0 9- p ~ - w. w v : . ifl i':{{"lW . .1rrW "vn. "{ " s:.V A .Wf t ~ ~ ~ . .. . . A.":{ : ::, 5 :'""t {. . . > . . W '.. '":Y ... V s . M mcm la n" , :":" "''r a>',": }> ~y:t>..>{.;. :: .;. ..*y. .s">rS y°s! a 1t?}i~sJ:i ?.Sr :i{{vv:1 ... :.a' W..":Ss o ...t.*.'Y: ":'V:::Y~t'h{{{'iAJ:. J''.., i.l' , "". . . . ..i">SI~ ' - .gt.s 7 Some thoughts on midtermrs 'SS .~. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dresexamine the 'Coloured side of Sot October 28. The weather is get- ting colder; the leaves are turning colors; and mid-terms - as in- evitable as the fall - are jumping out of nowhere like Halloween ghosts. Preparations for midterm exami- nations always make me crazy. I get delirious, slur my speech, and say weird things all on my own without the help of alcohol. For instance last Monday in the "Fishbowl," I was hectically perus- ing my notes in hopes that I could absorb a semester's worth of knowledge via osmosis in less than three minutes, and a classmate of mine (I'll call her Lisa) also perus- ing, introduced me to a friend of hers who was sitting near us. Her friend (I'll call her Beverly) turned to me and said, "Hi, my name is Beverly." I smiled and replied, "Hi, my name is Sheala, a.k.a. Cocoa, b.k.a. Peaches. Beverly looked sur- prised, and my classmate hung her head in embarrassment, mumbling, "Sheala, That's Not The Move." Maybe I had too much caffeine that morning to help keep me alert after studying all night. But midterm aggravation doesn't end once a student enters the class- room either. Every time I take a SHEALA DURANT Michele Rosewoman Innovative pianist and bandleader discusses the explosive future of jazz INTER VIEW Michele Rosewoman is a critically acclaimed innovative jazz pianist/composer. She has won numerous awards including recognition in the Down BeatCritics Poll and the ASCAP Foundation/Meet the Composer Commision for works performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Rosewoman was interviewed by Eclipse Jazz Co-coordinator Jeff Brown. - She will be appearing at the Ark 8 and 10 p.m., Friday,.Nov. 4. W:How did you get into jazz as a music? R:Growing up around it. Just hearing it from the time I was very little, my folks listened to a lot of classics. W: Were your folks jazz musicians? R: No, my father is from New York and so much was going on here. And he used to go and hear a lot of music and hang around record stores. Eventually, before I was born, he and my mother opened a small record store. I grew 'up in an artistic family because my mother is a painter, a great painter in fact. Between the two of them, I heard a lot of music including all kinds of World music. A lot of things... add up to major influences for me. But I heard Duke and Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Oscar Peterson, Art Tatum - just all the greats. W: When did you start playing? R: I started playing when I was six. W: And was it jazz that you started playing? R: No, to me the piano was just a big exciting toy. I used to just sort of play with it and see what it could do - to see what I could do with it. You could say I started out through improvising and eventually I ... started playing when they brought a piano into the house. But I would say that I started from a very intuitive approach and I ended up back at it. W: Did you go through any formal type training at any of the "famous" music schools? R: No, I sure didn't. I haven't had formal education in music. I went through a little struggle to get accepted into UC-Berkeley, where I was actually enrolled. I tried to get in as a music major and had been refused. I had to audition and I improvised so I'm sure it was on that basis that they refused me. And then I had to auditior. to take any classes in music at all. I dealt with another lady who at that point asked why I wasn't trying to get in as a music major and I said I had tried and had been refused. She got very angry and took it up with the Board and got me in. Within less than half of a year I had stopped going there at all. I felt there were no classes there at the time on anything other than 16th-18th century classical harmony. There were no ethnic music classes, no indigenous music classes. There was nothing then of interest to me. Meanwhile, I had tapped into a good situation. Out there they have what they call junior colleges and they're free. I'd heard of auditions for a big band, a jazz band, and I went and auditioned. At the time, I couldn't really read big band charts but I could hear that it was the blues in there. So I sat down and I improvised and got accepted into the big band and when the classics began to conflict, I just stopped showing up. That was the end of my career to the institutions. See INTERVIEW, Page 11 test, I usually wind up sitting next to some person with a bad cold who's bleary-eyed, feverish, and carrying a box of Kleenex. This person usually feels that it is necessary to announce their condi- tion by saying something to the effect of "I'm sick as a dog." To which I usually reply, "I can see that." I find it hard to concentrate when people in this condition plop down in the seat next to me. As far as I'm concerned they can find an- other seat and keep their germs to themselves. But wait, I'm not finished. While I'm writing my answers, there is always someone who just has to put their big Neanderthal feet on the back of my chair. This is so rude. Once I get a whiff of those clod- hoppers, I always ask the perpetra- tor nicely (at first) to put them on the floor where they belong. Blue books and the emphasis placed on them by professors is still interesting to me. There are some students who have professors who insist that they use a blue book, and if the student doesn't have one, the professor will insist that they go out and buy one. By the time the student has had a chance to run up the street to the store and back with the book, there are usually only 20 minutes left to complete three essay questions. So far I've focused on midterms, but I haven't forgotten about those students who have papers to write instead - students, who knew about the paper topic a month and a half ago but because of procrastina- tion, long phone conversations, walks through the Arb, and parties in the Union, may be in some campus computer center this very minute trying to piece together one of those last minute jobs. Some people get irritated if they have to take a number at the com- puting centers, but the wait gives me a chance to catch up on my reading. I do recall being just a lit- tle upset once while I was typing a sixteen page paper, and the moni- tors kept running around saying, "save your work." They even tack up little stickies by each station that say the same thing, but all too often, good advice goes unheeded. See DURANT, Page 13 r % ,w 1.'T.. U Wst%&A - wo" wow#Afa Vignettes uncover the plight of Indians living under Apartheid OFF THE WALL SKLICrtirAD V*. zN Ir L j ES'TMROW.. ONLY 3 cubic Ff f.