Night Ride Across the Caucasus

The photo above was taken by the Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorski in the early 1900s in Dagestan in the Caucasus.

Though small the Caucasus or Caucasia is one of the most linguistically, ethnically, and culturally diverse regions on earth. The region is bordered by Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the Caspian and Black Seas.

The following video is called Night Ride Across the Caucasus. The singer is Loreena McKennitt.

Some Americans may remember what some call Russia's equivalent to 9/11, the Beslan School Massacre, where over 300 civilians who were mostly children were killed by Chechen militants on September 1, 2004. Beslan is in the northern Caucasus.

Also for the readers of this blog, I plan to write posts here only on weekends.

Enjoy this positively breathtaking video.

Mexican Romantic: Alejandro Fernandez

Like many singers I love, I just happened upon Alejandro Fernandez by hearing one of his songs I liked on a CD I bought of Grammy Award Winning Latin singers.

Alejandro Fernandez is one of Mexico's most popular singers. He began his career singing mostly ranchera and mariachi music like his father Vicente Fernandez, another singer famous throughout Latin America. Alejandro has the nickname "El Potrillo" which means "the little colt." His father Vicente, is called "El Gran Garanon" meaning "the great stallion."

In the last several years, Alejandro Fernandez has changed his style to Romantic pop ballads, always sung in Spanish. He has partnered with singers like Gloria Estefan, Placido Domingo, Marc Anthony, and more recently with Beyonce.

At 36, Fernandez has been married twice and twice divorced. He has five children. He says of his music and himself, "“Romanticism is something that will never die. I’m super, ultra passionate."
I think of Alejandro Fernandez as a kind of Mexican Elvis, but sans (without) the moves. The following video is one of my favorite songs by him and is from his first acting effort Zapata: El sueno de un heroe; translated into English, "Zapata: The Dream of a Hero."

The Romance of Women in Western Art

Sometime last summer I discovered and saved to my YouTube favorites the following video, Women in Art. For the art lover and Romantic, it is a spectacular compilation of female artistic forms in western art over the last five centuries. As I have mentioned before, I minored in art (drawing & painting) when I was an undergraduate. Emma Alvarez whose blog I have listed under my Blogs With Class section presented the video on her site several months ago, I believe. Her comments about it can be read here. So here is Women in Art along with Bach's Sarabande from Suite for Solo Cello No. 1.




A companion to Women in Art is this also beautiful and breathtaking video also called Women in Art with Romantic imagery of women by a number of 19th century European artists like William Adolphe Bouguereau and the Pre-Raphaelites.

A New Discovery, Sort Of...

When I was an undergraduate at The University of Georgia, I almost majored in anthropology. At the time my alma mater was seeking or claimed to be diligently seeking minorities especially African Americans to major in fields which did not usually attract blacks. Among my choice of electives I picked anthropology since then as now I was extremely interested in world cultures. The professor I studied under encouraged me to consider majoring in the field because I did so well in my studies, getting all A's. I evaded her urgings for reasons I will not go into here.

Around 2003 or 2004 when I was hunting online for any information I could find on Iraqi reactions to what was happening to their country, I found a site called Iraq4u.com which catered to Iraqis who no longer resided in Iraq. On the site were some Iraqi music by various singers, and because of my search there I fell in love with the music of Ilham al Madfai. I subsequently bought one of his CDs. But besides discovering al Madfai, I learned from the site that a people whom I thought had vanished in the pages of Biblical history still existed in Iraq. These people are the Assyrians, the fearsome warriors spoken of over and over in the Old Testament portion of The Bible. The ancient capital of the Assyrians was Nineveh, and even today in Iraq there is a province called Nineveh (Ninawa). There is very little left of what was once the ancient city of Nineveh, however, the descendents of these ancient people who had one of the first Middle Eastern high cultures live on, not as the worshippers of pagan gods like their ancestors millenia ago, but as Christian people. The Assyrians live dispersed throughout the world now. Assyrian minorities who still live in the regions which is their homeland are threatened by Arabization and Islamic extremism. About 400,000 live in the US.

The Assyrians are a Semitic people, whose native language is a form of Aramaic called called Neo-Aramaic or Syriac. Jesus is believed to have spoken Aramaic, so I am sure knowledge of this gives the Assyrian people a lot of pride. When I was Turkey in September, I watched a program on Al Jazeera English one afternoon, about a soccer team for the Assyrian community in Sweden. In this report, I heard for the first time about the Turkish genocide against the Assyrians who lived in eastern Turkey. I was well aware of stories of the Armenian Genocide, but here was a second group who apparently is not fighting as aggressively to get Turkey to admit to crimes as the Armenians are doing. At least I have not heard of any uproar coming from the Assyrian quarter to the degree it does from the Armenians.

What I am learning about the modern day Assyrian people is fascinating along with their music. One of their top singers who was born in Baghdad, but now lives in California is Linda George. She sings in Syriac (Neo-Aramaic) and English and has been inspired by such singers as Anita Baker and Barbara Streisand. Her official website can be accessed here.

