Back to the Roots - the Folklore

Sticking to the "good old things" idea, I've been closely pursuing a dear subject of mine, folklore music.
How people sing and play when they've never studied it, only by having it "in their bones"...
If you watch such a song, it does have a basic structure, that makes sense, but how long a phrase lasts, or how many lines a verse has, that's almost always different. Not only from one interpret to another, but also depending on the moment or mood they're in.

Now that's FEELING! That's feeling purity!

The moment one's starting to "learn" music and count bars in his/her head to make sure that every lyric fits in the assigned measure and doesn't go, ups, upbeat by mistake sometimes (although, what a charming mistake...), then the magic is gone.

That's how one can't "learn" to play blues, for example. Because blues is a state of mind, a mirror of somebody's life, who lived in a certain time and certain conditions and experienced certain feelings, not just some vocals studied by heart, or some pentatonic licks, and certainly NOT a 12 bar formula, as they teach in schools (as mentioned above, most of the original works of the genre don't have a fixed form).

And, studying the Romanian folklore, I find it even better.
First, because it's always been a group activity, and, as in any brainstorming, more people come up with more interesting idea than only one.
Second, because it's mostly happy (well except the ballads and doinas which HAVE TO be sad).

In my opinion, one of the main reasons the Romanian folklore has an optimistic way to look at things is because it never mentions the problem of money :D. There is trade, but no money (everytime money comes into discussion, there's trouble - that's why most American blues heroes are so messed up... ;))
And that is because Romanian folklore is older than the extensive use of money.

And because they were working for themselves, for their own wellbeing. Exercising all day on the sunny fields, together with their neighbours, their loved ones and their animals, that's how they fed their families and kept up their optimistic mood.

The best pictures of nature (forests, plants, rivers, wild and domestic animals), rural landscapes, yearly seasons, beautiful girls, weekly village dances are to be found in folklore songs! So pure and full of life like no painter or writer could put it.

And, another important thing, in the Romanian folklore one can find the genuine national traditions. Not the false religious ones that were introduced in time by the church and slowly imposed themselves as "ancient" habits.
It's indeed noteworthy that the folk songs almost never mention church rituals, but they celebrate love, generousity, compassion (and equally hate, gealousy, envy, like any normal human feelings), work, beauty, good weather, wishful thinking, youth or old age, good manners and social morals, without giving them any religious meaning. That's what gives them a detached atmosphere of good mood, without any guilt or uncertainties.

I find it very worthy of admiration how those simple people knew in their heart and brain the way to peace and happiness.

Stories and Grandparents II

So I remember my Grandpa full of a great humour, that sometimes would also upset others, although I couldn't understand why. Or, well, maybe I did, but I couldn't see why people were so stiff and unwilling to open their mouths and laugh at little funny things.

That was one thing he didn't lose till the end of his life, not with all the bitterness and heavy drinking of the last years with an ill wife - stuck to bed and also embittered by suffering - and with a household to take care of all by himself.

Still then, he would play his little tricks, and make innocent fun of everybody, and especially of himself!

I remember his laugh, which would start with a deep breathing out and continued with even more rough breathing out through rare, heavy "haha"s (only that, and would make me laugh too).

I also remember him loving to look neat. "Sint fudul, tataie!" ("I'm conceit, grandchild" in a very aproximate translation) he used to laugh while combing his hair to the back of his head with some special hair cream every morning. I didn't quite understand that word but in my mind it was pretty positive and funny, which still hasn't changed.

At events, he would put on these funny trousers, that were another amusing and puzzling invention to me. They were probably cavalry equipment, for riding, cause they were baggy puffed in the upper side and would get very narrow right under his knees, so they could get into high boots.
Some pairs of very impressive boots he had too, high and heavy (I would be allowed to bring them!) and shiny, that he preserved stuffed with fancy wooden shapers inside and he would cream and polish for hours every now and then.

Then the shaving... oh, that was a whole ritual. And my favourite moment of the week! I would leave any playing or doggy chase aside and I'd watch still and wide-eyed everything he's doing.

Always the same (that was somehow the fascination):

Now he's warming up water in the large kettle on the fire. Now he takes out the tin basin and puts it on its special stand in the sun, in the best angle and light. I bring out the special mirror, with a prop, which you can fix at a certain height, and the barber brush, and the soap. It's a very special soap, cilindrical and weird-smelling, for which he would travel long distances to get... But the razor, that one he brings himself. It's sharp, and very dangerous for kids.
Then comes the best moment! When he produces lots and lots of foam with his magic soap and warm water and puts it all over his face! Hahaha! He's the funniest in the world! And he knows that too. And then he suddenly forgets about everything and gets a very tight and concentrated expression as he starts shaving veeery slowly every bit of his face. Haha, that's even funnier! He's much too serious all of a sudden not to make you laugh. And then those grimaces and wry faces to get some certain portion of skin cleared out... Well of course my Dad would shave too, and he'd make almost the same faces, but his foam would come out of a can, already made and perfumed, what's the magic in that...

