LJ 20: Spring Quarter 2009

This is my final paper for my second journalism class I took. Yes, I know, most people take LJ 20 before 21, but it didn't fit into my schedule. I decided to do my paper on Professor Robert Garfias from the Anthropology department at UCI. He's a spunky little old man with lots of great stories to tell. I tried my best to recapture them here.

Around the World in Seventy Years

They had done four recordings that day. The islands would catch the clouds, making the weather hot and muggy, causing them to perspire in their shirts and ties. They always wore ties. Robert Garfias was an ethnomusicologist with a thick black mustache born in San Francisco. Harold Schultz was the Grad student he had chosen to accompany him, a wiry guy, not too skinny with wavy hair. They were here gathering field recordings of the various people from all around the Philippines for research to be compiled in the states. This small pocket of East Asia had a scarce amount of information. That’s why they were there. To get to the main village they had to wade through the riverbed, holding their recording equipment over their heads. Reels of film, cameras, and sound recording devices tentatively held towards the sun setting over the Kalinga province in the Philippines.

A Tinguian funeral was in progress and the entire village had gathered to honor their dead. A number of random objects were placed on a table next to the large crowd of people in the distance. These objects were meant to be commemorative of the deceased. Another large crowd of people stood in a circle, a large trailed of smoke spiraled upward from within the center of the mass where a large water buffalo was roasting. Gunfire quickly replaced the sounds of gongs and singing. They kept crossing. There was no turning back now. They got in and out of there quickly.
“They get crazy during funerals because everyone is gathered there,” Robert states as he clicks the picture on the screen. He looks up at the screen through his black rimmed glasses, his platinum hair shining under the dim lecture hall lights. The gongs slowly begin to fade into the background until they are gone completely. Nothing is left but the soft click of computer keys and scribbles of pens on paper by his students frantically trying to take notes. Others sit with their heads propped up against their elbows, staring at him blankly. He’s strayed yet again from the topic.

“That’s it for today,” he says as he taps at the control panel, which beeps in response. The picture disappears and the screen goes blank. He shuts his black Fujistu Tablet and comes around the podium to what looks like a large black umbrella resting on its side on the beige tiled floor. Water still drips from is deeps black crevices. It’s a kasa, a large Japanese umbrella composed of bamboo and silk. It is the third or fourth one he has had, made in a special shop down the main street in Kyoto. He slings his black laptop bag over his shoulder as he picks up the open kasa and holds it in front of him as he walks past lingering students.

It was 1958. Robert spent the duration of his graduate research in Japan on the Court Music of the Japan Imperial Household called Gagaku. He immersed himself in the culture, learning Japanese and returned to the states after two years able to speak it fluently. He even received the Order of the Rising Sun from the Emperor of Japan in 2005 for a lifetime of work strengthening relations between Japan and the United States.

“It’s originally just for work relating to Japan, but when the emperor greeted me he said it was for all of humanity. It’s a big deal. I don’t talk about it much, but when I do its just to remind myself.”

His wife would ask him to sing his daughter to sleep before she went to bed at night. From the other room, she could hear the faint sound of him singing the Japanese court music he had been trained to sing while in Japan. He had studied with the Japanese Household Music Department, who were amazed that an American man, a Hispanic-American man wished to learn so much about their culture.

“My wife and I think this is what might have warped her,” he chuckles to himself.

Piercing shrieks of what sounds like to be a squeaky car with a faulty transmission, or an out of tune oboe begins to emanate from his pants pocket. The girls in the front row of the classroom look up startled and stop scribbling their notes. He pats both his pockets trying to retrieve it, and finally manages to fish out his iPhone. He pauses the music as he answers the phone in front of an entire room of students. Still speaking in the same way he had been giving his lecture, he continues his conversation, the entire class hearing his end of it in its entirety. It’s his daughter and she is having computer problems again.

“I bet you can’t say you know anyone else who has Burmese music as their ringtone,” he smiles as he continues, “That was my daughter. She doesn’t have work today. She’s a cinematographer so she just waits to get called for work. It’s very scary. She worked on Iron Man and will probably get called to work on Iron Man 2.”

Across the screen flashes a picture of two young boys at a piano. One is clearly Burmese with his slanted eyes and an oval face, but the other is slightly lighter with dark hair and a square face with the beginnings of a strong jaw. His face is turned downward towards the piano in front of him, away from the camera. He is Robert’s son Nicholas.