The Assyrian people are very proud of their heritage and dream of being able to reclaim their homeland. They were after all the old kids on the block before the Babylons, Medes, Persians, Arabs, and Turks showed up in their territories. Nevertheless, the Assyrians are a mixed "race" of people. I personally think the ones I have viewed online resemble the Turkish people more than they do Arabs, Iranians, or Kurds.

It is said that Assyrian culture was around over 6,000 years ago. They had converted to Christianity before Islam existed. When I look at the products of Assyrian nationalism, it is a interesting mixture of their pagan and Christian heritage. These people are proud, ancient, and becoming a group which is a rare entity in the Middle East: they are Christians.

Here is a video by Linda George about Iraq.



A video by Assyrian singer Faris Esho with a lively couple dancing in traditional Assyrian costume.



A nationalist Assyrian video with (can you believe it?!) the rapper 50 Cent wearing a muscle shirt with the Assyrian flag on it. Is he Assyrian? :) Or does he even know that what he is wearing is the Assyrian flag? Perhaps an Assyrian fan gave it to him.




Here is another Assyrian nationalist video which has art referencing ancient Assyrian civilization.

Finally this video explains Assyrian traditional clothing

I really hope this ancient people can survive because the world will be less colorful without them.

A Romantic Pick From Turkey: Winter 2004-2005

I have traveled to the country of Turkey five times. Thrice I have resided there and worked as an English teacher teaching the language as a second language. When I tell people that I have lived and worked in Turkey as an English teacher, some ask me what language do the citizens of Turkey speak. Most have never heard of the Turkish language.

I had an intense love affair with the country from 2003 until this year. I never thought my love could be so fickle, but it receded into the mists. Now I have just both fond, perplexed, and exasperated feelings for the place.

When I was working in Turkey's largest city Istanbul, during the winter of 2004-2005, the school where I was employed had put me up in a cheap but clean hotel. Often my room's heater did not give out enough heat, so on the two days when I was not working and the weather was too bad to go out I would look at a music video station named KRAL. Kral in Turkish means "king." This video by Cuneyt Tek is called 'Gidersen' which means "If you go..." I would sit in my hotel room or lie in bed and wait for it to come on. The hotel where I stayed for 3 months only carried about eight television stations, all of which were in Turkish. Since at the time I knew almost no Turkish, I would watch KRAL since "music," as someone once said "is the universal language." Later when I bought Tek's CD containing the song, "Gidersen" I played it for my best friend Hanife, and using the liner notes containing the lyrics, we sang the song together one day during my one of my breaks. Hanife told me that "Gidersen" is a love song which I had already gathered from the video. She also told me that she thinks Cuneyt Tek is very cute. He is, and rather remains me of a very young, teenage Burt Reynolds. I also knew that the word, "askim" means "my love," a word that the song contains.

When I watched this video that winter on TV I was really touched by how Romantic it was. The story that the video tells of a boy and a girl falling in love as children and going through life together is what many of us would like even if we have too much pride to admit it. I had one student, Aylin, who married her sweet heart from middle school, but she divorced her husband while I was her teacher in Turkey because he came over to America and abandoned her for another much older woman with kids, so Aylin's love story went awry. I wish it could have ended differently. She recently wrote me that she still is alone. I learned from her experience and from my own there that love and Romance is just as uneasy in Turkey as here and everywhere else. Wouldn't it be nice if it were easy?

Enjoy "Gidersen." :))

Is It Me? But Isn't This Video Romantic?

I know only two words in Arabic. They are 'hello' (marhaba) and 'beloved' (habibi). Habibi can also mean 'I love you' or 'darling.' Since I am a Romantic you may have noticed that unlike some I have learned pleasantries not vulgarities first. Really I am not interested in vulgarities since even in my native tongue English, I rarely use bad words:)

Due to the fact that my Arabic is almost nil, I do not understand it even though I enjoy listening to Arabic music immensely. I adore Arabic pop music particularly. My favorite Arabic singers are Amr Diab, Asala, Tamer Hosni, Wama, Hussein alJasmi, Mustafa Amar, Khaled, Cheb Mami, and Faudel. I used to wonder if I was a little strange when I began to gravitate towards listening to music in languages I did not understand. Then I learned that many people in other societies do the same since in most countries listeners are exposed to American pop music. Many of these listeners do not know English.

During my recent journey to Turkey, where I tried to be a live-in English tutor to a rather dyfunctional Turkish family, they hired a young housekeeper from the country of Georgia. Her name was Kate, and she loved people like Sean Kingston, Justin Timberlake, 50 Cent, and Beyonce. She would sing right along with Sean Kingston singing his hit Beautiful Girls, but she had no idea what the words meant since the languages she knew best were Georgian, Russian, and Turkish. There are many others worldwide who love music which languages they don't understand, but the sound captures their imaginations, transports them, or just creates relaxation.

This video is by the Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram. I had heard the song on the Arabic music website Alaghany.com and loved it. It is not one of favorite Arab pop tunes however, but when I finally ran across the video for the song, I was captived. Is it just me, but isn't this video romantic? Enjoy!