I'm a big fan of a certain sort of interwoven monogram, what I assume to be a late-19th century graphic fashion that crops up these days (in my world) most often in the logos of Brazilian soccer teams. Here's the crest of Internacional (aka Sport Club Internacional), from the southern metropolis of Porto Alegre:
And here's the shield of Fluminense (Futebol Club?), from Rio de Janeiro:
... and of their Rio rivals Flamengo (Clube de Regatas—they began as a rowing club!):
... and of the Vitória Futebol Club (which started out as a cricket club, though the second C didn't make the current monogram):
The Brazilians aren't the only ones with cool monograms, of course. My favorite Aussie Rules team (picked largely on uniform design—how un-Aussie-Rules is that?!) is the Carlton Football Club, from Melbourne (as are most of the clubs in the AFL). The current one's lost the laurels (perhaps due to a pretty dismal performance in the last couple of seasons I was able to watch from the USA):
... and finally (most famously) here's the badge of European soccer giants Inter Milan (F.C. Internazionale Milano):
But the real reason for all this is a lead-up to the following, an artwork I scanned from a very odd design book, The Art of Looking Sideways, by the late British designer Alan Fletcher. It's a monogram of every letter, A-Z. Making it the mongram that contains all monograms, perhaps. Definitely amazing, full of the antler-esque, victorian madness that can only be called, as the 17th century Dutch did, "pronk".
And now a present usage, a truncated story from the oft-cited Mumbai daily DNA:
This brings up a long-standing question for me: how do you represent a generic, anonymous criminal without reorting to sketchy cliches about what a "representative" criminal looks like? The ingenious DNA answer: just use an anime-character silhouette!
(I couldn't find the exact stance, but here's, perhaps, our dacoit's tourist girlfriend, as seen on the animenano podcast)
From today's Folha de S. Paolo, a photo from this weekend's World Club Championship match: English shirt on a Brazilian footballer playing in Japan for an Italian team against Argentinean opposition.
Today, Kaká was named World Footballer of the Year. His acceptance speech, also in English:
Tonight is really special for me. When I was young, I dreamed of playing for Sao Paulo and playing just one game for the national team. That was it, but the Bible says God gives us more than we ask for and that is what has happened in my life.
For some reason I get a lot more excited (or is it I cringe less?) about players' for-the-camera professions of faith when they aren't American. Also, oddly, when you're wearing the on your shirt you by definition carry it close to you whether you win or lose — which is a pretty strong (if invisible) answer to the protest that, hey, wait a minute, Jesus isn't just (or even firstly) for Winners.
1. The Gloucester Wassail Song / Waverly Consort 4:13 2. I Saw Three Ships / Sufjan Stevens 2:34 3. Beautiful Star of Bethlehem / Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys 3:52 4. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen / Jimmy Smith 4:19 5. Navidad / Gipsy Kings 3:25 6. Come Ye / Nina Simone 3:39 7. O Little Town of Bethlehem / Sister Rosetta Tharpe 2:26 8. The First Noel / Cyrus Chestnut 3:28 9. Jingle Bells / Duke Ellington & His Orchestra 2:57 10. Lo! How a Rose E’er Blooming / Sufjan Stevens 3:22 11. Il Est Né Le Divin Enfant / Trapp Family 1:18 12. Hoy Es Dia de Placer / San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble 2:02 13. Noite Feliz / Palavra Cantada 2:23 14. Sleigh Ride / Ella Fitzgerald 2:58 15. Come On Christmas, Christmas Come On / Ringo Starr 3:35 16. Jesus Ahatonnia (The Huron Carol) / Bruce Cockburn 6:31 17. Riu, Riu, Chiu / Benjamin Bayl & Choir Of King's College, Cambridge 2:09 18. That Was the Worst Christmas Ever! / Sufjan Stevens 3:18 19. Go Tell It On the Mountain / Smokey Robinsoinson & The Miracles 3:46 20. Weinachten Im Moomintal / Dakota Oak 4:05 21. Children Go Where I Send Thee / Joan Osborne 4:23
* Two-thirds of the inspiration for this list comes from KCRW's wonderful annual three-hour Christmas/Gospel Music extravaganza, Morning Becomes Glorious, deliciously DJ'd by Andrea Leonard (I listen to the streaming archives year-round here: 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003). Actually, MBG's playlists only maybe 20 percent holiday music; the rest is just good, very wide-ranging Gospel tunes — in fact, the Christmas songs are generally not the ones I love the most.
Thus, it felt sort of silly to be compiling a Christmas mix, till I realized that, hey wait, I do really love plenty of Christmas music. Really it's just a certain sort of sentimental, shopping-mall-type song that I don't care for (ah, but even exceptions there — Bing Crosbey's expertly-crooned "Silver Bells" nearly made the list). But most of the above is very traditional/choral (I sang the Gloucestershire Wassail with my high school choir at dozens of Christmas gigs), very Gospel, much more the Christmas Story than Christmas stories.
Of course, it wouldn't be a Wimbo Zuri mix without songs in lots of languages, from lots of eras. I think I've come out pretty well on that account.
** What's Wimbo Zuri, you ask? Well, aside from simply the name of my mix-cd-producing fake record label, it's not-quite-correct Swahili for "good song". And just fun to say.
I saw this once a couple of years back, and again this week: a map of India on France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast, with the disputed (but largely, and longly Indian-administered) state of Jammu and Kashmir omitted. More than a little odd-looking. Is this obvious cartographic siding with Pakistan a sort of French payback for the loss of their colony at Pondicherry?