“He works for Mercedes now you know. He designed a car that was supposed to come out this year, but they postponed it because of how bad the economy is right now. No one can afford to buy it. He was disappointed,” he says scrolling quickly through his emails in his office.

Numerous UCI addresses flash across the screen, various music companies and museums until finally he arrives at one that says Nicholas. He clicks on it and opens up the link. “Car Body and Design” flashes across the top of the page and he scrolls down to a picture of a man sitting at a desk cradling a drawing of a silver car, his pen resting steadily in his hand. He looks up at the camera, his square face still there, and his strong jaw now present. His hair is speckled with silver.

“He looks just like you,” I exclaim.

“Yeah a lot of people say that. We’re very close but it’s so hard for us to see each other now. He’s back here now and he’s glad he doesn’t have to spend another whole year in Germany designing”

They lived in Burma for a year while he studied the Music of the Burmese Hsaing Ensemble in Rangoon in the Rangoon School for the Arts. He recalls the fresh mohinga, a Burmese soup made of catfish and other spices. The aroma would slowly drift down the street in the early morning to where they were staying, past the tiny houses and the large ornate temples accented with gold, in the Indonesian architectural style. He recalls the Pwe Theater, with the Burmese clowns allowed to say whatever they so wish despite how controversial it may be. Clowns were regarded as above the law, and when the dictatorship was established and one was arrested, it caused a great uproar among the Burmese people. The country has thus been renamed Myanmar in recent years, and it has become harder and harder to visit it with the current military dictatorship that has been in place since he was there in 1962. Robert was lucky to visit in 1964 and 1966, allowed to stay for a year to study the music from 1973-1974, and 1999 most recently. Monks protested the dictatorship in 2007, but their protest went unnoticed because of how isolated Burma was from the rest of the world. Crowds of people were machine gunned, monks decapitated and their bodies left to rot in the jungle, two non protestors were killed on accident and their families were given $20 per body as compensation as they watched members of the dictatorship pull away with their corpses in the back of a truck.

“Only in Burma can you buy food off a street corner and know it is safe.”
His son Nicholas was only five years old then.
“Dad, do I have to brush my teeth?”
“Yeah you have to brush your teeth every day.”
“But why Dad? We’re in Burma.”

We walk out of his office as he shuts the door behind us. In there, books on ethnomusicology line the walls while video recordings marked “Robert Garfias Recordings” are stacked up as high as the shelf above it. A sea of video cassettes with Korean titles cascade down the shelves. An award for “UC Excellence in Teaching Site of the Year: 1997” sits nestled in-between everything. A picture of a bird he took while bird watching in Irvine is tacked to a board outside. It shyly looks away from the camera. A glass lamp from the 70’s sits on his desk next to a tiny row of ornate red bells hanging from strings and a set of fountain pens, one from Turkey and one from Japan. The tiny end table next to his computer chair is from Turkey, its geometric patterns a stark contrast to the dark carpet below it. A big wipe board is covered by an even bigger Indian painting depicting an elephant parade and people dancing. The silver and gold highlights illuminated by the sun as it filters in through the blinds. He shuts the door behind him as he fiddles with his iPhone for a bit before stopping and he says,

“My wife had surgery today. You go on ahead. I have to see if she wants me to take care of her.”

The Cerritos Library Skyline Room is a flutter of brightly colored saris: green, blues, yellows, pinks all accented with gold contrasting those of European descent in their dark pea coats and black leggings. A large gathering of Indian people, with a few of other descents are spotted throughout the room. Robert sits in the front row. He leans over to the woman next to him and whispers something in her ear to which she nods. He has to lean slightly upward because she is a bit taller than him. She has short brown hair, bangs, oval rimmed glasses, and a smile on her heart-shaped face. The performance starts and a young woman in a sari approaches the mic and begins to speak. She introduces her dance as a “pure dance”, and a steady drum beat starts as she takes her place in the center of the stage. She bobs her head to the beat, making facial gestures depicting a woman who has just been cheated on by her husband, the bells on her legs jingling with every step.

