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Man With Sign, February 14, 02025
Friday is cold and clear, with temperatures in the low 20s F. I have chemical heat in my gloves but not my boots as I walk up to Roosevelt Circle, arriving at 7:32 and clamping my big sign to the guardrail post. Today I am holding up the simple directive: WE MUST BE BETTER ANCESTORS. Craige is out of town until next week, so I'm a soloist.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG2HeI0kUx0
#ClimateChaos #ClimateChange #CitizenActivism #HindustaniMusic
Traffic is light, typically so for a Friday. Aside from the mechanically repetitive admonition of the get-a-jpb guy (who rolls his window down so I'm sure to hear him), everyone else who offers a response is positive. The sun is extremely bright and by midway through the vigil I'm feeling the warmth on my body.
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Today is the last day of practice in "kahe laadali," and as I've been doing for the past several days, I simply launch into free improvisation and keep my ears open to find out where things will lead. The first twenty minutes or so I work on reshaping both the mukhda and other parts of the composition, with the aim of landing at whichever beat the phrase under consideration is built around.
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This is fun and my voice seems responsive and trouble-free, which is less of a crapshoot these days than six weeks ago, when dysphonia in the passaggio was seemingly chronic. A little before 8 I move to work on the antara, applying some of the same procedures to bol-alapi, especially on the first line "jaisi ritu upaje mo mana."
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In the last third of the session I feel motivated to do a little work on quintuplet bol-bant, singing five notes in the space of two beats. There are several syllable groups in the asthai that express a 2+3 partitioning, and I build around these to create 1- and 2-cycle sequences, eventually finding a couple of formulae that work well and have a nice flow to them.
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John Gallagher arrives at 8:17 and takes some pictures while I sing. At 8:23 I make a video, then continue singing for the rest of the hour. At 8:26 the wind knocks over my big sign and sends my bag flying, and John helps out, holding my sign while I restore everything to its place for the last few minutes of the vigil.
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And then the hour is up, the week is up. I'll be in Boston at mid-day today for a demonstration, hauling my tired, sore body out to join in solidarity with all of us who cannot stand idly by. I had hoped we would have found new stuff to protest by now, but no. The struggle continues.
Have a good weekend. Monday is a holiday, so I'll see you Tuesday.
Man With Sign
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