In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was plenty to be sad about, but one thing I remember sticking out in a particularly resonant-metaphoric way was the story or two that came out about Sikh immigrants being attacked because their assailants assumed, given the turbans, that they must be Muslims -- the irony being that in my understanding, one of the original reasons for the Sikh mode of dress was to differentiate them from their Hindu and Muslim neighbors in the Punjab. I think the early Gurus believed that if the Sikhs stuck out, then they'd have to stick together, and the community would be stronger. Hence the strong Sikh martial tradition too. Anyway, today there was a nice resonant-metaphoric counterpoint to all that, in today's NY Times article about Akal Security, a huge and growing guard-supplying firm owned and operated by a New Mexico-based Sikh sect. Lots of meaty church-state, free-practice, open-bid, non-profit type details. Plus, who couldn't love that the sect's founder lives on a ranch in Espanola, NM called the "Hacienda de Guru Ram Das Gurudwara".

[email fragment] Motorcycle Diaries: Up a notch via the Nic Harcourt interview w/ that actor dude (Gael Garcia Bernal? I think.); back down one thanks to Slate n you.

Also this from Lawrence Weschler, "Anatomy Lesson", Atlantic Monthly, October 97, about visiting the Rembrandt painting in its gallery during a break from covering the Bosnia war crimes tribunal:

The Anatomy Lesson is so famously overexposed, so crusted over with conventional regard, as to be almost impossible to see afresh. And indeed, when I recently came upon the painting once again, rather than seeing it I found myself recalling an essay I hadn't thought about in almost thirty years -- the English critic John Berger's 1967 rumination on the occasion of Che Guevara's death. Responding to the simultaneous appearance seemingly all over the world of that ghastly photo of Che's felled body, stretched out half naked across a bare surface and surrounded by the proud Bolivian officers and soldiers who had succeeded in bagging the revolutionary leader, Berger made a startling connection to Rembrandt'sAnatomy Lesson. Gee, I remember thinking at the time, this man doesn't look at his morning paper the way I look at mine.

 
[via google image search]

"Truth exists, but people have a vested interest in not knowing it." -- Errol Morris eschews relativist doubts in an interview with The Believer about, among other things, whether or not he's a documentary filmmaker. I watched the second half of his movie The Thin Blue Line yesterday, and was curious to find out the details behind how he gets everyone he to make eye contact with the camera, but I discovered and got lost in the interview instead. Another Morris gem: "By the way, I have a theory about why the National Enquirer is more reliable than the New York Times... Elizabeth Taylor can sue. The Kurds can't."

My Saturday late-morning tradition: browsing the new releases at the British dance record store Tunes.co.uk. The selection's good -- a little electronic- and house-heavy, perhaps, but with nice nerdy-but-hip-hop and international releases (West African funk, for instance, or some long-sought-after examples of great-sounding rap in Portuguese). The best part is their RealAudio samples usually run to three or four minutes, rather than the 30 second standard at iTunes or Amazon.

Today's listening included The Pharcyde's sweet "Passin' Me By, with its ur-cool background loop (here I define ur-cool as anything Ira Glass has used as a background track for a This American Life story), and clever, diverse rhymes on the going-after-but-not-getting-the-wrong-girl theme. Where else in hip-hop do you hear an MC say something so self-effacing as "Damn I wish I wasn't such a wimp"?

The Guardian: "With a disregard for science which would have made Mercator spin in his grave, Foale dragged lines across the screen and shoved interchange stations about as if he was playing with a fictive city. 'No, it's definitely not a map,' he said. 'A map is geographic. This is a diagram.'" --Nicholas Crane on the ... um ... whatever that reshaped (our perceptions of) London.

A little living gem from Alexander von Humboldt's turn-of-the-19th-century descriptions of what's now northeastern Venezuela:

Of all the productions on the coasts of Araya, that which the people consider as the most extraordinary, or we may say the most marvellous, is 'the stone of the eyes,' (piedra de los ojos.) This calcareous substance is a frequent subject of conversation: being, according to the natural philosophy of the natives, both a stone and an animal. It is found in the sand, where it is motionless; but if placed on a polished surface, for instance on a pewter or earthen plate, it moves when excited by lemon juice. If placed in the eye, the supposed animal turns on itself, and expels every other foreign substance that has been accidentally introduced. At the new salt-works, and at the village of Maniquarez, these stones of the eyes were offered to us by hundreds, and the natives were anxious to show us the experiment of the lemon juice. They even wished to put sand into our eyes, in order that we might ourselves try the efficacy of the remedy. It was easy to see that the stones are thin and porous opercula, which have formed part of small univalve shells. Their diameter varies from one to four lines. One of their two surfaces is plane, and the other convex. These calcareous opercula effervesce with lemon juice, and put themselves in motion in proportion as the carbonic acid is disengaged. By the effect of a similar reaction, loaves placed in an oven move sometimes on a horizontal plane; a phenomenon that has given occasion, in Europe, to the popular prejudice of enchanted ovens.

[email fragment] Hey, I had a Spanish usage question -- I was just looking at El Pais (Madrid) and they abbreviate Estados Unidos as EE UU -- I'm assuming the doubling is because it's a plural? Anyway, I'm wondering how you would pronounce it if you were reading the abbreviation out loud. Would it be "eh eh ooh ooh"? I kind of like it that way -- sounds like a noise a chimp might make.

[email fragment] Thanks for the [Lawrence Weschler Inteview] link. There are a few equally great prose tidbits in the longer interview (linked therein) from which it was excised. I've also been following Weschler's current residency at Transom.org -- maybe one of these days I'll gather the courage and the words to post something. But the whole thing's worth browsing through, and, as usual, there are some great links to outside sources (like, say, a PDF of the sublime quasi-intro to Vermeer in Bosnia).

And speaking of W. (ah, to speak of a W. without deeply conflicted political emotions), have you gotten to see one of the prototypes of Omnivore, Weschler's doomed-from-the-go magazine? I ordered one from the MJT bookstore. Wonderful (that word again!) in every sense.

[email fragment] I'm not sure I can be that much more help than any decent guidebook. Also, most of my knowledge is at least six years out of date -- okay for monuments, less so for restaurants.

My main general suggestion would be to try taking a long second-class train journey. It's roughing it a little, but it's a really great way to see something of the diversity of the country, and to meet lower-to-middle-class Indians who don't make their living in the tourist trade. Rail journeys from Mumbai to Bangalore, Delhi to Bangalore, and Mysore to Chennai are among my favorite Indian memories. Note that in terms of cultural experience, second class is actually preferable to first, which can feel like being sealed in a 1970s doctor's waiting room.

Found on iTunes this morning the album "Is It Rolling Bob? - A Reggae Tribute to Bob Dylan, Vol. 1" which features, among more predictable adaptations, a nearly unrecognizable dancehall version of "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Even the 30sec preview's a sound to behear.