COMMENTARY: Donate baby's chord blood - Monitor

[unable to retrieve full-text content]MonitorCOMMENTARY: Donate baby's chord bloodMonitorMaricela Andr ade of Hidalgo holds her newborn son, Austin Humberto Andrade. The four-time mom donated her son's chord blood to help those who are sick and need the special cells. Posted: Sunday, May 8, 2016 6:48 am. COMMENTARY: Donate baby's ...and more »

Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" strikes a chord in deeply divided Gaza Strip - Berkshire Eagle (subscription)

GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP >> Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" has opened to audiences in the Gaza Strip, albeit with a distinctly Palestinian twist.

Instead of the forbidden love story of Renaissance-era European aristocracy, the star-crossed young couple in Gaza's version of the play is divided by politics stemming from the deep internal Palestinian split between two rival movements.

Yousef, a son of a member of Gaza's ruling Islamic militant group Hamas, falls in love with Suha, the daughter of a fanatical member of the rival Fatah party, rather than Shakespeare's feuding Montagues and Capulets.

Dubbed "Romeo and Juliet in Gaza," the performance has brought a rare taste of foreign culture to this conservative and isolated territory. But it is even more noteworthy for its critical look at the political rift that has crippled life in Gaza for nearly a decade.

"It's a call for love; to give a space for love and for youths to dream of a beautiful future away from the current state in Gaza, especially the youths and their suffering," said director Ali Abu Yassin.

In 2007, Hamas routed forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas and ousted his Fatah party in a week of deadly street battles. Since then, Abbas' rule has been confined to the West Bank, while Israel and Egypt have imposed a blockade on the Hamas-ruled Gaza. The measures, which Israel says are needed to prevent Hamas from importing arms, have brought Gaza's economy to a near standstill.

Attempts by Hamas and Fatah to reconcile, meanwhile, have repeatedly faltered. The rift is so deep that today some families may reject a marriage proposal based on the political affiliation of the suitor.

The "great resemblance" between the feuding families in Shakespeare's original tragedy and "the reality of Gaza" inspired Abu Yassin and Atef Abu Saif, a renowned novelist, to come up with play, Abu Yassin said.

The play was performed eight times last month — just as the Hamas-controlled police prevented academics and national figures from holding a conference calling for unity with Fatah.

On a recent evening at Al-Mis'hal Cultural Center in Gaza City, the audience laughed and clapped — and on occasion, even got up on its feet in appreciation of the 70-minute performance on the theater's modest stage.

After the Palestinian national anthem was played, the black curtains opened to a scene of a cafe shop in a refugee camp neighborhood where youths were talking and playing cards.

To the 350 spectators, it was an accurate depiction of Gaza's reality: in a territory where unemployment is over 40 percent, cafes are often crowded with idle young men who have little else to do.

The same cafes are also packed with Fatah members, who continue to collect salaries from the West Bank government under the condition that they not work in Hamas' administration.

In the play, as Suha's father, a local doctor, enters the cafe, it is clear from his shaven face that he is from Fatah.

Yousef's father Awni, a bearded merchant representing Hamas, also frequents the cafe, where he quarrels with the Fatah doctor. At times they scuffle, prompting the cafe owner to kick them out.

"Don't reconcile! Keep cursing at each other" the owner yells at them.

"We will leave this land to you and go," he adds, drawing a burst of applause from the audience.

Then, laughter erupted when the doctor asked the cafe owner if he was following the reconciliation news between Hamas and Fatah. The two parties have held dozens of negotiation rounds and announced several agreements, but none has been implemented.

Abu Yassin, the 54-year-old director, said the warm reception reflects public discontent with the situation.

"They feel the play represents them, expresses what they can't express. They live with the story because it's exactly like them," said Abu Yassin.

Knowing the consequences, the old cafe owner advises Yousef to change his mind and not to fall in love with Suha because their families won't accept each other.

However, in the Gaza take on Shakespeare's famous story, the ending is different.

