Nomad Codes

music,” he wisely chose to leave his remastered tunes somewhat scuzzy. Besides preserving more of the original recording, this remaining surface noise spills the dustbin of history into the digital clean room of today’s musical universe. When I hear the scratchy samples of Tricky, Portishead, or the Mo’ Wax crew, I hear entropy, death, and vinyl ancestor-worship. But when I listen to the nightstorm of static that bathes G. Kurmangaliev’s Kazakhstani lute or Sa Zen Ga Zhiu Luh’s serpentine Tibetan melody, I hear nothing less than the immense but muted roar of all strange, lost, and forgotten music, the long-ago strains of humanity’s joyful noise.
    1995

BURMESE DAZE

    My Date with a Transvestite Spirit Medium

    I do not have children, which saddens me a bit, for I would like some day to tell my offspring of the time I met Valiant Lord Kyawzwa, the Burmese guardian god of rogues and vagabonds, on the hot and dusty planes of Mandalay. We were traveling in the month of August, J and I, and the sky was low and heavy with monsoon. Our guides had brought us to the town of Taungbyon, famed throughout the land for its exuberant Nat Pwe —a week of endless overlapping rites that honored, propitiated, and feted the Thirty-Seven Nats, Burma’s earthy and melodramatic pantheon of all-too-human spirit beings.
    The crowded central footpath through Taungbyon was flanked by food stalls, tea shops, and globalist collages of T-shirts and cheap jeans. A labyrinth of smaller paths radiated outward from this main artery, and beckoned us with clanging gongs, drum beats, and otherworldly folk-pop squealings—the sonic signs that the nats were in the house, or, more accurately, inside the bedecked and spangled bodies of Burma’s incomparable spirit mediums. Following one of these paths, we stumbled upon a group of smiling women who invited us to join them inside a small stall set up next to a particularly boisterous orchestra.
    We settled down on the raised platform, joining what turned out to be a small and informal session with a spirit medium, or nat kadaw , who sat cross-legged before a lacy altar wearing a glazed, otherworldly look in his eye. Most of Taungbyon’s mediums are, in some manner or another, transgendered—”ladyboys” in the local parlance. The nat kadaw before us was clearly a man, though he was dressed in an effeminate array of pink and white chintz and wore a fetching orange bandana topped with a few crisp low-denomination units of Burmese kyat (pronounced “chat”). The medium smiled at us and silently directed someone to give us some fried chicken legs, stringy and vaguely repulsive, which I dutifully munched down for the both of us. The ladies moved aside, and encouraged me to shuffle up the medium, who gifted me with the first glug of what would become, by the end of the day, a veritable stream of Grand Royal whiskey.
    Though I did not know it at the time, chicken and whiskey signify the presence of Ko Gyi Kyaw, also known as the aforementioned Lord Kyawzwa, at least according to one the few documents on nat worship I have managed to scare up. Lists of the Thirty-Seven Nats are notoriously incomplete and contradictory; they are often composite figures, with multiple names, and there are well more than thirty-seven. Though the Burmese use the term nats to refer to both heavenly devas and local nature spirits, the Thirty-Seven “Great Nats” are a spectral crew of former human beings, some quasi-historical and some obviously folkloric, who linger on in an astral antechamber of the earth, refusing to vacate the premises. They are a colorful lot, packed with princes and beauties, and nearly all left our world in wretched and excruciating circumstances, like self-immolation or leprosy or death by tiger. I can’t tell from my research whether Ko Gyi Kyaw died of drink or was buried alive, but his life course was firm, its debauched credo—which conjures Hafiz and 50 Cent in equal measure—captured in this sample from one of his ritual songs:
    Do you not know me? Have you not seen me at cockfights? Have you not seen me letting off fireworks? Many times have I fallen prostrate in the gutter, drunken with my wife’s wine, and many times have I been picked up by the loving hands of pretty village maidens.
    I needed my photo taken with this guy. So I ponied up 500 kyat and sidled next to Ko Gyi Kyaw’s temporary vessel for a shot. Egged on by the ladies, I put my arm around the medium’s shoulder.