I'm fascinated by this bank ad that ran on the front page of DNA India: First, the suggestion that comfy retirement offers the chance to finally play the violin—a worthy goal, though I wonder how often arthritis might get in the way. But what really struck me was the non-Stradivarius-copy features of the fiddle: the slightly larger f-holes, and, above all, the fact that there's only one string! Was this just an error on the part of the props department, or a subcontinental adaption? A few quick searches turned up references to a one-stringed Indian viol called a riti, so perhaps it's that. Though I think in India classical music, the violin tends to be held in a pretty different posture. So who knows? Maybe you!
In any case, I was reminded of the 19th-century Italian virtuoso Niccolò Paganini:
In performance Paganini enjoyed playing tricks, like tuning one of his strings a semitone high, or playing the majority of a piece on one string after breaking the other three.
This was the main image on last Friday's Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. Usually I feel a little bad making fun of design choices on not-so-major newspapers—presumably everyone's doing the best with the resources and talent they have on hand. But this Photoshop siamese-twin montage is realy too much. Though including the deposed police chief's microphone as a sort of cancerous growth sticking out from the Mayor's neck does add a bit of metaphoric interest.
Surveying a handful of American newspapers last Sunday, I had fun doing a close comparative reading of how they handled the end of daylight saving time. I guess it's a sad-but-true fact of the mechanics of newspaper journalism that perhaps the most crucial (in terms of having direct effects on the immediate lives of their readers) information that will grace the front page all year is a little graphic of a clock with its hour hand in a motion-blur, springing foreward or falling back.
LA Times: Fall Back Did you remember to change your clocks? Daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m. Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Time has changed Did you remember to set your clocks back at 2 a.m. today, or when you went to bed last night? Hope so.
Boston Globe: Turn clocks back Daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m. today. Set your clocks back one hour.
Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger: Fall back Did you remember to set your clock back one hour and change batteries in smoke detectors?
New York Times: A Reminder Standard time resumed at 2 a.m. today. Clocks were set back one hour.
I love the nuances of tone and paper-reader relationship implied in the slightly different phrases. Is the paper offering a patient, reminding, question-marked question; sneaking in an added public-safety tip (darn it! we will be usefuller than the competition!); offering a stern no-fuss order (Boston); or, befitting the paper of record, recording the event for posterity, with none of that messy directly-addressing-the-reader stuff. "Clocks were set back": Pure objective passivity, or so they want us to think.
From the American Foundation for the Blind's Helen Killer Kids Museum website: Here's the description, descriptive indeed for the sight-impared user, and a bonus for the rest of us:
This faded photograph, from 1902, shows four people on a sunny front porch. Helen is seated on the far left, smiling, while Anne stands behind her, signing into her hand. To their right is Mark Twain, sitting with his hands folded in his lap, and Laurence Hutton, who is standing behind Twain and holding a cigar. Hutton was Literary Editor of Harper's magazine and a supporter of Helen's education.
And here is Thomas Edison's 1909 film of Mark Twain—I think the only one there is—of the author doing a silly walk and playing cards with his daughters:
The recollection that sent me off gleefully discovering the above, was a quotation in an article of a few years back, perhaps the New York Review of Books, in which Keller described in detail the timbre of Twain's voice, felt by touching his throat as he talked. I couldn't track the article, or the original down, but this will do well in its place:
The Story of My Life, chapter XXIII:
I read from Mark Twain's lips one or two of his good stories. He has his own way of thinking, saying and doing everything. I feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake. Even while he utters his cynical wisdom in an indescribably droll voice, he makes you feel that his heart is a tender Iliad of human sympathy.
I find it thrilling how, 97 years after Twain's death, probably the best, the closest description we have of his voice was from someone who couldn't, in the usual sense, hear—but whose gift, to herself and to the world, was in learning, largely through metaphorical skill, to transcend the gaps and silences that separated her from his world, and him from ours. "I could feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake". Wonderful.
I'll break the celebrity-gossip silence of this blog with the following article, from the Mumbai daily DNA India:
HYDERABAD: It would have been the ideal film script except that nobody is in a mood to oblige. Last week’s elopement by Telugu megastar Chiranjeevi’s daughter Srija has set the film industry and the elite of Hyderabad on alert to the likely dangers from their rebellious offspring. The star, though, said that all was forgiven and extended his blessings to the young couple.
Despite the olive branch from dad, the next day the same paper reported that Srija was seeking police protection from Delhi for her husband, who was still threatened by angry family members. It's easy to focus on the silly side, but I should note that the sense of threat (and, for the "aggrieved" family, shame/dishonor) presumably make a lot more sense in a non-Western, less-individualistic cultural context (though the role of Indian film stars in adapting Western-style stardom adds some shades of irony). In any case—and back to silly—if Chiranjeevi's film roles are any indicator, he's not someone you want on your bad side:
The DNA article continues:
Film producers, directors and financiers in the city have tightened security arrangements and cut short holiday trips of their children. They have now sent them to closely guarded resorts and bungalows around the city where their contact with “friends” and associates is restricted. The city police have also been considering a special cell to keep a tab on children of VIPS and VVIPS as a matter of routine exercise. ... Hyderabad is home to nearly 1,275 powerful families of industrialists, politicians and settlers from West Bengal, UP and Delhi. There are 27 private security agencies of which seven specialise in personal security for children of the rich and famous.
It took me a second or two to figure out what VVIPs meant (think Very, Very). I guess in a country the size of India you need the distinction. I wonder what the cutoff is to garner the extra V? Also I love the humble specificity of "nearly 1,275".
