, on every Saturday night, you can see performers doing just about anything except moving to a beat. But audiences are hungry for musical dancing, and they have found it, usually in other kinds of dance—in ballet, for example. Utterly empty ballets will often be frenetically applauded if they are performed to a rousing beat. A better example is “ethnic” dance. Why is the cheesy Riverdance such a hit? Why does the New York Flamenco Festival sell out? Because their shows are exciting musically. To come back to modern dance, what makes Mark Morris so popular? Why are the works of Ronald K. Brown the main draw of the Alvin Ailey company’s recent repertory? Partly because both men have taken their inspiration from music-bound ethnic forms—African dance in Brown’s case, Balkan dance and flamenco in Morris’s. As populations go on moving from Asia and Africa to Europe and America, this revival of musicality in modern dance will continue. I hope Khan will be part of it. That is, I hope he gets back to kathak soon.
What an Indian tradition can do for modern dance.
by JOAN ACOCELLA
Issue of 2006-10-23
Posted 2006-10-16
Globalization may have its downside, but it could do something for modern dance that a lot of people would appreciate; namely, restore musicality. Early this month, Pandit Birju Maharaj, the reigning guru of kathak—a dance form that grew up in the Hindu temples and the Mughal courts of northern India—gave a concert at the Peter Norton Symphony Space that may have been the most remarkable display of musical chops to hit the New York dance stage this year. Maharaj is sixty-eight, and he has slowed down. In this show, he was spelled by two disciples, Saswati Sen and Mahua Shankar. Nevertheless, he was soon demonstrating the advanced-math rhythms that kathak is famous for. He showed us how to lay a three-count foot-stamping phrase over a four-count musical phrase, and how to fit fives into sixteens. Saswati Sen did a dance to a count of nine and a half, a feat few people would have dreamed of. She accomplished it by taking some of the beats at double speed, and that is something else about kathak: how fast it gets, with no sacrifice of clarity. The dancer may be spinning like a rotary blade, but, from second to second, the head and arms are making exactly this shape, then exactly that. You can’t believe it—that so many different things are coming out of one source. And that’s not to speak of the mime dances, usually based on Hindu mythology, that are done in alternation with the rhythm studies. In these routines, the kathak performer often plays several characters. In a tale from the Ramayana, Sen was now a virtuous wife, now the god who seduced her, now the enraged husband, and also the river flowing by. Kathak is probably at least eight hundred years old, and in that time it has developed extraordinary subtlety.
Occasionally, for this reason, it is confounding. Maybe a jazz musician could have counted out Sen’s nine-and-a-half-beat phrase, but I couldn’t. Likewise with the stories. That milkmaid Maharaj portrayed at one point: what was she doing, so interestingly, with her hands? Petting a dog? Making dinner? Because kathak is such a perfect, specific flower of Indian history and religion, it looks foreign, like Kabuki, and therefore it might seem that, despite the large Indian populations living in Western capitals, this form could have no effect on Western dancing. You can’t just pick it up. People say that it takes six years to learn.
But you can now learn it in the West. Akram Khan, currently the most bankable British choreographer on the international dance scene, is, artistically, the grandson of Birju Maharaj. Born in London, of Bangladeshi parents, in 1974, he was taken by his mother at the age of seven to that city’s Academy of Indian Dance, where he studied with a famous kathak master, Sri Pratap Pawar, who was trained in India by Maharaj. Until he was twenty, he says, kathak, together with music videos (he adored Michael Jackson), was all he knew. He had no idea that there was such a thing as “modern dance.” Then he went to college, where he studied Martha Graham’s technique and Merce Cunningham’s, and he came out jumbled. He started choreographing in the late nineties, and his style, he told an interviewer, was “eighty percent kathak and twenty percent modern dance.”
You could see that in “Kaash” (2002), his first evening-length piece, which he brought to New York in 2003. This was kathak, but shorn of most of the elements that make it seem exotic. Gone was the Indian garb and the eyeliner and the ankle bells. Gone were the mime dances and, with them, the thing that most makes Indian dance look strange to us, its “facialism”: the rolling eyes, the fluttering eyebrows, the coy looks and pleading looks and angry looks. This facial acting is a whole art in itself, highly stylized, and it is part of the pride of kathak, but to untrained Western audiences—and possibly also to a young Anglo-Bangladeshi growing up in London in the eighties and nineties—it can look like silent-movie acting.
So Khan got rid of the plummy parts, and he hung on to the steely parts, the rhythms. Furthermore, he transferred them to his ensemble. Kathak is traditionally performed solo, but in “Kaash” Khan had five dancers doing the fancy rhythmic combinations. More than that, he made the mathematics visual as well as audial. Again and again, in a line of dancers working in unison, one would peel off, start doing something else, in counterpoint to the others, and thus introduce the seed of change. The resulting dances looked like some biological process glimpsed through a lab microscope—cell division, maybe—where first you have unity, then disturbance and metamorphosis. Another element of kathak that Khan kept was virtuosity. He himself is a firecracker of a dancer—small, tight-strung, but quick and wild. “Kaash” ’s ensemble was just as impressive. Khan had taught the dancers kathak, not for six years, obviously, but long enough. They acted as though they had been doing this dance forever.