The performance ends and after a short speech by Robert everyone begins to get up to go. Robert and the woman linger for a bit in the front row. I approach him with my mother at my side to say hi. He immediately greets her in Burmese and proceeds to introduce his wife to us in English.

“She’s my secret little helper,” he tells them as he looks over in my direction. I am a reader for his Music of Indonesia and the Philippines class Winter Quarter 2009, and I am taking his Music as an Expressive Culture class to get the ethnomusicology certificate.

My mother and I shake hands with his wife before they quickly move about the crowd, shaking hands with people far more important than us.

She was an anthropology student at the University of Washington. Not his student though.

“I noticed her but, apparently she had known about me but she was trying to be cool.”
He noticed her one day walking across the bridge.
“I said my God that girl is beautiful. She’s gorgeous.”
He finally mustered up the college to talk to her.
“She was cool and later she tells me she was waiting for me to wake up.”
They started talking.
“Well you saw her. You know she’s old but still. Fifty-five that’s pretty old huh?”
She visited him three times during the year he was in Japan.
“That was hard but at least now it’s only going to be three-four months.”

“If you should ever get married,” he tells his class, “and I hope most of you get married, it is important to assume the other person might think differently from you.”

The sound of the bride’s song from the Philippines fades slowly into the background. He clicks onto the next picture of a group of people standing before a kulingtan.

“In ethnomusicology, wherever you go you make certain assumptions. You go there expecting what you’re going to see and that’s what you see.”

Japan, Africa, Korea, Mozambique, Romania, Turkey, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Burma, Okinawa, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Central America. All areas he has conducted research in, made lifelong friends, and raised a family. Burmese, French, German, Japanese, Romanian, Spanish, and Turkish. All languages he learned from books and tapes, self taught, or learned from native speakers.

He remembers the taxi driver in Zamboanga, extremely hesitant to take him and Harold to a party where they were playing the kulingtan, a large row of gongs. This was because the last taxi driver that went there was murdered. They get there and begin recording the music. A bright flash illuminates the pitch black room, revealing an eager crowd of over fifty people, curious about these Americans and their recording equipment. Any one of them could’ve done it. He remembers the theater performance he went to watch in San Francisco. The men were performing a dance depicting the story of a group of men fighting an evil witch. They jab at a figure prancing around in black and white feathers with a mask with their knives. She casts a spell over them causing them to try to kill themselves. Men were writhing on the stage floor, attempting to pierce themselves with their swords, the tips no longer visible because they were on the verge of breaking skin. Robert is backstage as the curtain falls and he expects to see the men get up, but they continue writhing on the ground until a priest comes backstage and sprinkles them with water, freeing them from the trance. He remembers the Indians in Tuscon, the children were so inquisitive, continually asking him questions when he was supposed to be the one learning about them. When he was done being interviewed, he began to interview the musicians, the elders of the tribe. His questions were met with a long silence and a steady “Yeaup”, silence a sign of intelligence in their culture.

“We raised our kid to be aware of other cultures, and that people may think differently from them. We make them conscious that in other cultures they can’t do this or they can’t do that”

There are things he forgets. While he was a Grad student at UCLA during the 1960’s he was asked to deliver a rabob, an Indian instrument, up North. A group of friends were performing up there and they had sold their old rabob to UCLA for research and asked Robert to bring them a new one to bring back with them.

He drove his old 1955 Buick late that night, hoping to make it up North by the morning. He fell asleep at the wheel and his car veered off the road and flipped over. It was 6 am. No one was on the road. He awoke to the murmurs of a crowd of people who had gathered around his car. He got out of the car as faces stared, mouths wide open.

“He actually got out.”

Robert could barely walk. He had cuts on his hands and head. He made it to the performance but was in the hospital for a few days. They noticed his strange gait as he walked in, holding the pieces of what was left of the broken rabob in front of him. They took it tenderly in their own hands, wrapped it up in plastic so that it looked like a giant ball.

“I didn’t remember that until just now,” he said as his voice trailed off, “that could have been the end to a career!” he chuckled, his face still pensive and staring at all the books and video cassette recordings that were displayed in his office.

An old black and white picture of a battle scene flashes across the screen. A military march opens with a rolling drum pattern played on a snare drum. He begins to talk about the National Anthem and how it is influenced by ragtime. He emphasizes the fact that African American culture is so heavily intertwined with our American history. You cannot talk about one without mentioning the other.