All this brought to mind—and this will be no comfort for the concerned powerful families in Hyderabad—this catchy song, by the androgynous (and on multiple other counts bizarre) French pop artist Katerine:
I've been enjoying some of the super-long 1960s New Yorker article-cum-books that are hidden in the DVD set I got last year for Christmas—this week it's Truman Capote; before that it was Hannah Arendt. The tradeoff for having to read 'em on the computer screen is that the lovely timeless prose is interleaved with the very ephimeral ads of the day—it's amazing how differently they wrote and paced ad copy and chose suitable illustrations back in the day. So I was reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and learning about the banality of evil and the banality of Bergdorf-Goodman's clothing sketches, when I came to the following full-pager (The New Yorker, May 16, 1963, p. 87):
That headline reads: "New Inner Circle is for women with delicate skin". Here's the ad copy:
I remember the 1980s and 90s anti-vivisection campaigns directed at cosmetics companies testing on rabbits* — unearthing yet another ugly secret from the beauty industry, with the clutch photo being of a lab rabbit with harspray in its rheumy taped-open eyes. What's amazing about this ad (aside from its ironic placement in of a history of individuals designing and perpetrating exceedingly evil acts against other people, many under the impression that they were doing something for the greater "good")** is that the cosmetics bunny isn't the secret, she's the salesman. This is definitely of the pre-Vietnam, all-trusting era: "you know we'd never hurt this bunny with our products, ergo our product will never hurt you".
* How much was it the cuteness that made it seem so awful? I don't know that rabbits are more deserving of protection or outrage-on-behalf than rats or mice.
** I actually think this irony may be less than it seems. There's an unfortunate temptation to equate cruelty/misuse of people with that of animals. I think they're both awful, but are by no means the same — and indeed a blurring of the human/animal distinction has historically, I think, tended to make it easier to be cruel people more than it's made it harder to be cruel to animals. Great minds and men may disagree (didn't Gandhi say something about it?) but that's my hunch.
I'd remembered Gandhi's last words, after he was shot by his asassin, were "He Ram!", which was translated, perhaps a little too universal-ifyingly, as "Oh God!" Though it may be that's what Gandhi would have intended.
Anyway, so it was the alternate transliteration of he that got my attention in this headline, from the Mumbai newspaper DNA:
The article raises a lot of issues from India's recent past, particularly the place, literally and figuratively, of the god Ram, and stories associated with him, in Hindu (and Indian) identities. In the 1990s the flashpoint was a mosque torn down in Ayodhya because it stood on a site associated by some with Ram (his birthplace? I forget). Now it's to do with plans to dredge a canal through Adam's Bridge, the shallow archipelago that links India and Sri Lanka, which has traditionally been linked with the bridge built by the monkey-god Hanuman in the the Ramayana. An atheist minister in Tamil Nadu made some comments about it being silly to think of the bridge as an architectural site worthy of protection (as some from the anti-canal camp were arguing), and then the argument got to be over whether said minister ought to have made those comments, whether it was an insult to Indian-ness/Hindu-ness.
Anyway, so Ram-awareness is on the upswing among Hindu nationalists, even to the point of coopting Gandhi's favorite Ram-hymn (despite the fact that the mahatma himself was quite at odds with the anticedants of today's Hindu nationalists—or at least the extreme ones. And they (witness the asassination) with him.
Serious and complex matters. But, a little pathetically, the main thing the headline made me think of was The Beatles' song "Hey, Jude". I'll hold off on deciding whether that song could, with the simple name substitution, be used to illustrate an episode or two from the Ramayana (and whether or not that'd be a good thing).
Laugh not, it's been done before: witness animator Nina Paley's mesmurizing, inspiring, and vaguely troubling Betty-Boop-meets-Busby-Berkley-meets-the-Delhi-Durbar series, The Sitayana, in which episodes from the Ramayana are given a feminist slant and set to the alluring melancholy music of 1920s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw:
If you liked that segment, head to the The Sitayana site proper, which has segments from several episodes/songs, in a slightly better quality form.
Here's an ad that sometimes runs the full bottom span of the Sydney Morning Herald. I just thought it was odd to use a raccoon as a spokes-animal, especially given Australia's many zany indigenous species. Does a raccoon scream "North America" like a kangaroo screams "Australia" hereabouts?
A brief South Indian typography lesson from John Murdoch, Classified Catalogue of Tamil Printed Books (Oxford: 1865). In some ways I think I prefer the "BAD" to the "MEDIUM"—the former's blotchy, but the spacing is more even.
Last fall I set myself the goal to draw a quick sketch of a person from each and every of the 244 Wikipedia-sanctioned countries in the world, in alphabetical order and alternating between men, women, boys, and girls (hence the name of the project). I started with "Abkhazia Man" in October, 2006 and finished "Zimbabwe Girl" in August, 2007. The source images were found using flickr or Google searches. All the photos were drawn with a Bic ballpoint pen in a nice black notebook I had left over from my dot-com days. Here's an embedded flickr slideshow:
The next order of business, of course, will be to figure out how to present these images in map form.
Till then, some notes on the project: throughout, I was aware of the problematic notion of selecting a de facto "representative" portrait for every country—and the equally-problematic notion of pretending that I wasn't. This problem is obvious for widely multiracial countries like the USA or Malaysia (who gets to be "the" American face?), but perhaps more insidious for presumably "less-diverse" countries like Sweden or Zambia, where choices between "traditional" or "modern" faces might bear their cultural baggage more subtly. So part of my way-out was to leave it up to the search results, picking the first striking and sketchable-by-me face that came up in the returns. But even the fact that I simply tried to dismiss people who seemed to be obvious tourists in favor of those who looked to me like locals, undermines that algorithm.