Yousef, like hundreds of young Gaza men, flees to board an illegal migrant boat promising a better life in Europe, as Suha screams for him to return. His fate is never revealed, a reminder of dozens of Gazans who disappeared when a migrant boat sank in 2014.

The European families in the original tragedy reconciled after the death of the star-crossed lovers, but in the Gaza version, they remain enemies.

Mohammed Zoghbor, a doctor who watched the play, says the ending reflects the lack of hope in the bitterly divided Palestinian society.

"The home remains divided, the families remain divided, the youths are divided and talks take place for the sake of talks without results," he said.

Abu Yassin said it is a coincidence that the play is being performed around the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. He said the play would be performed again soon as part of a series of activities organized by the British Council, a U.K.-backed cultural organization, to mark the anniversary.

Abu Yassin has directed dozens of plays and other arts in Gaza, which lacks a national theater, but "Romeo and Juliet in Gaza" was the most important and most successful, he says.

"What makes Shakespeare's work distinguished is that it fits all the times and all the places. It's universal," he said. "The theater here of course is not like the theater Shakespeare used to perform in, but it's still important to try to keep it operating."

Woman's Defiant Pose Strikes Chord in Sweden - Newser

(Newser) – A 42-year-old woman has become the "talk of Sweden" after striking a defiant pose against neo-Nazi marchers, reports the Local. Tess Asplund stood in the path of the marchers with her fist raised in a photo captured by David Lagerlof of the anti-racism group Expo. "It was an impulse. I was so angry, I just went out into the street," she tells the Guardian. "I was thinking, 'Hell no, they can't march here! I had this adrenaline." The incident took place in the city of Borlange between Asplund and members of the Nordic Resistance Movement, and police quickly hustled her away. The image, however, has resonated on social media in the country, notes the Independent. "Tess has captured one of the conflicts of our time," says another member of Expo.

The Local notes that many are comparing the image to an iconic photo from 1985 of a woman hitting a neo-Nazi demonstrator with her handbag, though "I really don't want to go that far," says photographer Lagerlof. He recalls the scene: NRM leaders are "slowly walking towards her, and it looks like hers and the leader's eyes meet, that they are staring at each other," he says. "When they are quite close to each other the police come along and push her away." For her part, Asplund says she hopes the image leads to positive change, though she admits being a little unnerved by the attention. "These guys are big and crazy," she says. "It's a mixed feeling, but I am trying to stay calm."

London Calling? How Music Strikes a Chord for Expats - Wall Street Journal (blog)

When I was growing up in Montreal, British rock music introduced me to London from a distance. The Who sang about Soho, the Rolling Stones about Knightsbridge, the Kinks about Muswell Hill. Now that my family has moved to the city, music is helping us get in tune with London on a firsthand — though less rock 'n' roll — basis, and we've come to know that a hobby like music can be a brilliant way for expat families to connect with the local community, and each other.

My wife, Beth, my 10-year-old son Nicholas, and I moved to a borough in southwest London from just outside New York City about 17 months ago. We knew no one in the area. The key to connecting with both the people and the place was, for us, to "keep it local." I scoured magazines and websites and signed up for as many email newsletters as I could find to get in touch with local activities, especially for my son. We had to sell our car before we moved, so we chose a home near plenty of public transport. We would have to rely on buses, trains, the Tube and walking until we bought a car.

We explored and found out that a lot of businesses we needed on a day-to-day basis were within walking distance: One block alone provided a post office, pharmacy, dry cleaner, barber and news agent.

Nestled between these shops, like a musical fill between chords, was a black storefront with gold lettering spelling out Ritz Music. One day, I stepped through the doorway between the arched windows displaying guitars and picked up a Ritz handbill. My wife and I had talked for years about wanting our son to learn an instrument and, now that he was 10, we thought it might be a good time for him to pick up a guitar, largely because he was now big enough to hold one comfortably. Ritz offered beginner guitar lessons for kids, so we signed him up and rented an acoustic guitar.

We told him he could quit anytime he felt like it, but he stuck with it. It didn't hurt that everyone was unfailingly friendly and helpful every time we walked into Ritz. We returned the rental guitar and bought him his own natural-wood-colored model. At home, he looked up song tabs on the Internet or in his Beatles songbook and thrashed away at his guitar strings.