“They made a bad choice. Nobody remembers the words. It was originally a drinking song,” he chuckles to himself. Uncomfortable laughter slowly rises from the underage pockets of the mass before him. He starts humming the tune waving his conductor’s hand along beside him.

“You have to remember this was enacted after I was born,” he proclaimed to this congregation, his hand still moving with the rhythm that no longer rose from his chest.

Robert worked under three presidents: Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton.

“Reagan was impossible. I don’t think you could get an idea in there.”
“Clinton could really have done something. You could really have a conversation with him.”
“Bush was good too.”

He was a White House advisor on the Council of the Arts. Robert and a group of other men from various areas would get together and deal with grants in charge of the National Endowment for the Arts. They would also recommend who would get the National Medal of the Arts.

Once a year they would have the opportunity to have a quick meeting with the commander in chief himself. Most of the time it was just a simple handshake and hello and they were on their way. You were allowed to have a couple words with the president.

“You could say anything you want, didn’t have to do with the arts.”

“I was living in Costa Rica and it made me realize we should stop the blockade of Cuba. Because of the invasion of Panama under Bush the father, we were seen all over Latin American as tyrants, preventing people from getting medicine. Our role is seen as an aggressor,” he said to Clinton.

“I thought I was going to cry but I didn’t,” he said as he stared off above the heads of his students.
“I used to play them all the time. The guys from Phoenix came and they packed them all up and took them away.” His bright eyes began to dim like the sun setting over Phoenix. His instruments were being collected for a future museum in Phoenix, Arizona funded by Target. He is an outside adviser hired to find certain instruments. He was in Puerto Rico last summer with a Japanese film crew. He found a man who made traditional instruments and offered to pay for them out of his own pocket.

“No. Your word is good,” he replies, “I’ll make the instruments. Call me in January.”
He found a museum in Ireland with information on how to make traditional bagpipes and passed it onto them as well. He also made arrangements in Korea. All of his contacts more than happy to help the retired adventurer.

Robert was twelve years old when he went to Mexico, a stark change to his hometown of San Francisco. It was here that he became interested in music and bought his first, and definitely not last instruments. He bought a recorder but couldn’t play well so he would just tootle around with it when he had time. His mother, mesmerized by classical Spanish guitar hired a teacher to teach it to him. Eventually Robert picked up his father’s saxophone and developed a passion for jazz as well as composing music. He began to play in a jazz band, travelling all around the United States and even to the Orient which he found himself captivated by. He would play jazz compositions on any Oriental instrument he could get his hands on. He had listened to Cantonese opera on the radio. It was horrible, but someone had to be listening to it and he wanted to figure out why. In San Francisco he met a lady who taught him how to play the koto, a large stringed Japanese instrument. He became so involved in his lessons he stopped composing and focused more on ethnomusicology.
They were not in museum cases. Four bagpipes and four mouth organs lay slumped against a wall in the dining room of the two story house in University Hills. An African harp called the kora sits in a corner of the same room, surrounded by two Korean drums, a Chinese drum and the North African bendeer. Hundreds of instruments occupied the upstairs part of the house. Flutes lay in baskets and mouth organs from the 1960’s that he got for $35-$40, now worth $9, 000-$10, 000, covered the floor.

“I gave them everything. I didn’t give them the Burmese drum. My wife wouldn’t part with it,” he chimed in. It was a big beautiful gold drum with delicate gold frogs on the side, cast in the cir perdu, lost wax method. His wife had gone to a store on the east coast and seen some there for $8,000-$10,000.

“Made in Massachusetts,” the store owner haughtily stated.
“We brought ours back from Burma,” his wife simply said.

The drum sits on the beautiful white tile countertop of the bathroom, the mirror behind it casting its elegant reflection. The all white of the bathroom is chosen carefully by his wife to set it off, so that it will be the first thing you see no matter which direction you look.

“I kept my Okinawan flute because the Okinawans might want me to play again. Probably not but you never know. You know they sit on the hard floor when they play, and I just can’t do it anymore. I mean they just kneel there and play, but I’m the only flute player in all of California and Hawaii.”