Well, whatever. My goal for the project was to give myself the chance to explore and rejoice in the variety of the world's faces, and I think I achieved at least a bit of that in my compilation. As for the artwork itself: it is nearly universally safe to assume that my sketches don't do the source images, let alone the people behind them, justice. Usually I was pleased if my portraits looked like a plausible person, if not the one I was trying to draw.
In general I think the younger women and girls bore the worst of my artistic lapses: an ill-plotted jawline on a guy could usually be turned into a five-o'clock shadow, but finer features proved less forgiving of my misdrawn lines. And I don't think I came near depicting the wonderful variety of my subjects' skin tones (dulled though they were by photography). Often as not, folks I was trying to draw darker just got scruffier.
The project has certainly been much more of an exercise than a finished artwork—hence the occasional experiments with widely varying techniques of line and shade. I'd hoped, from A to Z, that I'd get better and better at drawing ballpoint portraits. In the end, though, I think I mainly got faster.
This week I watched a very interesting French documentary Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois about the manic-obsessive-brilliant-wonderful film preservationist who founded the Cinémathéque Française. Along the way, he mentioned the two contrasting foundational figures of French cinema, the Lumière Brothers, and George Méliès. Here's a sample of the former:
The Lumière clips they included were definitely fascinating—how could documentary footage of people walking around in 1895 not be fascinating? but the Meiloc ones really piqued my interest (as they did Langlois'—he used to pull out the old, flammable prints to show them as a special treat to the Cinematique's imployees). I'd heard him mentioned in Michael Silverblatt's interview with Brian Selznik, whose illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret is full of magical Méliès referencces and tips-of-the-hat. The thing that stuck with me there was the comment that, although Méliès discovered and pioneered all of these amazing and surreal special effects, he never discovered (or at least used) that most basic of effects: moving the camera. All of his shots are framed more or less like a theater stage—or, better said, the stage in a magic show.
Here are two Meiloc films from YouTube, L'homme a la tête en caoutchoc ("The man with the rubber head", 1901) which is a more basic magic-show setup, and the delightfully surreal (and famous-in-places) Le voyage dans la lune ("A Trip to the Moon", 1902), which crams near-infinite motion into that non-moving camera.
A few of my friends are in Lebanon for pre-wedding festivities this week; in honor of that I found this 1799 travel narrative (Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the Year 1792 to 1798 by William George Browne) which has that distinct eighteenth-century advantage, namely that the lower-case s's are typeset almost the same as f's, giving the whole thing a very funny lisping look, and not a few fun outright misreadings (like that key Syrian export, filk).
Google Books now allows for easy posting of old, good book snippets. This removes about eight steps from my process. Let's celebrate with a (presumably hand-colored) plate from an Oxford library copy of Foreign Butterflies by James Duncan (London: 1858): "
Prelude: Nine years ago when I was editing travel guides, it was a matter of pride for the musically-inclined editors to blast the office with guidebook-appropriate (or hilariously-innappropriate) music. For me, of course, that was arranged with a perpetual connection to a Bollywood-themed internet radio station. Over in the "domestic" room, the editors played Frank Zappa, Jonathan Richman, and, when a great laugh was needed, the following song, by French pop master Serge Gainsbourg:
[N.B. This embed, and for that matter the others, doesn't seem to work ... you can get the same effect by going to www.deezer.com and searching for "Serge New York". I'll work on the odeo players soon, I hope]
OK, forget all that for now. What I really want to write about is a story I heard whilst listening to one of the many excellent W.E.B. Du Bois Institute lectures they got online somewheres, specifically a series by (then) NYU prof Robin D.G. Kelley on Jazz and Modern Africa:
In this particular lecture he was talking about the specific mid-twentieth-century debate over who was and wasn't an "authentic" African drummer during the early cross pollinations between American jazz and music from contemporary Africa (the music itself, of course, having elements traditional and contemporary). Kelley's lecture is a lot about Guy Warren, who came from Ghana to the states in the early(?) 1950s with the goal of introducing the talking drum to American jazz. His first records wound up coming out around the same time, more or less, that a few African-American jazz drummers (Art Blakey, and later I think Max Roach) were starting to use explicitly African titles and themes in their records. Basically Warren thought Blakey et al's music wasn't African at all, and was for that matter completely uninteresting.
Side note no. 1: Guy Warren's first album, "Africa Speaks, America Answers" was recorded with the Chicago band he'd been playing with -- a band, which was, with the exception of Warren and an African-American drummer, composed entirely of Jews and Italians (who nonetheless did all right with the call and response stuff). Prof. Kelley also noted, as something of an aside, that although several influential African-American jazz musicians were drawn particularly to what they saw as the authentic African spirituality of Warren's music, Warren himself was neither Muslim nor Christian nor Animist but in fact a practicing Buddhist. Anyway, Kelley says his music was, perhaps not so surprisingly, ambitious and drew on a ton of different traditions: African, Jazz, classical, etc. This probably made him less than an ideal candidate for the role of "authentic African drummer".
Enter Babatunde Olatunji ... who came to the U.S. from Nigeria on a Rotary scholarship and attended Morehouse College and then NYU grad school, studying political science. To make extra money, he started playing music with an ensemble he'd put together — traditional West African stuff and original compositions, though Kelley notes that a lot of his training as a percussionist had apparently come from African American musicians he'd known since coming to the States.
