Contemporary Arts

My younger one had a paper to do on the arts of ancient India.  I suggested she talk about court music and the dance of South India, Bharatanatyam, as she has the good fortune of studying it, here in Beijing.   I mentioned a few famous performers, and she dutifully found pictures on line of the famous dancer Balasaraswati.  She put a picture of George Harrison up there with Ravi Shankar.  I was thinking it looked pretty good for the efforts of an eleven year old.  But the feedback was that she needed to find more “ancient” material.  These traditions are certainly “ancient,” and I think it’s unlikely we’ll find any ancient practitioners of these arts, but that’s the assignment.   

I dug out a few books about Indian history from off the shelf.  So I don’t know who carved the reliefs into the temples but certainly you can point to these forms or that terracotta tradition.  I found a copy of the Mahabrata and the Ramayana. It’s not clear that there is an author of these epic texts but you can think of them like the Iliad and Odyssey, I explained.  For now she has a lot of notes.  Tonight we’ll see what we can do to turn it all into something in her own words. 

Obama’s here on this side of the Pacific.  The third U.S. president to head down to Vietnam, since the culmination of our ten-year debacle in 1975.  He wants to end the weapons trade embargo.  He wants to talk about letting the U.S. Navy use Cam Ranh Bay, once again.  The Chinese press and the U.S. press alike call it like it is: an effort to put pressure on China, regionally.  Later in the week he’ll be up in Japan, visiting, but not apologizing at the atomic bomb memorial in Hiroshima. The head of the Taliban has been blown up in a drone strike. The photo of his wrecked vehicle is there on the top left of the New York Time’s home page. 

Poor Obama has tried hard to live up to the Nobel Peace Prize distinction of his first year in office.  But U.S. presidents are necessarily compelled to work at cross-purpose to non-violence.  Perhaps we all are, practitioners of the contemporary arts.