“I kept my saxophone, but I gave them my old one, it was originally my father’s that I used to play when I played jazz. That’s a good place for it, a museum.”
“I was so sad when I gave them my Kayagam, it’s like a Kyoto but it’s the Korean one with twelve strings. It’s so beautiful, I love that instrument but I don’t play it anymore.”
“It’s better to arrange them now. I could wait ten years but then who knows who would want them? At least now I know they’re somewhere where they can be used.”

High school was just after World War II and the first soldiers were beginning to come back. The sudden influx of male teachers when there had been none for as long as Robert could remember was a big deal. Some were easy to talk to, GI’s coming back to teach. A Science teacher who played the saxophone but not jazz, a wonderful painter who did watercolors and stage design, so Robert studied that too and began composing music for the school plays. All the kids in the school would sing to music he had written.

“I was president of the Spotlight Club. I thought I was a weirdo, but everybody knew me.”
“I had a friend who was teaching a summer camp for,” he pauses, leaning his elbow against the podium. “A summer camp for well…nerds,” he continues. It was one of those camps that forced kids to broaden their horizons to break free from the pop music scene and video game soundtracks they had limited themselves to.

“My friend realized they liked music they didn’t have to really pay attention to.”

“My goal here is to expand your concept of what’s beautiful,” Robert tells his students. He dims the music. The quarter is ending two classes early because he must travel to Philadelphia to divvy up more money to buy instruments.

“I’m sorry that you’re going to be stupider because of it. I feel that I have a long-term responsibility.”

His students shift in their chairs at the sound of something not related to Indonesia of the Philippines. One girl switches windows on her black Macbook from her thin notes to Facebook.

“I was sitting in the back of an anthro class evaluating an instructor. People were on myfacebook, my bookface whatever that is, playing games and then they’d switch to Doc Pro and type two words.”

At this point the girl hesitates as she switches back to Doc Pro, minimizing her Facebook window, as she flips her hair.

Robert came to UCI as a dean, thinking about becoming a chancellor, and was publishing articles on ethnomusicology at the same time. He began to get more involved in administration: National Council on the Arts, Presidential Appointee, but he eventually gave up on administration. Robert refers to all these events as markers,
“When I die, I don’t mean to be morbid, but these are the types of things they are going to write about. I’m glad I didn’t go more into administration, I probably would’ve been very unhappy.”
She wanders back to Facebook again.
“I guess I enjoy it. I mean if I had to teach a basic anthro class, giving the same lecture every day I might have retired years ago.”
She checks her email.
“It’s gratifying teaching young people and seeing them get something out of it. I want them to have curiosity, expand their idea on the concept of beauty.”
She clicks another tab as an AOL Instant Messenger Chat Box hops up and down at the bottom of her screen.
“Some student evaluations say that the music is so boring, and some even get offended by the casual style,” he says as he leans against the podium scratching his head. This casual style exemplified by a man named Dick Waterman.

Robert met a teacher when he was an undergraduate, a composer interested in world music. He didn’t know much about it, but he was encouraging. He started reading all kinds of things and met a famous Dutch ethnomusicologist who came to visit San Francisco and had studied Balinese music. He told Robert he should go to school at UCLA because the guy who had traveled to the Netherlands with him was now running the program.
“I didn’t know him but he was a pretty big influence. He told other people I should’ve been the one to carry on what he was trying to do.”
The only other place to study ethnomusicology was Northwestern University. There was an anthropologist there named Dick Waterman who had done field work in Australia and Africa. Robert wrote him a letter stating that he’d like to come and Waterman was happy to have him, and he met the Dutch composer who told him to go to UCLA. Waterman came to lecture at UCLA. He was different from the other lecturers, he was relaxed informal. He and Robert connected immediately when they talked.
“If I had gone to study with Waterman,” Robert begins to trail off, “he was a completely different person. Dead now of course.”
Robert contemplates telling Waterman’s son, one of his close friends, just how much of an indirect influence he truly was.
“He’d probably be surprised to know. Now I can reflect on it.”

Class ends and his students begin to file out slowly, shaking off their drowsiness as they head to their next class. I speed walk to my class my poetry class at ten, and then it’s back to Garfias’ class at eleven.

I walk towards the black doors of SSL and see him chatting with a student before class. They are blocking the door so I swerve to the next set of doors, staring down at my rainbow flip flops now thoroughly soaked from the rain. I reach to open the door but someone else opens it for me. I see the kasa in his other hand.

