Non mi legga chi non e matematico.

The above is a quote from one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.  As my well-educated and intelligent readers probably know, Leonardo kept many notebooks throughout the course of his life, in which he made many sketches and wrote many interesting things from right to left.  Why from right to left?  No one knows.  The translation of the quote is roughly "Let no one read me who is not a mathematician.

I don't know how he would feel about me reading him, much less quoting him.

This is unconnected to anything else, but I want to say it.  Star Wars was on TV today.  "The Empire Strikes Back," to be precise, dubbed in Italian.  I did not watch very much, but I did notice that everyone's voice was different except for R2D2 and Chewbacca.  I wonder why they didn't translate those character's lines into Italian.

Last night I attended a concert at another university in Milan.  It was done by two women, an Israeli woman and a Palestinian woman, who each sang a selection of their own songs and then performed together.  It was amazing--my favorite things I've done in Milan thus far.  The experience meant a lot to me before the concert even started, because my friend had given up her ticket so that I could go.  That immediately gave the free concert a ton of value.  It was supposed to start at 9:00, and at about 9:30 the audience broke into applause.  The girl next to me (a friend of the friend who gave up her ticket) explained to me that clapping is a way for the audience to communicate they are tired of waiting and want the show to start.  My first thought was that timetables for showtimes must be quite different in Italy than in the US if there is a ubiquitously known way for the audience to communicate impatience.  Oh, those cultural differences.  My second thought was "Really? 30 minutes?"  I'd estimate an American audience would have clapped in 12 at the latest.  The Palestinian Mira Awad was the first performer, and she was positively entrancing.  She sang acapella mostly in Arabic, and a little bit in English.  She sounded wonderfully Middle Eastern, and at one point the man accompanying her on djembe had a solo, and she did some lovely dance moves.  I have a friend who once spent a summer in Palestine, and when she came back she tried showing me some dance moves she saw there at a wedding.  I had an idea of what they should look like, but had never seen them look so smooth and beautiful as when this woman who had spent her whole life there did them.  After a while the second singer, internationally known Israeli singer Noa came on.  I used to think J.R.R Tolkien was exercising his imagination when he described Saruman captivating people by putting them under the spell of his voice.  When Theoden, king of Rohan, resisted his voice and spoke, everyone around thought his voice sounded horrible--unrefined and foolish.  Now I think Tolkien heard someone like Noa and wrote about his experience, adapting it to fit the story.  Seriously, her opening song was 10 or 15 minutes long, and she thanked the university for hosting the concert, as well as the audience for coming, and then introduced herself and her band members.  With each introduction of course the audience applauded, and I literally felt like one of those poor sucker soldiers riding with King Theoden who just wanted him to shut up so they could continue listening to the enchanting voice of Saruman.  The main difference is that Noa is not a wizard gone bad.

Here are a few pictures I snapped of when they were singing together.  I also really liked what the lighting designers did.  Every song had a really different look.

Their first song together.

I think this was during the song "There Must Be Another Way" which was really powerful as a duet between an Israeli and a Palestinian.  Beautiful.  If I wanted to get really symbolic here, I could talk about how the light that look like an eclipse.  An eclipse--temporary and holding the promise of full light in the future.  If you care to give the song a listen, here's one version: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN8B1xvCxI0&feature=related

 

This was their last song.  Here's the two of them performing it in Rome a while ago: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iukOKO-6R0

There have been a few changes to the song since then, making it more equally split between the Hebrew and the Arabic, but this is more or less what they sang.

When we left, the girl I was with (who is a jazz singer and attends at least a couple concerts every week) said that Noa "is a Singer, with-a the big S!"

I must say I agree.