Anyway, Olatunji was playing at Radio City and got "discovered" by a Columbia record exec who signed him and, a year or two later, got him into CBS studios in New York to record "Drums of Passion" — which not only went on to vastly outsell anything by Guy Warren or, I think, any of the other Africanist projects by American jazz musicians, and in fact has never gone out of print, and now gets cited, on various promo-type sites, as being possibly first real (successful) "world music" album, the first real studio-recorded album of real African music, etc. etc. etc.
Whether or not Olatunji was better qualified than Guy Warren to be known as the introducer, at least he turned his popularity into a long and very legitimate career both in the African American, jazz, and world music communities. A few years before he died in the 1990s he did some sort of collaboration with one of the Grateful Dead, though which one I cannot say.
Fascinating story, I thought (and hopefully you think). So I hopped on over to iTunes to see just what the original authentic drummer sounded like. I clicked on the first track of "Drums of Passion" and ... well, something seemed awfully familiar.
Just what was going on here? Who copying who? A few searches turned up lyrics and the story of the song in question—
Akiwowo (Chant to the Trainman)
This is the song about the legendary conductor when railroud trains were first introduced in Nigeria over five decades ago. Millions still remember Akiwowo, who always made sure that his passengers, mostly men and woman returning from their farms with their products balanced on their heads,never missed the train, as well as his warm welcom, broad smile and humor. Akiwowo, now in his eighties,lives happily in the village of Pa-Pa Lanto full of sweet unforgettable memories of his service to his people and country.
Akiwowo Oloko lle lowo Gbe Mi Dele Ile Baba Mi
Akiwowo conductor of the train Please take me home To my fathers house
As for how exactly "Akiwowo" became "New York USA" let us turn to the following computranslation from Serge Gainsbourg's French record company:
Serge enters in studio from the 5 to October 16, 1964, with Goraguer, for a second 30 cm, "Gainsbourg Percussions". Via Guy Béart, it impregnates disc "Drums of Passion" of the Native of Niger Babatunde Olatunji.
For "New York the USA", Serge is inspired — rate/rhythm, arrangements, melody, technical question and answer between the singer and choruses — by "Akiwoko (Song To The Trainman)". For "Over there it is natural", of a counterpoint of Myriam Makeba.
Many years later, when to the USA a disc leaves Serge containing "New York the USA", Olatunji brought in Gainsbourg a lawsuit for plagiarism.
It seems worth noting that whereas "New York USA" was presumably adapted/recorded in France, "Akiwowo" was recorded (and quite likely written) in New York. So without too much difficulty we might imagine Olatunji listening to the clatter of subway or el trains and thinking wistfully back to the famed Nigerian railway conductor. (Incidentally, the click-click-clack percussion makes perfect sense with the original song's rail theme).
But of course we are left to ponder what exactly led Serge to impregnate disc "Drums of Passion", and why concerning New York, and for that matter what became of that lawsuit for plagiarism brought in him by the first original real and authentic African drummer in USA.
Postlude: More media! Here's a much-older Babamayo Olatunji performing a Liberian rhythm:
... and here's, from France's Institut National de l'Audiovisuel, a prehistoric music video of Serge Gainsbourg's "New York USA" — the song begins after a 1min. introduction by the French chanteuse Barbara:
... and — because I could —here's a map of all the buildings Gainsbourg sings about (scroll down for the Bank of Manhattan at the island's tip):
A couple of weeks back I was watching a Chinese film, Quitting (Zuotian - 昨天 - trailer here), a really great semi-documentary about a young actor coming out of drug addection in 1990s Beijing. There's one scene where all the young cool folks are hanging out together, celebrating the protagonist's birthday, and they start singing a song to the tune of the old American gold-miner's lament, "Oh My Darling, Clementine".
I rewound the movie so I could type out the subtitles:
wish you longevity as long as a pine tree of the Southern Mountain may you have good fortune as much as the endless water in the Eastern Ocean
I emailed a bunch of Chinese-American friends to find out if they knew anything about this version of "Clementine" —and whether it was a specific "birthday song" used, perhaps, in place of the ubiquitous, but technically still copyright-protected "Happy Birthday To You"? But nobody'd heard aything about it.
Interestingly—getting back to copyright—The Beatles' music plays a significant role in the plot of Quitting, but makes no appearence on the soundtrack—it's all Chinese rock (which works quite well—even in the scenes where you're watching the main charactar listening to a Beatles album on his headphones ... actually, the whole film is accessible but also again and again visually, sonically, and conceptually arresting).
In any case, I wonder when the "Clementine" melody made it back to China ... obviously Chinese immigrants were an important of Gold Rush (and post-Gold Rush) California ... perhaps it made it back soon after it was written (in the 1880s, but based, perhaps on a song from the 1860s). Most likely it arrived much more recently. But I like the idea of a former Chinese "Miner '49er" making his way back to China in his old age (long as the pine on the Southern Mountain), bringing the song from Gold Mountain.
Though I've already posted on M.I.A., her second album, Kala, is out this week, complete with a wonderful Mobutu-print-inspired cover. She did a lovely live session at KCRW a couple weeks back — I was beside myself when she launched the first song, "Bamboo Banger" with a half-cover of Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" (though omitting the part about driving to the Stop-N-Shop). I also loved a line from her second song, "Hussel", that went more or less, "I put people on the map / who've never seen a map". And I can't tell whether her off-pitch singing is a sort of casual swagger or an homage to the semitonal wonders of South Asian (and particularly South South Asian) singing styles. Probably both.
Rounding out music news: Josh Ritter has a new album, e'en edgier than the last but sounding quite good from what I've heard. I'll have to get it sometime.