“There you are I thought I recognized that long lanky walk of yours!”

He curls his right arm around my head as he presses his cheek next to mine. He walks on ahead to open the door to the classroom for me as I walk towards it a bit shocked. Other students around me begin to whisper and I can read the words “head lock” on their lips. I quickly walk into the classroom averting their gazes and take my place in the front.

He fiddles with his brand new Macbook. It turns on but nothing is projected onto the screen.
“I used to believe the Mac people were good people. Vegetarians trying to save the planet. This thing is a nightmare!” he exclaims as he reaches for the phone hanging from the wall to call for help.
“Kristen now I see why you were laughing at me when you saw me the other day.”
I was walking down Ring Road to Brandywine and I see Garfias holding an opaque UCI bookstore bag. Inside I can make out a box for Macbooks. I smile to myself remembering all the troubles my roommate’s Mac has caused her.

“You bought a Mac?” I asked.
“Yea the instructor before the 11o’clock class said it would be easier.”
The student he is talking to stares at me as he clutches his own laptop, also a Mac.
“I see. Well hopefully the lectures will go smoothly and all the listening examples will play this time,” I say as I keep walking.
He finally gets the program going thanks to the help of the student I had seen him talking to on Ring Road. As the projector warms up he wanders around the classroom, going through rows of desks peeking behind people’s laptop screens.
“What are you doing?”
She looks up startled. He stares at her curiously waiting for an answer.
“Just checking my email.”
“Oh that’s all,” he says disappointed as he wanders towards the back of the classroom.

He stops in front of another girl of Japanese descent in front of a laptop screen. He begins to speak with her in Japanese. She looks up confused, obviously not able to understand what he is saying, so he smiles and moves on.

I remember when I first approached him last year about my Humanities Core Course research paper I had done on African drumming. He assisted me in finding resources to help improve my paper and expand my research to extend beyond that of the Langston and the internet.

“Hi my name is Kristen. I was wondering if you got my e…”
“Are you Persian?”
“No I am mixed actually.”
“What are you mixed with?”
“My mother is Burmese, Australian, and white.”

He begins speaking in Burmese. I give him a confused look, unable to understand him because the only thing I know in Burmese is a profanity, and I would hope it would not be something he would choose to say to me.

“My mother speaks it but I can’t understand much,” I reply and continue, “My father is Philipino and white.”

He begins to speak a bit of Tagalog to which I respond to by shaking my head and shrugging my shoulders.

“I speak Spanish actually. I took four years in high school.”
“I would’ve guessed you were Hispanic. Now about the dun-dun…”

He returns to the front of the classroom as he scans all the different faces. I remember the first day of class he started late, so everyone was busy chattering away with one another, catching up on stories about winter vacation. He stealthily pulled out his digital camera and snapped a picture, those in the first few rows noticing before those in the back who were only made aware by a bright camera flash.

“My wife said I’m not supposed to do that anymore. I just want to be able to put names to the faces I see,” he smiles.

He begins his lecture as usual, diverting from the lecture as well. He begins discussing Balinese music, remembering Colin McPhee, a good friend of his who did detailed studies in the field.

Colin McPhee was leaning against the wall, chatting with three grad students, Robert included. One of them was a young mother who had brought her children. Colin stood with one arm propped up leaning against the wall as he talked, while her two children, around the ages of five or seven ran around him like a pole on May Day. Colin was so deep in conversation that he placed his hand at his side hitting one of the children hard in the face. He jumped up flustered as his cherub face exclaimed,
“Oh wow! Aren’t you glad I didn’t have a hammer in my hands?”

He stood there looking apologetic at the mother now comforting her child, looking up at the man that looked like Santa Claus who had just hit him in the face. Colin was an interesting fellow even to those in his field who were said to understand him better than most. Robert recalls a trip on their way back to Japan.

“Will you take me to a music store?” he asks Robert.

Robert takes him to a music store down one of the main streets in Kyoto. He waits for Colin outside. Colin returns holding sheet music, instead of a book or magazine like Robert had anticipated. He sat next to him on the plane, watching this man read sheet music chuckling to himself as he imagined how all the compositions were to be played in his head.

“Hear it as a language, and it’s profound,” Robert says as he fades the music.