My son learned about music, but he also met local children his age. Ritz offered a jam session where children played guitar, keyboards, drums and bass under the tutelage of an adult musician/teacher/bandleader, and our son tried that, too. When we picked him up after the first session, he asked, "When's the next jam?"

A pleasant repercussion of his new hobby was the chance for us to bond through music, not just with the locals but with each other. When London native David Bowie died, I revisited his music by buying a few of his CDs and, much to my surprise, my son, the alien from abroad, took to "the man who fell to Earth." Nicholas learned "Starman" at the jam session and taught himself a bunch of other Bowie songs.

About six months after my son started playing, the bandleader for the kids' jams debuted an adult jam session, so I signed up as a drummer. I was pretty rusty, but the music also offered me a chance to meet some locals. As it turned out, a couple of my bandmates were parents of a few of my son's bandmates. The impact of music reverberated further when my wife courageously came to hear my band in concert at a local pub. Long ago, it hosted the likes of U2 and Elvis Costello, but my wife had to settle for listening to me, introduced as the guy "on drums, all the way from across the pond." Since the gig was on a Sunday afternoon, it became a family affair where my son saw children from his jam session.

The pub was only one player in our area's rich musical heritage. We ate dinner one night at a restaurant on the former site of another local club where the Beatles once came to watch Mick Jagger and co. perform. We visited a nearby island in the River Thames where musicians including the Who and Bowie played early in their careers before becoming world-famous. We took a "Swinging '60s" tour on a classic, bright-red Routemaster double-decker bus, on which a guide recited musical tales accompanied by a soundtrack of bands that once played in the neighborhood.

Our family is blessed with a city accompanied by a lively music scene and history. But this pastime can work anywhere the universal language is played, and it can bring you more in harmony with the community, wherever you are.

My son and I recently took the Tube to fabled Denmark Street in London—where many musicians sold and recorded their early songs—to visit the row of guitar shops. Nicholas by now was able to distinguish a Fender from a Gibson guitar and asked afterward if he could return to Denmark Street to choose his next instrument. Music had helped rewrite two-dimensional lyrics about a faraway city into a more familiar place.

Christopher Harder is a freelance writer and editor. He is based in London, where he moved with his family in 2014, after many years in the U.S.

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Golden Chord singers present "My Way" - Ledger Independent

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Golden Chord singers present "My Way"Ledger IndependentThe Golden Chord Singers, under the direction of Mike Leet, would like to announce their 2016 spring dinner concert titled "My Way," featuring classic songs recorded by Old Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra, in celebration of what would have been his ...

Timeline: The Tristan Chord - Vermont Public Radio

The music of Richard Wagner marked a growing "crisis" in Romantic harmony marked by the so called, "Tristan Chord". This is the opening harmony of the prelude to Wagner's 1859 opera Tristan and Isolde. Never before has one group of four notes rocked the musical world so completely.

The Tristan chord is spelled, from the bottom, f – b – d# - g#.  It is sometimes called a half-diminished 7th chord or a French augmented 6th with a long appoggiatura, but don't worry… those names aren't important. What is important is that theorists, musicians and composers have argued about these names, this chord and its significance for over a hundred and fifty years. It absolutely defies convention.

This wasn't the first time this harmony was used. You can find examples of it in the works of Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, J.S. Bach and even all the way back to the Renaissance in the music of Guillaume de Machaut. What makes Wagner's Tristan chord so unique is that he had no intention of using it correctly.   It's not meant to resolve from dissonance to consonance, according to the rules. It's just meant to be there; a moment of tension without the expected release. In other words, the Tristan chord marked the first time that a harmony's sound became much more important than its function.

For Wagner, this sound was about longing, an existential cry for peace. In his writings he talks about his feelings of isolation and disquiet and also a deep spiritual longing in his soul for what he called Nirvana. All of these feelings, everything came back to Tristan and that sound of unhinged, unrealized desire. From the moment these four notes are heard together they become tied to Wagner, the character of Tristan and the story of the opera and this is true even after the opera is long over. Today every time we hear this harmony it is forever tied to this one moment in history.

