Author: Antonian Lara

Asbarez: From Friends to Family: AYF Summer Camp Wraps Up Another Successful Year

Antonian Lara
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8 hours ago

All 8 sessions of the 2018 AYF Camp season were a great success

GLENDALE—The campfire is out, the snack shop is empty and only the sounds of birds chirping at AYF Camp Big Pines remain. The 2018 AYF Summer Camp season has come to an end leaving behind the most successful season to date. In the span of eight weeks, over 1200 campers and staff from all over California and beyond participated in the AYF Summer Camp program where they were able to see old friends and make new ones while participating in classic AYF Camp activities.

Over the course of a week, campers participated in a wide array of activities and educationals, developed interpersonal skills and created lasting memories. “The best part of AYF Camp is that you are able to make friends while working together to accomplish goals and participate in the competitions. You really turn into a family over the week at camp,” says Edik Kermenikian, 14, Houston, Texas.

In addition to the traditional camp activities of canoeing, arts and crafts and Red-Blue-Orange group competitions, campers participated in daily educationals focusing on a diverse range of topics. Former camper and counselor Berj Parseghian, owner and chief instructor at Jeff Speakman’s Kenpo 5.0 and 5th Degree Black Belt, led campers through a series of fun and exciting training exercises and spoke about the importance of health, fitness and self-defense.

AYF Camp also partnered with Beads for Battle, a nonprofit cancer support organization that aims to spread hope and positivity to everyone affected by cancer, to organize a workshop where campers had the opportunity to make bracelets, write encouraging notes to patients and learn about cancer awareness. Some campers were lucky enough to learn a variety of traditional Armenian dances from Patille and Cynthia Albarian, instructors at Patille Dance Studio in Pasadena, while others learned about traditional Armenian instruments and music from Arick Gevorkian. Deeown Shaverdian, an AYF member, presented the campers with information on the recent Velvet Revolution in Armenia.

“My experience with the youth of our nation was, as always, more of a learning experience for me than it was for them. The intelligent questions, the curious stares, the engaging discussions and, most importantly, the eagerness to enact change and take action were the most inspiring to me,” says Shaverdian. He adds that, “It is important now more than ever to instill in them a sense of responsibility to take ownership of their country and culture and to pave the way for its progression into a new era of unprecedented advancement. Through educationals about current events, history and culture, we can cement the creation of young patriotic Armenians who, through their education, activism and work, will proudly carry the torch of the Armenian culture into the next generation.”

These topics, along with educationals by the Armenian Youth Federation and Armenian National Committee of America, engaged campers of all ages providing them with information on Armenian history, culture and topics relevant in both our diaspora and Homeland today.

AYF Camp is an integral part of the summer for many by providing a fun and safe environment for children to learn and grow as individuals. “My favorite parts about AYF Camp are staying connected with the Armenian culture and making friends,” says Anjelique Alexander, 17, Laguna Beach, CA. “I’ve been coming to AYF Camp since I was 10 years old and it’s interesting to come back each year and see the same campers and meet new campers to embark on this journey together. I’m very excited to begin the next step and return as a counselor for the first time next summer.”

The AYF Camp Management Board and Summer Camp Committee is thankful to the directors, counselors, medical staff and educational speakers for volunteering their time and ensuring each week was a success, as well as to its community members without whose unwavering support the AYF Summer Camp program wouldn’t be what it is today.

Since 1977, AYF Camp has offered a genuinely rewarding experience, by serving as a place for Armenian youth to make new friends and memories for a lifetime. AYF Camp is the largest and oldest summer camp program in the Western United States focusing on Armenian culture and heritage. Visit AYFCamp.org for more information and sign up for our newsletter to receive news and updates on programs and events.

Asbarez: Portantino Honors Homenetmen on its 100th Anniversary at the State Capitol

Antonian Lara
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12 hours ago

Senator Anthony Portantino presents proclamation to Homenetmen scouts and Western Regional Executive members on the Senate floor

SACAREMANTO—Senator Anthony J. Portantino on August 9 honored the Homenetmen on its 100th anniversary at the California State Capitol. Leaders and scouts from the Homenetmen were recognized on the floor of the State Senate with a resolution from Portantino who were joined by senators Kevin De León and Scott Wilk. Similar recognition was also conducted on the Assembly floor by Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian.