- Vr Hajji Musa and the Hindu Fire-Walker Ahmed Essop Readers International, 1988 $10.50/Hardcover An insane Muslim prophet fiercely denounces the decline in morals threatening his status within the South African Indian commu- nity. An aging Indian bachelor re- jects his own people in a quixotic attempt to ape a white "civilization" that refuses to accept him as an equal. An unscrupulous gangster seeks to compensate for what white society designates as his racial inferiority by perpetrating as- tounding cruelties against his fel- low Indians. And, again and again, Indian women find themselves the victims of men who treat them as degraded slaves in an effort to forget their own enslavement in a segre- gated society. Vignettes such as these make Ahmed Essop's stories of Indian life under Apartheid - the first collection of his work published outside South Africa -a painful reading experience. Though many of his stories are superficially comic, the difficulties involved in maintaining a person's dignity in a country that legally designates that person as inferior leave their har- rowing mark on nearly all of Es- sop's efforts. Furthermore, the effort to portray those daily struggles significantly qualifies the power of Essop's work as well. Much like his characters, he is obsessed with being a man in a world continually telling him he is a boy. The losers in such a world are, inevitably, the women; Essop's heroes flirt with manhood by deny- ing their "girls" the right to grow up. Nearly all of Essop's stories concern the question of authority and the different social and biologi- cal conditions working to under- mine it. "Aziz Khan" and "Film" are poignant accounts of how the Muslim leaders of the community watch the erstwhile allegiance of their "flock" evaporate before the pressure of modernization and their inability to fight the oppressive policies of the Apartheid regime. In "Father and Son," "Ten Years," and "The Betrayal," aging men are con- fronted by more powerful and po- tent sons or proteges, who chal- lenge them and steal their patriar- chal mantel. And in "Yogi," "Dolly," and "Two Sisters," Indian men repress a sense of their politi- cal subjugation' by transforming women into sexual slaves, compli- ant "mirrors" reflecting and con- firming male desires for and illu- sions of mastery. In all of these tales, women serve as props for Essop's probes into the anxieties and preoccupations of the male psyche. Duplicating the very pattern of displaced victimization he so successfully captures in his work, Essop himself achieves much of his power as an artist by deploy- ing the women in his plots as willing and silent slaves - slaves who move his stories along with- out ever themselves making an ap- pearance or emerging as individuals. Essop is at his best when he di- rectly exposes the naked political brutality of the South African regime and then asks the hard and honest questions concerning what this brutality is doing to degrade Indian people and rend the fabric of Indian communities in places such as Fordsburg, the Johannesburg suburb, that is the setting of most of his work. In the short but powerful story "The Commandment," for example, a revered and loved African servant, Moses, learns at the end of his long employment that he will no longer be allowed to live in Fordsburg. As a Black man who is no longer "a productive labor unit," he cannot, under South Africa's Group Areas Act against racial integration, re- main in a "Coloured" (Indian) community. Essop's story traces the community's reaction to Moses' impending removal, following in scrupulous detail how love turns to hate beneath the pressures of guilt and impotence aroused by the Indi- ans' inability to do anything to save a man they had grown to love. On the morning he is supposed to leave for his tribal homeland, Moses is found hanging from a roof-beam in a lavatory in the yard - a fitting commentary on the moral cesspool generated by Apartheid's legal structures. "Gerty's Brother," perhaps the best story in the collection, also examines the effects of Apartheid but with greater subtlety. Here an Indian, Hussein, casually takes a poor white orphan as his mistress and her eight-year-old brother as his page. But rather than degenerating into another tale of sexual conquest, Essop here concentrates on the bur- See BOOKS, Page 11 I I' ~ I Want a date? It's not too late That's your fate Rehabilitate Wake-n-bake Bake a cake Matriculate Proliferate Manipulate Twist of fate Put on weight Debilitate Suffocate Watergate Reciprocate Fabricate Defecate Incorporate Extrapolate Contemplate Integrate Exonerate Fornicate Masterbate I just can't wait - Law Library bathroom stall i , REOPENING OCTOBER 30 M t w mmm-. -a d-- 9-1 AND ft'S ONLY( 200 AM. ...- __.. _. "40,N\ i ARE -F-K . ... . \; t 1 '(1 '' 1/ ' ., + " % --- SPRp N ' . MONDAY ... Alternative Dance Mus wells 9 - 10) WEDNESDAY ... Quarter Night (No cc I.D., 25 cent drafts, $1 wells) DJ JAMMIN' JON THURSDAY ROGER L --- Eurobeat ($1 cover, $1 x WIE I /Ilfto4 - iAsl ..... ,'V K VZi4 SATURDAY ... Top 40/Modern Danc $1 cover, $3 thereafter) / DJ ROGER L. You must be 19 to enter;:18 WITH COL Nectari PAGE 10 WEEKEND/OCTOBER 28, 1988 WEEKEND/OCTOBER 2-8 1988