And narrative? Earlier this year, Khan—speaking, I believe, for all dancers rooted in what was once called the Third World—told Claudia La Rocco, of the Times, that every dance he did was narrative: “I don’t believe in the word ‘abstract,’ in what I do.” To another interviewer he said that “Kaash” had a big story, combining modern physics with ancient Hinduism: it was about Shiva, the creator-destroyer god, seen as “a black hole in space that sucks everything in—light, matter, sound.” “Kaash” is Hindi for “if.” Presumably, the title refers to the indeterminacy of Shiva’s universe.
I don’t quite buy this explanation, or, rather, I see it as background. Choreographers often start a piece with a story in mind and then create a dance in which the story is completely absorbed, becoming a mood rather than a narrative. “Kaash” had a sinister feel to it. There was a solo for a woman who seemed like a wounded insect trying to find its legs. There was also a tense, erotic duet for Khan and a woman (big, strong, excellent Moya Michael) in which he covered her eyes with his hand, blinding her. But nobody talked about Shiva, or anything else. The piece was abstract, and it looked like modern dance. For many years, modern-dance choreographers have been making good use of African dance—which is not hard, since it is so much a part of our culture—but adaptations of Asian dance tend to look like dress-up: Barbie goes to an ashram. Khan, because kathak is native, not foreign, to him, was able to beat the odds. Last spring, three years after the New York première of “Kaash,” he brought us “Ma” (2004). This dance did have an overt story—indeed, a text by the novelist Hanif Kureishi—about Mother Earth, which is what “ma” means. But, as in “Kaash,” the soul of the piece was rhythmic dancing. These two works, both set to Indian-inspired scores (“Kaash” ’s by Nitin Sawhney, “Ma” ’s mostly by Riccardo Nova), are the only really successful fusions of modern dance with Indian dance that I have ever seen.
This month, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a celebration of the seventieth birthday of Steve Reich, Khan showed a new piece, “Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings,” to a Reich composition of the same name, and it was a surprise, because it was less kathak-based, less rhythm-driven, than anything else we have seen by him. It was a trio for three men—Khan; Young Jin Kim, a Korean; and Gregory Maqoma, a South African—and it had two themes. One was multiculturalism, as embodied by the three dancers (and Reich’s music). The other was the unity of dance and music. As the curtain rose, we beheld the London Sinfonietta ranged on two sides of the stage—violins, violas, cellos, pianos, vibraphones, plus the conductor, Alan Pierson. It was just an orchestra, but, displayed in that way, like a set, it was a heart-stopping sight, the cellos gleaming, the vibraphones winking at the lights. Khan was saying how beautiful music is, and how dance is nothing without it. But, as the piece progressed, it turned out that this was all he was going to say. The dancers did solos, duets, and trios, but eventually they gave up on that and began conducting the orchestra, along with Pierson. Kathak, with its rhythmic meditations, was nowhere in evidence. I think I know why. Given the multiculturalism theme and its casting consequences—three virtuoso dancers, from three different lands—Khan could not impose his own style. On the other hand, that style is his language. Without it, he didn’t have any ideas.
I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come. Khan has told the press that he is now taking time off from his company. He’s been making a series of duets for himself and other star performers, such as Juliette Binoche (a dance-theatre piece) and the ballerina Sylvie Guillem. This project may be, in part, a product of exhaustion. After “Kaash,” Khan became famous very fast. He was covered with honors—he got an M.B.E. last year—and invited everywhere. To directors of dance festivals, there is nothing more attractive these days than a talented choreographer of bicultural origin. Khan recently said that for the past few years he has been touring ten months a year—a punishing schedule. If, as a result, he is now doing side jobs, that is understandable. It’s easier than running a company.
But, without a company, Khan will not be able to go on exploring kathak, and that would be a terrible loss. “Kaash” may have looked like modern dance, but in one sense it departed from the main line of that tradition: it was musical. Modern dance arose partly in opposition to ballet, and one of the fripperies of ballet that some early modern dancers were determined to throw off was subservience to music. We tend to locate modern dance’s split with music in the nineteen-sixties, with Judson Dance Theatre, but it began early in the century, and it hasn’t gone away. In every downtown dance venue, on every Saturday night, you can see performers doing just about anything except moving to a beat. But audiences are hungry for musical dancing, and they have found it, usually in other kinds of dance—in ballet, for example. Utterly empty ballets will often be frenetically applauded if they are performed to a rousing beat. A better example is “ethnic” dance. Why is the cheesy Riverdance such a hit? Why does the New York Flamenco Festival sell out? Because their shows are exciting musically. To come back to modern dance, what makes Mark Morris so popular? Why are the works of Ronald K. Brown the main draw of the Alvin Ailey company’s recent repertory? Partly because both men have taken their inspiration from music-bound ethnic forms—African dance in Brown’s case, Balkan dance and flamenco in Morris’s. As populations go on moving from Asia and Africa to Europe and America, this revival of musicality in modern dance will continue. I hope Khan will be part of it. That is, I hope he gets back to kathak soon.
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