And two recent indie-rock discoveries: Vampire Weekend (think Paul Simon's Graceland with a punk-pop sensibility), and Bishop Allen (I heard their song "Castanets" on the KEXP podcast and thought, "wow, what a great song!"; then looked up the band name and thought, "wow, they're named after one of my favorite-named Cambridge, MA streets!", then looked at who was in it and thought, "wow, I used to work in the same office as the lead singer! we used to nod hello!").
In one of Walker Percy's novels (Lancelot, I'm pretty sure), the narrator mentions a 19th century duel that was fought on an island in the Mississippi river so as to be outside the jurisdiction of any state. The theme resurfaces later on in one of the meant-to-provoke questions in Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: Why didn't anyone ever write a novel about rafting down the Hudson River? The answer, if any, has to do with the statelessness of a border-river: you're neither in one place or the other, passing by without necessarily entering.
Of course, no islands in the Mississippi are truly without jurisdiction—there's always a dotted line on some map. But the current dotted line's often quite fascinating. Below's a particularly jigsawed stretch south of Vicksburg. Some of the jogs are reminders that rivers change course from time to time (hence too the beautiful-from-above filigree of oxbow lakes). But I'm not sure the dotted line always follows a former river-course either.
A few weeks ago my father surprised me with a garage-sale gift: an old Oscar Schmidt Autoharp. Since then I've sporadically been figuring out how to play it ... the basics of which are more involved than I'd supposed. First, there's the matter of deciding how you want to hold and strum it. Here are some examples, with my own made-up titles for 'em:
A) The Mirror. I discovered this video during a fruitless attempt to find a recording of Jimmy Carter reading some of his poetry. The consolation prize, as you'll doubless agree, was more than worth it. Note the left-handed strumming, which is easiest given a tabletop-layout, but feels just wrong since I already play cello and guitar in the standard poses.
B) The Bridge-Strummer. Difficult on my particular harp, which has the maximum amount of buttons/keys, narrowing the target era quite a bit. Still, can't argue with June Carter Cash:
C) The Crossover. Just plain awkward:
D) The Upright Reverse Half-Piano Hug. This is the one I've settled on. Earl Scruggs and Mother Maybelle Cash.
"The Poor Poet", by Czeslaw Milosz. I spent way too long trying to find the Polish original, but no luck. I love the subversion in this poem: beauty emerging despite the poet's ill motives, the tension between cynicism and hope.
Yesterday's Folha de S. Paulo ran this science-article teaser on the cover ("Science—On a piece of paper, an insect discovered during the expedition—Expeditions to the Amazon encounter dozens of unknown species"): Here's the article it refers to (in Portuguese, so for me skimming it was, blah blah forest blah biodiversity blah blah species blah). But that insect photo's amazing. It looks so fake, especially the fiber-optics-looking tail brush, which makes it look like one of those hand-tied fly fishing lures. Life imitates art imitating life? (except without the causality).
Usually for me the coolness, quaintness, or otherness factors make just about any book over 100 years old look good to me. But not this one—it's an affront to taste you'd think would only have been possible with desktop publishing and free fonts. All that bad typography, and set by hand (and the heavy frames continue on every page).
When Luther's puppy happened to be at the table, looked for a morsel from his master, and watched with open mouth and motionless eyes, he [Martin Luther] said, "Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat! All his thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat. Otherwise he has no thought, wish, or hope."
I finally finished the Vintage Spiritual Classics* selection of Martin Luther's writings. This was one of the end-bits that stuck with me. Incidentally, the dog was called Tölpel.
* For some reason there's no obvious list of all the editions in this series to be found with a quick search, even from Vintage (they list reading guides for a few). Actually, I'm generally surprised by the poor design/content of the Vintage site, given how well-done and -chosen their books tend to be. I guess it's better than having a great site but publishing trash.
Wandering around Google Books this week I found this great engraving of a flamingo's skeleton, from On the Anatomy of Vertebrates, by Richard Owen (London: 1866). I should flip through the rest ... I'm sure there are plenty of other great engravings. But this composition I liked how the long neck inscribes a near-perfect quarter-circle, which looks wrong and stilted but still graceful.
"The Maneuver", by William Carlos Williams. From his Collected Poems (and bravo to New Directions for allowing Google Books to allow multipage previews when you search it!)
This week I finished reading Richard F. Burton's Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay, a narrative of travels the famed Victorian explorer-linguist-diplomat undertook during the closing phases of the disastrous (but attractively-named) War of the Triple Alliance, at the turn of the 1870s. Burton's journey was a sort of offshoot as his tenure as a British consul to the Brazilian Empire, and it's clear that, as far as the war went, his sympathies were with the Brazilians (and to a lesser extent their Argentine and Uruguayan allies). Like most old travel writing, it refuses to resonate for long with modern interests (hence: his true-to-title detailed descriptions of mouldering earthworks, artillery positions and peculiarities, written for an age familiar, after the Napoleonic, Crimean and US Civil wars, with the terminology), and ruffle modern feathers (of course he says all sorts of insensitive, scornful things about the people and cultures he encounters—though with Burton, it's scorn backed up, right or wrong, by brilliance and deep and broad linguistic and cultural knowledge: twenty-odd languages mastered; as many countries and colonies on four continents explored).
