Lop Nur Journals: The Uighur Hendrix

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

The Uighur Hendrix

I'm in Kashgar now, heartland of the Uighur people. Yesterday I was wandering through the old town, trying to shake off the 24 hour train ride from Urumqi, and trying not to think of lunch, which was nowhere to be had as it is Ramadan at the moment, when I came across a small musical instrument shop. Inside they had a whole bunch of traditional instruments, such as the Dotar, kind of like a two stringed lute, and the Tambur, a four string long-necked mandolin kind of thing. I'd been in there a short while when out of nowhere appeared Abdirihim Hiyit, "King of the Dotar" in Xinjiang (his CDs in every shop). He picked up a Dotar and proceeded to absolutely tear it apart - putting my feeble pluckings of only a few moments before to shame. I managed to record some of it (he was very friendly and easygoing, as indeed everyone here seems to be), you can see a short clip from a much longer session below. Enjoy!

4 Comments:

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Maurilia

In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits; admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old postcards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one's eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At time even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

Italo Calvino

Lop Nur Journals

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

The Uighur Hendrix

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