“I am proud to represent the 25th Senate District which is home to five Homenetmen chapters. For the last century the organization has remained true to its motto, ‘Elevate Yourself and Others With You’ which has instilled our youth with the importance of civic responsibility as they strive for collective excellence. I am happy to recognize the efforts of the Homenetmen in our communities.” commented Senator Portantino.

Sen. Anthony Portantino with Homenetmen scouts at the California State Senate

The Armenian General Athletic Union and Scouts, also known as Homenetmen was founded in 1918 and is a non-profit organization that has served over 800,000 youth in five continents. The organizations mission is to prepare exemplary law-abiding citizens by providing physical and health education, endowing the mind and the soul with the finest spirit of sportsmanship and understanding of responsibility and honor.

“I am humbled to represent such an amazing youth oriented organization with 100 years of rich history. On behalf of Homenetmen, I am grateful to Senator Portantino and Assemblymember Nazarian for recognizing our century of positive influence on our youth,” concluded Manuel Marselian, Chair of Homenetmen Western Region Executive Committee.

The first chapter in the United States was established in 1968. Since then it has provided the Armenian-American youth with moral, physical and social education, while exposing them to the Armenian culture and heritage. The Homenetmen experience is one of lasting association, altruism, and benevolence. Homenetmen’s motto is a constant reminder of the fundamental object of the organization.

168: Russian deputy defense minister denies media reports on suspending arms supply to Armenia

Antonian Lara
| 12:32 | August 3 2018
Category
Politics

Russian deputy defense minister Alexander Fomin denies the Russian media reports according to which Russia may suspend delivering arms to Armenia under the loan agreement worth 100 million USD.

“That information is not true”, the Russian deputy defense minister told reporters in Armenia’s Monte Melkonyan Military-Sports College.

Asked how he assesses the situation over CSTO Secretary General Yuri Khachaturov, Alexander Fomin said Armenia conducts justice.

Moscow angered by Armenia’s crackdown on CSTO chief

Antonian Lara
RusData Dialine – Russian Press Digest
August 3, 2018 Friday
Moscow angered by Armenia’s crackdown on CSTO chief
 
by  Alexandra Geogevitch
 Kommersant
 
The new Armenian authorities’ decision to prosecute former leaders has driven a wedge into Moscow’s relations with Yerevan and may set the two countries at loggerheads even more. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s government has launched a criminal investigation against former senior officials as part of a case into dispersing opposition protesters in March 2008.
 
Pashinyan, who was sent behind the bars in 2010 for organizing the riots, now demands those who also had a role in the crackdown on the protesters be held accountable: ex-President Robert Kocharyan and Secretary-General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization Yuri Khatchaturov, who was the commander of the Yerevan garrison in 2008. They have been charged with usurping power.
 
The prosecution of the CSTO chief has sparked Moscow’s outrage as this deals a blow to the image of the Russian-led military and political bloc, sources in Russia’s state bodies said. One of the sources close to the CSTO did not rule out that “the attempt to slander Khatchaturov and the entire organization has been inspired by players outside the region.”
 
The standoff between Moscow and Yerevan may affect Russian weapons supplies to Armenia agreed earlier, according to the paper. Top managers of two Russian defense enterprises said the implementation of the second package of contracts, under a $100 mln loan to Armenia, “now remains doubtful.”
 
Alexander Iskandaryan, Director of the Yerevan-based Caucasus Institute, has called not to link the current events in Armenia with the country’s foreign policy priorities. “What is happening now in Armenia is within the logic of the Armenian domestic political process. It should be viewed in the context of relations between the new and old elites.”

A Family’s 400-Year-Old Musical Secret Still Rings True

Antonian Lara
New York Times
Aug 3 2018
 
 
A Family’s 400-Year-Old Musical Secret Still Rings True
 
 
By Lara Pellegrinelli
 
Aug. 3, 2018
 
The surest route to a drummer’s heart? Cymbals.
 
“You can have all the swirling harmony in the world,” the drummer Brian Blade said, “but only the cymbals can put you over the top of that mountain you’re trying to climb. The tension is the beauty of it, like riding a wave until you need it to crest.”
 
Mr. Blade, who is best known for playing with the country music singer Emmylou Harris and the jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter,  said he thinks of his cymbals as an extension of himself, though he also gives credit for his distinctive sound to the instruments he plays: Zildjians. He has endorsed the brand for 20 years, just one in a long, diverse roster of musicians to do so.
 