Still there's much of interest to quote—mostly with a wincing sort of humor. So I'll get on with it, in order of appearence in the book. First, some proof of Burton's general view that Paraguay had it (i.e. near-total destruction at the hands of the Alliance) heartily coming:
The war in Paraguay, impartially viewed, is no less than the doom of a race which is to be relieved from a self- chosen tyranny by becoming chair a canon by the process of annihilation. It is the Nemesis of Faith; the death-throe of a policy bequeathed by Jesuitism to South America; it shows the flood of Time surging over a relic of old world semi-barbarism, a palaeozoic humanity. Nor is the semi-barbaric race itself without an especial interest of its own. The Guarani family appears to have had its especial habitat in Paraguay, and thence to have extended its dialects, from the Rio de la Plata to the roots of. the Andes, and even to the peoples of the Antilles. The language is now being killed out at the heart, the limbs are being slowly but surely lopped off, and another century will witness its extirpation. [link]
Luckily the nation, civilization, and language did survive (see an earlier post for a bit more on that). For one so scornful, though, Burton did spend three years "mastering" Tupi-Guaraní, and throughout endeavors to search out proper etymologies for placenames (commenting that if he doesn't, he's sure they'll soon be lost).
And first of the word "Paraguay," which must not be pronounced "Paragay." The Guarani languages, like the Turkish and other so-called "Oriental" tongues, have little accent, and that little generally influences the last syllable : a native would articulate the name Pa-ra-gua-y. [link]
Language done, he moves on to diet. Paraguayans, from what I hear, now eat tons of meat, just like their Southern Cone neighbors.
The Paraguayan is eminently a vegetarian, for beef is rare within this oxless land, and the Republic is no longer, as described by Dobrizhoffer, the "devouring grave as well as the seminary of cattle." He sickens under a meat diet; hence, to some extent, the terrible losses of the army in the field. Moreover, he holds with the Guacho [sic, Gaucho], that " Carnero no es came"—mutton is not meat. Living to him is cheap. [link]
Burton is deeply anti-Jesuital (I wonder what he'd made of the movie The Mission? "Popish propaganda!") and blames the Paraguayans' so-called infiriority on the centuries-past influence of the priests.
A curious report, alluded to at the time by most Jesuitical and anti-Jesuit writers, and ill-temperedly noticed by Southey, spread far and wide—namely, that the Fathers were compelled to arouse their flocks somewhat before the working hours, and to insist upon their not preferring Morpheus to Venus, and thus neglecting the duty of begetting souls to be saved. I have found the tradition still lingering amongst the modern Paraguayans. [link]
For all the scorn and asides, Burton does write beautifully and precisely, especially—to modern eyes—in numerous sections describing the natural vistas of the wide and mighty Paraná river. I've read quite a bit about Argentina but this enriched the picture like nothing else:
The channel winds wonderfully, to the east, to the south, and to the north-west. Rival channels abound, and we often see far beyond the monte-bush, to our right and left, ships' sails passing up over land like the sailing waggons of the Seres. When the waters are out, temporary cross-cuts, as on the great Rio de Sao Francisco, enable boats to cruise across country. The riverine edges wax higher as we advance, and whilst one side grows grass the other becomes tree-clad; higher up, this formation will assume larger and more distinct proportions. From this lower bed the larger animals, so common up stream, have of late been frightened away ; the fish to breed in the tributaries and the less disturbed parts ; and little life save aerial remains. At rare times a bullet head protruded from the water and at once withdrawn denotes the "Nutria" indifferently described as an otter, a seal, or a sea-wolf. The shag, plotus, or diwr, is of two kinds, one dingy brown, the other black with white-tipped wings and a plume that commends itself to what wears bonnets. They gaze at us with extended necks and " bob" down stream, in remarkable contrast with the hunchbacked, motionless Mirasol or white crane, standing one-legged and meditative on the bank, and with the Socoboi, the large ash-coloured heron, roaring like a bull because we dare to disturb him. [link]
But, soon enough, back to scorn. Burton finishes with the boring paltry fortifications and arrives in Asuncion, the evacuated, occupied Paraguayan capital (the dictator Lopez having taken his soldiers into the jungle to fight to the end). That final sentence presages great bitter 20th century travel writers like Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux:
A few paces beyond the cathedral lead us to the Hotel de la Minute. The house once belonged to a Paraguayan of importance. It fronts a new theatre of ambitious size, said to be built upon the model of " La Scala/' and fitted for 1000 spectators. Its flanks are one hundred yards long; in fact, it occupies a whole " cuadra."* The brick walls that back the three tiers of boxes are four feet thick; they must be fearless of fire, and, after the usual theatres of South America, they suggest the Coliseum. The building was unfinished, and of course a dead mule occupied the inside. [link]
Finally he gets round to the weather:
It is popularly said here, as in the Brazil, that summer and winter meet in one day, and that Paraguay combines the four seasons in twenty-four hours. Between midnight and 6 A.M., it is spring; summer then extends to noon: the third quarter is autumn; and from 6 P.M. to midnight it is winter. [link]
One closing note: Burton himself enjoys poking fun at the various names given to Paraguay by analogy-hungry writers of his era: "The China of South America" (both closed contries! both grow 'tea'!), "The Sebastopol of the South" (just like the Crimea! in that there was a war!), and—my favorite—"Prester John's Southern Kingdom" (a lost tribe of primitive, wealthy Christians!). And, clearly, so do I.
MEDELLÍN, Colombia, July 11 — Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, sporting three days’ growth of beard and unruly hair nearly down to his shoulders, Sergio Fajardo looks every bit the nonconformist mathematician who spent years attaining a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.
But that was a past life for Mr. Fajardo, this city’s mayor and the son of one of its most famous architects. Now he presses forward with an unconventional political philosophy that has turned swaths of Medellín into dust-choked construction sites.