Grandpa stopped smoking the moment my Dad called to tell him the news about my birth. Cause he planned to be around for a while and watch me growing. He also planted a garden full of plum trees so I have enough fruit to eat and enough trees to climb if I want to do so (I would take more that full advantage of that some years later...). There were the sweetest, the most savourous, the most amazingly coloured, the most enormous sorts of plums I've ever seen (even to this day).

And Grandpa kept the best dogs too - perfectly behaved and trained and highly intelligent. I've learned valuable lessons from most of them...

Grandpa would build for me huge snowmen in the winter, and swings on tree branches in the spring, and would fill up barrels with water from the wheel fountain to dip in on the hot summer days, and would bring me corn puppets to play with in the autumn (all hair colors).

...And everybody was merry, no worries in the world... when I was small, and my Parents were young, and my Grandmother was healthy, and my Grandfather had dark thick hair, combed on the back with a special cream...


...To be continued someday

Stories and Grandparents

Stories have a special charm and mistery anyway. But when told by your Grandparents they're unequalled. It's just the way things are.

Something that happened today brought to my mind one fairytale my Grandmother used to tell us (me and my brother). And made me realize I still remember it, after all these years... We still know whole phrases of it.
I remember we made her tell it so many times that we already knew when she's "improvising" or sticking to the subject.

The very idea of hearing the old ones telling us something that happened in some unreal world (or in their past, which to us was pretty unreal too) was making every word so sweet and the whole experience as cool as any nowadays computer game.
We would gather around them and feeding on every bit of that fantasy material as on candy.

Now I find it quite sensational to have heard world-war-stories first hand, and I also regret not remembering all of them. But back then they were just simple (though amazing) stories...


What impressed me the most probably was the tale of the beautiful horses taken away by the army (don't remember what army though, could have been the Romanian, although Grandma would also tell of enemy German and Russian soldiers who would pass through villages, robbing them of any food supply they could find - Germans would always be polite and even say thank you for the livestock and crops they would steal, leaving desperate and hungry people behind; but Russians were much worse, they would also devastate, burn, rape and destroy everything they could get their hands on).

I could almost feel the grief my Grandma as a young girl felt when their beloved horses were taken away, fighting against and neighing loudly. I could see those tall proud animals in their every detail, as she described them, in their full color and height, with their special birth marks on their foreheads or feet, and I could feel dearly cared-for family members taken away.

And my eyes were full of tears. Then, at the end, when, after almost 6 years, one of them, the strongest and most beautiful of them finds its way home all by itself, skinny and sick, a shaddow of the fine creature it used to be, I used to cry for good (was kind of ashamed of it, but it was too beautiful and impressive a story to not shake up my already artistic imagination).


Then it was the story of the terrible heat wave on the Hiroshima day, when my Dad was only a few months old. It has been booked down, carved by my Granddad in the wooden beam of the bedroom ceiling and, man, was it exciting to descipher it when we grew up a bit and could read.

My Granddad was a learnt man. Not only was he one of the few in the village who could read and write, but he was informed on many other things (it's from him I've learned mathematical fractions way before getting to that in school, as a matter of fact).
He was a trained bridge engineer and during the war he would put together those heavy temporary bridges made of massive floating iron surfaces tightened together with heavy metal cables, on which tanks could cross a river. In times of peace his knowledge served as to fix roads and protect crops and roads by stopping massive snow storms with special fences put op on the fields.

So now coming back to the Hiroshima event, he knew what was going on on that horrible day when the sky got purple red and animals would instantly die with heat. He ran to the field to fetch Grandma and the baby in a white light cotton dress (we kids used to giggle at the thought of Daddy wearing a dress) and got into the darkest corner of the house, baby swaddled in wet sheets to keep it cool.

Reading this we would find ourselves transposed on that "Today, the 6th of August 1945, when the skies got red with heat..."., almost touching a young Granddad in front of us, reaching up and using his army knife to carve this story in wood while hiding from the nature gone mad outside.


...Those little traces in the timeline who would bring you to realize things about yourself and the world...

Like seeing that Dad's foot was once so small as the tiny footprint in the cement doorway showed it.
When we were very young, one could still distinctly see each one of its little toes. They faded away in time till all that was left of that footstep was a small cavity in the stone...


(read here the next episode, about Grandpa)

Church Bells - the most annoying noise pollution

These organisations that promote belief in some magical man that lives in the sky already get away without paying taxes, why should they get away with regularly making a disturbance that would get any rock show shut down?

They always "adapt" their theories to survive the doubts of always more educated and people-friendlier societies, so why not adapt self-promoting too? Why not using emails instead? :D

...Although, if I think about it, tobacco industries (whose products are just as unuseful, addictive and long term poisonous for individuals and groups around them as religion) are not allowed to advertise anymore...

So in the meantime all is left for me to do on such a sunny and peaceful Sunday is to use some earplugs and dream of a happy healthy world without churches or cigarettes...