Lua Hadar's Voyager Project

Nomad Notes, Easter Sunday in The Time of Corona, April 12, 2020

What is “Saudade”?

Yes, it’s Corona Time. No wandering for this nomad. I was lucky to make it back home on March 3.

I’ve been sequestered since Friday, March 13, following wise orders of our San Francisco Bay Area and California leaders. I am fine.

This period, this Time of Corona, has brought benefits as well as challenges. I think for many of us, it has given the opportunity to feel gratitude, and I do feel it.

I also feel that The Time of Corona will create a cataclysmic change in society; that the world will never be the same.

The song “Look for the Silver Lining” was popular around the time of the Spanish Flu of 1918, the last major pandemic of the modern world, before now. There is always a silver lining to be found, or shall I say, made? Our actions now create the silver lining. The choices we make and the preparation we forge now will help us in the new world.

In the summer of 2018, returning from Portugal, my partner and I stopped in New York and visited cousins. A walk on an Atlantic beach gave me a “sense memory” that swooped me directly back to childhood. The feel of the sand, its temperature and texture, made my feet remember my Long Island childhood.

I know my parents sheltered me; of course they did. That’s what parents are supposed to do. My parents avidly read the newspapers and we always watched the News. We discussed what was happening in the world at the dinner table every night. They had survived a Depression, World War II, and McCarthyism. Selma happened, Kennedy was shot, and Vietnam was in color on TV.

Yet it seemed a much simpler and sweeter world to me, the world I lived in then. “Or was it just my childhood, shielding me from what I could know?” This is the question I ask myself in my new original song, Saudade.

The lyrics came pouring out of me that day on the Atlantic beach in 2018, when my feet remembered, and it has taken almost two years for those lyrics to manifest in a music video, one that feels more meaningful every day.

In The Time of Corona, the word “Saudade” is having a comeback, so I’m grateful to be able to release this work now. The song is in English, but there is no single word for “Saudade” in English. Influenced by my visits to Lisbon’s Fado bars, this title chose me.

From the website of Portugal’s celebrated Fado goddess, Amalia:

What is “Saudade”?

“Saudade” is an untranslatable Portuguese term that refers to the melancholic longing or yearning. A recurring theme in Portuguese and Brazilian literature, “saudade” refers to a sense of loneliness and incompleteness. 

The Portuguese scholar Aubrey Bell attempts to distill this complex concept in his 1912 book “In Portugal”:

“Saudade is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present.”

The act of producing of this new music video has been sustaining me creatively during The Time of Corona, even as this word “Saudade” is becoming more widely known, as the world is mourning together for what might have been.

“Saudade” is the second original music video in a long-term effort I’ve entitled Voyager Project .

The first original music video of the Voyager Project debuted in 2018, “Our Common Humanity”. In it, my character is a sort of nature goddess or desert priestess, who reminds us “Everybody needs the water, everybody needs the food.”

The protagonist of “Saudade” is another manifestation of that nature goddess. She is of the sea, but like her desert counterpart, she wants a world where we can all work together in trust.

It would be impossible to produce this original work without the longtime collaboration of the multi-talented Jason Martineau. Jason has an immense breadth of skills and talents; a true Renaissance Man, and the multi-faceted projects that pop into my mind find in Jason the means to manifest in the concrete world.

“Saudade” has really been a duet project for us; together we have handled everything except Hair and Makeup, which must be credited to the skilled, creative, and fabulous Rebeca Flores.

On our music video “Saudade,” Jason Martineau has been responsible for Music Production, Music Transcription, Video Editing and Animation, Videography, Art Photography, Sound Editing and Graphics, as well as researching and creating the Restorative Mandala sequence. With skill, drive and vision, he has been my co-creator for 15 years, since 2005, and has given me artistic support and trust that cannot be expressed in words.

“Saudade” will be free to view on Lua Hadar’s Youtube  along with my other music videos and performances. The digital audio single will be available soon online as well.

How will you know when we release “Saudade”?

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Thank you for reading. Stay Safe.

Equal Education is the Bedrock of Society
Nomad Notes 1/20/2020

I have wandered to Portugal and back without writing, but more of that in a later blog.

Word for the day, METACOGNITION: Being aware of how you learn and what you have learned. We have a capacity for this as humans, usually from adolescence, but sometimes earlier. 