Zildjian was incorporated in the United States in 1929. But the company’s relationship with drummers, and drumming itself, dates back much further: 400 years to be precise, to 1618, when a secret casting process resulted in the creation of a new bronze alloy for the court of Sultan Osman II, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire.
 
“My father always said that the name is bigger than any one person in the family,” said Craigie Zildjian, the company’s chief executive officer (the first woman to have the job), a member of the family’s 14th generation of cymbal makers. “In other words, you have this little piece of 400 years. Don’t screw it up.”
 
For the 3,000 or so years before 1618, cymbals had evolved very little. The earliest evidence of them can be found on pottery fragments from Hittite Anatolia dating to the Bronze Age. Metallic percussion was long part of the military music for Turkic tribes including the Seljuks, who migrated to the Middle East in the 11th century. (Some “had horns, others pipes and timbrels, gongs, cymbals and other instruments, producing a horrible noise and clamor,” reads a description of battle during the Third Crusade.)
 
The sound quality of these boisterous instruments might have left something to be desired by the 17th century, an age of Ottoman musical refinement. It was then that Avedis I, a 22-year-old Armenian metal smith and aspiring alchemist, learned that mixing ample tin into copper would produce a rich, robust sound. But he faced a formidable problem. “It’s a very brittle alloy,” Paul Francis, Zildjian’s director of research and development, said. “It will shatter like a piece of glass.”
 
Then Avedis I made a music-altering discovery — still carefully guarded by the family — that involved forging a metal so flexible it could be repeatedly heated, rolled and hammered into the finest instruments. “He was looking for gold,” Mr. Francis said. “As far as I’m concerned, he found it.”
 
 
Osman II thought so: He granted the young artisan permission to make instruments for the court and gave him the Armenian surname Zildjian (meaning “son of cymbal maker”). The family set up shop in the seaside neighborhood of Samatya in Constantinople, where metal arrived on camel caravans and donkeys powered primitive machines.
 
Those working in Zildjian’s shop produced cymbals for the mehter — monumental ensembles with double reeds, horns, drums and other metallic percussion that belonged to the empire’s elite janissary military corps. The Zildjians likely also did business with Greek and Armenian churches, Sufi dervishes and the Sultan’s harem, where belly dancers wore finger cymbals.
 
“Military music was a branch of their classical music,” Walter Zev Feldman, the author of “Music of the Ottoman Court,” said. Although mehter ensembles were known in the West for playing in battle, they also performed courtly suites for its rulers, like those by Solakzade Mehmed (1592-1658), who wrote under the name Hemdemi.
 
Every morning before prayer, and every evening after prayer, ensembles gathered to play from castle towers, including one above the gardens of Topkapi Palace. Hand-held cymbals measuring a foot or so in diameter probably marked the rhythmic cycles, which Mr. Feldman said “are among the most complex in the world: cycles of 24, 28, 32 and even 48 beats.”
 
It’s no wonder that composers like Gluck and Mozart wanted to emulate a Turkish style with busy, glittering percussion. Precisely what Ottoman music they heard is an open question, though. A handful of European rulers adopted mehter ensembles or sent their kapellmeisters to Constantinople to learn the tradition, but the composers more likely were exposed, Mr. Feldman said, to “klezmorim, local Jewish musicians, in places like Prague and Berlin, who had learned the Ottoman repertoire.”
 
 
What came to be known simply as “Turkish cymbals” were assimilated by European orchestras and, in the first half of the 19th century, into new military and wind band styles that thoroughly integrated West and East. Meanwhile, the janissaries, having assassinated one too many sultans, were outlawed and executed in 1826 — as were their mehter musicians. The Zildjians lost a significant portion of their market.
 
Avedis II built a 25-foot schooner to transport the first cymbals physically bearing his family’s name to London for the Great Exhibition, the first world’s fair, in 1851. His brother Kerope assumed the company helm in 1865, establishing a line of instruments named K Zildjian in several sizes and thicknesses that are still prized by percussionists today.
 
Those old K’s — which possess the “sound of two gladiator swords meeting,” in the words of Armand Zildjian, Craigie’s father — can be heard in the Philadelphia, Cleveland and Metropolitan Opera orchestras, among others. Gregory Zuber, the Met’s principal percussionist, said, “It’s a tradition that’s been handed down from player to player” and that can be heard in the tremendous, exposed crashes that heighten the drama of the 19th-century operas.
 
