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Autumn Leaves: Recording the golden years
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Growing Older Disgracefully
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Mostly teenagers
but whatever
keeps me rememberin'
keeps it green
2004-04-18 - 1:00 p.m.
Thundering Horde
2004 April 18
Just saw something amazing.
I was making my morning coffee when I became aware of a deep rumbling that was getting louder. After a minute, it resolved into drumbeats. I yanked on some clothes, grabbed my camera and ran outside. There was the largest traditional band I've ever seen going up my street! Must have been 150 drummers. Most had the large, convex-sided, double-headed drum that is a little bigger than a Western street (snare) drum. It has a deep throaty sound that resonates in my solar plexus. And the sheer volume of nearly a hundred of them was astounding. You can imagine, they were rattling the windows!
There were other-sized drums as well, also cymbels and flutelike wooden "horns." They were doing a street cadence that was highly syncopated, but basically a heartbeat with ornamentation.
Their uniforms were white farmers' shirts and trousers with blue hip-length vests and red and yellow sashes diagonally over the shoulders and around the waist. I guessed that their vests were not long like the dancing bands I've seen because they are a "marching band."
The endearing thing about these traditional bands is that they don't march, per se. They walk together. So, you see heads bobbing in Brownian motion, not regimented,- very Corean. Their uniforms looked home-made and they had no hats, so my guess is that this is a group who has come together with little or no sponsorship. This kind of "committee of friends" approach to organising an activity is also very Corean. (That's the way the huge clean-up crews were gathered together during the World Cup soccer competitions.)
Cellphones are a good tool for facilitating this approach to problem-solving, or fun-generating, in the case of the drum horde.
Happy Trails!
~ Sil in Corea
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"I've always been impressed by the lives of those who didn't need to fight every dissenting voice. They had found that if their way was true, it would be known by quiet acts of purpose rather than noisy protest."
--AA Grapevine, June 2000, page 8
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