Mor Lam and Monks

Mor lam, is a northeastern Thai tradition that is slowly dying due to the influence of pop music. It would be wonderful if a new generation of Isaan youngster with talent could revive this lyrical art.

An unforgetable talent that had helped keep this artform current was Pumpuang Duangjan, R.I.P. While there are current artists like Jintara Poonlarp, Siriporn Ampaipong, and even a Dutch singer Christy Gibson, these studio-produced mor lam pales in comparison to the excitement and appreciation of a spontaneous talent shown in the live sparing of a mor lam contest or performance among the Isaan people.

I was fortunate enough to witness one such performance at a young age.  Maybe multimillion Thai pop music studio businessmen can be tipped to fund these contests in the Isaan country side, in the way that Nelson Mandela did for South African rugby, as shown in the movie, Invictus, not only to promote the goodwill of Luk Tung, a local musical genre not imported from abroad, but to give a sense of pride in cultural identity of the young, as well as to discover new natural talent.

I had always thought that this musical form is in some ways similar to modern rap, only much more traditional. It challenges its performers to dig up the best use of language and rythm on the spot. The best perform from a memory or repertoire of word play, rythm, rhyme and metaphors. It's what I would call a neobaroque form of entertainment because the musical accompaniment is simple and repetitive yet intuitive and spontaneous. It's a whole performance that engages and pulls in its viewers or in this case audience and listeners.

So what does mor lam performances have to do with monks?

I just recently read the history of Phra Ajaan Mun Bhuridatta Thera (1870-1949), the most venerable founder of Thailand's famous forest monk tradition. Here's what http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ says,

The unusual style of Phra Ajaan Mun's sermons may be explained in part by the fact that in the days before his ordination he was skilled in a popular form of informal village entertainment called maw lam. Maw lam is a contest in extemporaneous rhyming, usually reproducing the war between the sexes, in which the battle of wits can become quite fierce. Much use is made of word play: riddles, puns, innuendoes, metaphors, and simple playing with the sounds of words. The sense of language that Ajaan Mun developed in maw lam he carried over into his teachings after becoming a monk. Often he would teach his students in extemporaneous puns and rhymes. This sort of word play he even applied to the Pali language, ...

The best of buddhist teachings comes from oral traditions, in the forms of rhetorics, whether in the Tibetan debating or in this case the teachings of humble monks of Isaan origins, that towers above the more conventional Thervada style of Thailand's center. The language of mor lam and the language of forest monk tradition is Lao, which is (central Thais would probably love to deny) the true origin of the Thai language. Acharn Mun and other forest tradition monks had so internalized the teaching of the Buddha, which they had learnt in Pali, but it was practice and practice (of meditation) that allowed them to master the knowledge and thereby able to transmit in simple yet enlightening forms (in Lao) to their students and the common people. 

An interesting note to leave, pondering on oral tradition, links to languages, and preservations of cultures.

Acharn Mun passed away in 1940 at Wat Pa Suthawat, Sakon Nakhon. A small museum was built in his honor where there is an exhibit of his personal belongings and a brief account of his life.

Wax image of Pra Acharn Mun Bhuridatto, 

at Wat Pa Suthawat, Sakon Nakhon

Defining cvltvre.com

My interest in new media grew from media classes I audited with the Marshall McLuhan Program on Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto during 2003-2005. Derrick de Kerckhove, Mark Federman, and Twyla Gibson were teachers that have encouraged and inspired me to question the effects of media on society, organizations and individuals. Reading Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis expanded my previously naive notions of what media can be and drew me into a fascination with its role as transformers of culture and society.

It was with those evenings of trudging snow-covered roads across Bay Street to the Coach House where Marshall McLuhan himself inspired other minds to think about these questions that started me on the path of blogging. Media had moved human societies from Gutenberg's 15th century re-ordering of our senses from oral and tactile to our present modern predominance of visual and distant, hence 'reasonable/reasoning', critical perspective. It was at that coach house that I was awakened to an awareness of the electric, internet-induced sense of immersive experience most of us let ourselves into unnoticed.

That year, 2003, the class required blogging was exciting. There were thought-provoking researches on social media such as Danah Boyd's and Ann Galloway's. There was the great triumph of how blogging won a round in politics with Howard Dean's campaign only to be let down by the nature of politics that wasn't ready yet for this new kind of democracy. The dotcom bubble burst was a necessary dampener on the euphoria that normally accompanies new playgrounds as engrossing as the world wide web had become. I witnessed blogs come and go. Our class blog died as soon as the class concluded but I kept on blogging even if it was a bit hard to "speak" to only oneself. I liked the outered introspection, no-need to apologize navel gazing it allowed me.

It was also during this time that I was fortunate to meet with Juan Luis Saurez who became a good family friend. He adopted my husband, Cuauhtémoc, and myself into his fantastic (and complex) world of 16th century Baroque. I was thrilled that JL and Fernando Sanchez created cvltvre.com and feel honored to be invited to be a part of this beta version.

It is with this spirit of honor that I would like to give feedback about cvltvre.com's structure, its strengths and weakness, what can be improved on... from my humble perspective. little experience with blogging, and impressions acquired from net surfing.

I would like to invite other members to join this discussion because I feel that while this site's greatest offer is content, clarifying what we want from this site, where we think it can go, and fine tuning its structure will help towards its growth and move from beta to a public launch that can give us an exceptional new media tool supporting the social network of people in love with cultures, languages, the Baroque, complexity, all those strange and exciting concepts growing out of the University of Western Ontario, Department of Modern Languages' unique group of thinkers and their extended reach.

San Ignacio de Moxos

My itinerary in Bolivia will be Santa Cruz, Tirinidad, and San Ignacio de Moxos. Here's a google map of where I'm going:
Google map.`
San Ignacio was founded by the Jesuits in 1689 who were then expelled from South America in 1767. A famous film that tells the story of the Jesuits was The Mission(1986).

My trip to San Ignacio de Moxos is one month too early and I will miss their famous festival, "Fiesta del Santa Patrono de Moxos" which would include a procession of macheteros.
Since I was going to a place named for the founding member of the Jesuit Society, I decided to read The World of Ignatius of Loyola before I left.

Going to Bolivia

Getting on a plane to Bolivia in about 8 days. Never dreamed that it would be a country I would visit in my lifetime, but then again neither were Lebanon, South Africa, and Netherlands, or even Canada.

The more I read about Bolivia, the more I feel it was my destiny to go there, and I have this strange feeling that I will be going quite a few times more.

I'm collecting the links of useful pages I found about Bolivia, most of which will be about the Jesuit missions in Bolivia which is part of the subject of the documentary I am working on.

Highly recommend, beautifully done website: "La Gran Chiquitania". Bolivia Blog
A page on "culture of Bolivia" with About.com
Moxos Indians
A return to San Ignacio
A Brief History of the Colonial Mission of Eastern Bolivia
Of course, don't forget to check out wikipedia!

I was quite happily surprised that there is this level of information about a remote country which wouldn't cross people's tracks that much. Some additional sources are podcasts:

Travelpod
podcastvillage.com