If you are in the practice of thinking about yourself and your life, metacognition seems to happen naturally once you hit “the middle third” of life, and by the time you are rounding out that era, you — well, I — can see my life as chapters in a book, all of which have brought me to the present chapter.

The present chapter is one in which my ANGER at our corrupt president has surpassed FEAR and SELF-DOUBT as a songwriter, and I now have understood what it feels like to have a song come through me. Apparently I AM worthy of that experience after all. 

Our present day is also an era in which the video image has taken over society. So I am choosing, in this chapter of my life, to create artistic work that is fulfilling to me, and that speaks the language of Now. At this time of critical societal challenge, that must contain music and images that can be of help, with message, with compassion, and with hope.

Back to thinking back.

It appears I have taken my father’s career path, in my own way. Teaching for stability and mission; performing for creative fulfillment and community with other performers. The songwriting now seems to reflect all of that. 

Education. I’ve come to respect Education; to see the changes it can create in a child, in me, in a group, and in society. I do believe Education is part of the fundamental bedrock of a compassionate society.

Our country needs national education standards and national teacher standards with egalitarian pay. I believe we will not have the ever-fleeting EQUALITY I dream of if we cannot give EVERY CHILD an EQUAL START with an Education. That includes children who speak other languages or have special educational needs.

Heavens! Can you imagine the effect that would have on the prison system, just for starters? We need an education system that educates every child to be able to DO something that society needs for it to keep going and improve. We are a work in progress, each one of us and society as a whole. 

An ignorant person can be DUPED by propaganda or by other people. We are seeing the effects of that play out as the tragedy of criminality and corruption unfolds before our eyes. It is already more than a screenplay could cover. It’s a mini-series in the making, and we are living it. And it’s not over. 

An ignorant boy from Queens made it through the education system because his family was rich. He even graduated business school, so how could he have turned out to be so dangerously uneducated?

Because he had LEARNING DIFFERENCES that were not understood at the time. I know, because not too many miles away from Queens, right about the same time, my brother also had learning differences. And nothing could be done for him at the time except put him in what was cordially referred to as “THE DUMB CLASS.” At the time, Special Education was not developed as it is today, so if you had processing issues or dyslexia or other differences, either academic or psychological or emotional, you went to the same class.

And everyone made fun of you.

My brother did not emotionally survive that experience, and neither did the ignorant boy from Queens.

The ignorant boy from Queens developed his own coping mechanisms. His money and his enablers, eventually, through the years, put him in a position to be DUPED by a foreign power to become their corrupt puppet.

That is where we stand in the mini-series right now, today, as of this writing, as the reverberations are felt around the world. 

EVERYONE needs to be educated with the same standards. So there is no “elite” class and there are no “rednecks.” No ignorant credulous folk who believe the propaganda heard on Fox News. And there are no “dumb kids.”

That is why EQUAL EDUCATION  is the  BEDROCK of society. I’ve been teaching for years, but I get it now. 

NOTES:
NOVEMBER 10, 2020; WASHINGTON POST OP ED
Entertainer, author and beloved NPR radio personality Garrison Keillor has had plenty to say about Donald Trump during and after Election Day. On November 10, an article about Keillor’s Washington Post op-ed went viral. Keillor wrote: “Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out, and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president.”

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019; COMMON DREAMS (common dreams.org)
Why Trump Can’t Learn: An Educated Guess by a Veteran Teacher
Dyslexia may explain a lot about the twisted behavior of the president.
by Harriet Feinberg Ed.D, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

THE BUDDHIST IN THE ROOM
Lua Hadar Blog Series “Nomad Notes”
Chapter 7, leading up to the debut of “Our  Common Humanity”
Written 6/23/18 and 7/11/18
Mt. Shasta, CA

Two days ago, on the Solstice and on my birthday, I sat at the Trinity River in Northern California and was struck by the relentlessness of the rushing water, this persistent pulse of life that never takes a day off. This water has been rushing, faster or slower, since it was born. It doesn’t stop until the river itself dies, but even then it becomes part of something else.

This music video received its debut at The San Francisco International Arts Festival at Fort Mason Center for the Arts, San Francisco, on May 26, 2018. It was shown to the audience in the context of a live concert which my band and I performed.

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Slowly, inspired by the “Down by the Riverside” theme of the 2018 International Arts Festival, I found my set list was becoming a statement.