In America other musical forms began to shape, and be shaped by, the cymbal’s evolution. Avedis III, a Boston candy maker who left Turkey before the Armenian genocide, was reluctant to take over the family business when it was thrust upon him by his uncle Aram in 1927. But he changed his mind after checking out the growing dance band scene: “I saw the possibility that even if there wasn’t a market we could create one,” he recalled in a 1975 interview with The Armenian Reporter.
 
According to Jon Cohan’s book “Zildjian: A History of the Legendary Cymbal Makers,” drum shops and catalogs in the 1920s were likely to carry only so-called Oriental cymbals, American ones made of brass and nickel silver, and the weighty K’s from Constantinople. Avedis III sought out swing drummers, like Gene Krupa, and learned that they preferred Turkish cymbals but wanted them to be thinner and more responsive — “paper thin,” as Krupa put it.
 
The new instruments Avedis III developed and trademarked under his name had the crispness to cut through the sound of a big band. And, paired in hi-hats, cymbals took over the time keeping responsibilities from the laboring bass drum, a technique pioneered by Jo Jones of the Count Basie Orchestra.
 
“It gave you that upbeat that puts the snap in a dancer’s foot: down, chit; down, chit,” said Mr. Blade, who uses 1940s-era Avedis Zildjians in his drum kit. By the mid-1930s, celebrities including Chick Webb, Buddy Rich and Lionel Hampton were coming to the Zildjian factory in Quincy, Mass., to pick out their cymbals, with help from Avedis’s fine ear.
 
His experimentation producing novel cymbal types — swish and sizzle, bounce and crash —  would inspire a new generation of musicians to utilize a broader sonic palette. The bebop drummer Kenny Clarke led the pack by keeping a flexible, furiously paced, highly individualistic beat, probably on 17-inch Zildjian bounce cymbal. That instrument, later named a ride,  became a cornerstone of modern drumming.
 
Touring the factory, which now sits in a leafy industrial park in Norwell, Mass., is the drummer’s equivalent of stumbling into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams,” Mr. Francis, the director of research and development, said, quoting the movie, as he led the way on a recent visit.
 
A line of Gen16 products attempts to create an electronic cymbal that looks and feels like a real cymbal instead of a drum pad. A low-volume practice cymbal that looks like mesh is selling well among drummers in Asia who live in apartments with thin walls.
 
 
The lobby has the feel of a show room, with kits on display that belonged to Travis Barker (Blink-182), Tré Cool (Green Day) and Ginger Baker (Cream), along with a replica of Ringo Starr’s. “We all know what happened in 1964,” Mr. Francis said, referring to the British Invasion. “We had 90,000 cymbals on back order.”
 
A lounge gives drummers a place to try out their instruments or simply hang out while waiting for an order. Some, like Joey Kramer of Aerosmith and the famed session musician Steve Gadd, prefer to watch from the factory floor.
 
Metal glows hot from the furnace, and rolling machines spit out silvery pancakes of zinc-oxide-coated bronze, collected with coal shovels. Armand Zildjian modernized the factory using robots to remove the most burdensome physical labor and offer greater precision in tasks like hammering. (His younger brother Bob broke from the company 1981 and founded his own cymbal manufacture, Sabian, in Canada.)
 
Today, each instrument still passes through the hands of dozens of highly skilled workers. “Paper thin” is not measured by tiny calipers, but by lathe operators shaving off golden ribbons and checking to make sure their work falls within a certain range on digital scales.
 
The head cymbal tester, Leon Chiappini, who has worked at the factory for 57 years, listens to each one multiple times with a standard in mind and pairs them. But like drummers, no two are exactly alike.
 
more photos at
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Azerbaijani Press: Time frame of meeting between Azerbaijani, Armenian FMs disclosed

Antonian Lara
AzerNews, Azerbaijan
16:04 (UTC+04:00)

By  Trend

Azerbaijani and Armenian foreign ministers have agreed to meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in September, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Hikmet Hajiyev told Trend July 31.

“A principled agreement on the meeting of ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly was reached,” he said. “Moreover, holding another meeting before the above-mentioned one is being considered.”

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.