You can hear the Tristan chord quoted in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, Debussy and Benjamin Britten. It has been parodied countless times, but the power of this chord goes beyond just parody. Composers of the next generation saw the Tristan Chord as a license to explore sound for its own merit. They began to explore the boundaries of functional harmony that governed music for centuries and then eventually, discarded those rules altogether.

Timeline is an exploration into the development of Western music. Take a journey into the events, characters and concepts that shaped our Western musical tradition.

Blue Jays strike winning chord in Tampa - Toronto Star

ST. PETERSBURG, FLA.—The Blue Jays, the team baseball fans in Toronto fell in love with last season, on Friday overcame the strikeout curse that has staggered them thus far this season.

The Jays' offence has been whiffing at a prolific rate and has been a punchless version of the homer-happy crew of 2015. But those big bats came to life in a 6-1 win over Tampa at Tropicana Field.

Four Toronto homers sunk a Rays team that didn't quite let the Jays forget about all those strikeouts — Toronto batters still went down swinging eight times, but that was actually better than the per game average (9.5) entering the game.

Michael Saunders led the homer barrage, clipping two of them, showing an excellent all-around game that was taken from him a year ago when his season was prematurely ended in early May by the lingering effects of a freak knee injury suffered in spring training.

Saunders is also hitting over .350 in nine games since manager John Gibbons placed him atop the batting order. This is shine time for the Canadian-born left-handed hitter, and it's part of the good news that surfaced in Friday's win, which also broke a three-game losing streak.

Josh Donaldson, the only player in the majors to lead his team in hits, homers, RBI and runs, tagged a Drew Smyly fastball for a tape-measure homer that got Toronto rolling and feeling like it was 2015.

Donaldson's homer struck the catwalk above the outfield at Tropicana Field and would have travelled an estimated 445 feet had it not done so.

More promising signs came from Ryan Goins' first homer of the year and a return to domination for starter Aaron Sanchez, who answered up a sub-par outing in his previous start with seven shutout innings (six hits, six strikeouts and no runner advanced past second after the first inning.)

Strikeouts, though, are not exactly a fading trend for the Jays. They managed eight more Friday, including two by Russell Martin, which extended his streak to a near-record tying nine in a row (he snapped it with a single in his third at-bat of the game.)

But Toronto's lineup is all about power, all about steam rolling the opposition. The strikeout rash appears to the result of the club's 'all-power, all-pull' swing mentality tied to their gaudy stats the past few seasons. They'll ride it out, believing their post-season worthy lineup from 2015 will bounce back in short order, which is still a good bet for now.

"Hitting in front of our guys (Donaldson, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, Troy Tulowitzki) helps me a lot," said Saunders, who now has 55 career homers — 18 of them off left-handed pitching. "One through nine in our order, I really believe we'll get it going this year, I'm sure of it."

Martin came within one punchout of tying the major-league record of 10 consecutive strikeouts set by Rick Ankiel in his reincarnation as a hitter with Houston in 2013.

Also from Elias Friday night: Cincinnati's Adam Duvall had reached eight consecutive strikeouts Friday night, one shy of the National League record of nine shared by Mark Reynolds (2007), Eric Davis (1987) and Adolfo Phillips (1966).

Toronto entered the game having reached double digits in strikeouts in 11 of their first 23 games. Friday marked game No. 24, and the additional eight Ks put them at 225 so far this season.

The 225 strikeouts are the most Toronto has boarded through 24 games, and that's a staggering reality for a team that finished last season with 127 more runs than any other team in the majors.

Toronto also entered Friday's outing averaging 9.5 strikeouts per game. When they hit a major-league leading 232 home runs a year ago, they registered the fifth-lowest strikeout total (1,151) in the majors.

NOTE: Jays second baseman Devon Travis, out with a shoulder injury, took five at-bats in an extended spring training game Friday and said he "felt good." Travis may play his first full game next week but does not have a definitive timetable for a return to the Jays.