And for the first time, given “permission” by the festival context, I spoke out plainly during the storytelling sections of the show; as I introduced each song to the audience, I spoke in unmistakeable language, instead of the soft, implied thematic message I usually include about us all being One, about the human rights and prosperity we all should share.

Within the context of my Buddhist practice, I sing in a small chorus every couple of months. Last year (or was it the year before?) we sang a song called The World is Ours to Change, by Wayne Green.

I had had the opportunity to meet Wayne on a couple of occasions, as he is a big time music director of Broadway touring shows such as Mamma Mia and The Color Purple. Ever since I sang his inspiring song for the first time, I wanted to do it with my band. 

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Friend, colleague, mentor and sister Candace Forest has a track record of “putting me up” to doing things I must then dare to do. 

In 2015, she put me up to entering the Italian Heritage Parade and costuming a bunch of cabaret singers as identical clowns to walk and promote a show I put together at the Italian Athletic Club.

This time she put me up to a concert Finale with a participatory prop and a Girl backup Duo for a few numbers in the show, including The World is Ours to Change. I substituted the Girl Duo for the guitarist on the band plot I had submitted to the festival.

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Then we had to figure out the parts, rewrite the chorus to one of the songs (from Zulu to English), and rehearse. This was done separately over a few rehearsals, the last two with Jason, and then Jason plus the full band, respectively.

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In the meantime, Claudia Landivar, Girl Duo power voice, had volunteered to help with the graphic for the Finale. She created a graphic saying stand up with me, surrounded by the word Solidarity in many languages. I had this photocopied on the back of the program, which I had printed on card stock. They were used by the audience during the Finale.

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Finally we were just 2 weeks before the concert. And OMG I had STILL not settled on the Yiddish song, which HAD to be part of this concert. I immersed myself in Youtube videos and looked up the words and translations of the songs, where I could find them. I had studied Yiddish and German a bit, but not enough to reliably translate myself. I wanted a song that would thematically be part of the human rights set list, but still something I could relate to musically. Not religious. Culturally connected but in a way that felt right.

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My band for this concert included a bass player I had not performed with before, but whose work I admired, Sascha Jacobsen. I knew his many skills included both playing and dancing Tango. I wanted to use this groove; I also love Tango, but here I was 2 weeks before the show with no Tango and no Yiddish song.

And then i found THE YIDDISH TANGO. It is based on a pre-war song called Play Me a Little song in Yiddish. A second set of song lyrics that we found, however, came, it is said, from the Kovno Ghetto (Lithuania) and were sung in other Jewish ghettos as well, in the time leading up to World War II. I spontaneously cried when I sang the chorus out loud, the notes reverberating through my blood.

I had been asked to submit my tech plan months before. There had been much discussion with band members who had played the venue before about the challenges of the sound in that room. I was nervous, worried the festival would promise things they could not later deliver.

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The tech rehearsal for the video required patience, persistence, and good will for this hardworking crew that was managing not just my show, but a whole festival.

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The drummers brought their own mics, I provided extra monitors, and a great gift, my drummer Celso Alberti created a professional sound plot, which he knows all about as an audio engineer who tours the world with big name artists.

This was an incredible benefit for the group, one which grew even on the night of the show, as he collaborated with the festival tech person and with Jason Martineau to regulate the sound in the room.

There was very little time for actual rehearsal after the lengthy sound check was done. Again, I felt under-prepared.

 

I was glad that I had hired a makeup artist (Rebeca Flores) to come in and handle my face. This was an expense that was worth it; she did a great job and THAT particular pressure was off.

Claudia Landivar helped calm me down.

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Despite all that had taken place, I found I was not nervous once I got on stage. The show went better than anyone expected, including myself.

My last public performance had been at Feinstein’s at the Nikko on November 10, 2016. On that occasion, there was an ELEPHANT in the room; two days after Election Day, I had to find a way to acknowledge and speak about the catastrophe of the  election of You-Know-Who. I won’t put his name in this blog.

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THIS TIME, the element of THE BUDDHIST IN THE ROOM was transformational, supporting me to give a performance I didn’t know I had in me. 

And possibly MY AMAZING BAND had something to do with it.

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CREDITS

Honored to have Charles Kruger’s THEATRESTORM interview me for this great feature article on our new project.

https://luahadar.wordpress.com/2016/09/01/nomad-notes-chapter-5-victory-is-thriving-in-spite-of-it/