“Our most beautiful buildings,” said Mr. Fajardo, 51, “must be in our poorest areas.”
With that simple idea, Mr. Fajardo hired renowned architects to design an assemblage of luxurious libraries and other public buildings in this city’s most desperate slums. [full article]
So on the one hand: what a cool idea! And how refreshing to hear about a leader working to bridge the gap between rich and poor by giving the latter some actual good, helpful services, and by honoring them with "the best" rather than "the adequate". The article does touch on a couple of critiques for such a scheme—wouldn't it be better to spend the money on improving basic services?, and um, do the folks in the neighborhood actually appreciate the "beauty" that their mayor's worked to bring to them? Sometimes high-concept architecture gets, um, tried out on the poor because it's easy for visionary city planners to push it through on them. I remember the first time I went to New York City, riding the train past all these massive housing project towers, and realizing it looked exactly like the early 20th century futurism I'd been reading about—Corbusier and his World's Fair knockoffs, "the home as a machine for living" etc. Back then the visionaries had said, "in the future we'll all live in these great planned housing complexes". So they built them first for the poor, to prove the concept. But in the end the rich never signed up for their own housing projects—so the only people who lived in the futuristic world were those who didn't have much choice.
Back to Medillin—for a while I've been puzzling over why, when it comes to my Colombian news, I prefer the front page of the Medillin El Colombiano over the better-designed, more-nationally-focused, Bogotá-based El Tiempo. (I've linked the websites, but visit Newseum to see the latest front pages: El Colombiano; El Tiempo) I think maybe it's to do with the mix of big-city news and charming provinciality—the annual flower fair, or textile week. Plus lots of coverage of cycling and inline skating. But also, the article made me realize, quite a bit about public art (both high-concept sculpture and more populist Christmas lights on the aerial tramway). So perhaps the mayor's to thank for that. I hope his work appeals to the locals—from every background—even more than it does to me.
Sign and Sight recently featured a translation of thisFrankfurter Allegemeine-Zeitung op-ed, calling for an increase in German-language scientifc writing. Or rather, presumably, an end to its precipitous decline.
I've remained deeply fascinated by linguistic-nationalist-scientific-activism—old thesis topics die hard. Phrases like "new terminology must be coined!" always get me smiling (interestingly enough, I have an opposite reaction to those "there ought to be a word for" type features one finds in the back of magazines like The Atlantic, or in the innumerable Sniglets volumes of yore—they're always kind of annoying to me, in that they're all but totally unserious about their coinage—invariably a horrendous pun-monster—and, besides, there usually does exist a more or less elegant turn of phrase that would serve the purported purpose nicely). Right, but back to the article:
Anyone who only encounters scientific research in a foreign language pays a heavy price, even if he is a master of the idiom. "We are dumber in English" – this was the conclusion that researchers came to in Sweden and the Netherlands, where children were introduced to English on their first day of school. Lectures in English are part of every subject, but nevertheless, the test results are about ten percent lower on average than in courses taught in the mother tongue. In English seminars, students ask and answer fewer questions; they give the overall impression of being somewhat more helpless. Neither students nor teachers are generally aware of the problem, because they all overestimate their expertise in English.
I'd love to track down the study—Google only returns references to the aforementioned article. The quote makes it sound like each student took some courses in English, and some in his or her native tongue. But was the division uniform (e.g. math in English, art in Swedish), or did some in the study do the reverse (English art, Swedish math) and show the same ten percent drop? Other permutations abound (teach in English, test in Swedish?).
But back to our op-ed's prescription:
It shouldn't hurt German scientific language if, in the course of everyday research, publications appear in English. Such articles almost always deal with tiny advances in knowledge – like the question of whether or not gene X is expressed under the influence of protein Y. They are oriented towards a small audience, they seldom influence scientific concepts and they are, even if composed by native speakers, usually linguistically as outstanding as a manual for a DVD player. [!!!–ed.]
But a pile of puzzle pieces is still not science. Every discipline needs publications that show connections, transmit inspiring ideas and sketch out new concepts. Such work is intended for colleagues beyond the narrow realms of one's own field and broaden the circles of knowledge. They are nourished by their use of language, because the author wants to lead the public through a distant and foreign territory, and thus wishes to be as convincing as possible. In order to preserve German as the language of science [Um das Deutsche als Wissenschaftssprache zu erhalten], we should make an effort along these lines.
Ah, the big questions: what is science? What is German science? And how do we do it? Now leap to the end:
If we re-learn how to tell the story of science, then German will have a future as a language of science. [Nur wenn wir wieder lernen, Wissenschaft zu erzählen, hat Deutsch als Sprache der Wissenschaft eine Zukunft.]
I'm interested in the translator's choice to say both "German as the language of science" and "German as a language of science". Whether intentionally or not, it does get at an ambiguity of the article's vision: does he think that, simply, everyone would benefit from learning and "doing" science in their mother-tongue, or that German is better-equipped (at least till all the German scientists utterly lose the ability) as language for the clear expression of scientific "big ideas"?
"Under One Small Star", by Wislawa Szymborska. Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. (Here's the original: "Pod jedną gwiazdką")
Discovered, like so many of my new favorite poems, via Lawrence Weschler's wonderful, wide-ranging guest sessions on transom.org. Here's my reading:
This morning I started David Mitchell's novel Black Swan Green—seems quite promising, and it's come highly recommended. A few pages in, I found the following annotation, evidently added by a reader somewhat younger than Mitchell's 12–year–old narrator. I'm actually kind of a collecter of library-book marginalia, so I was rather pleased, and fired up the scanner. It reminded of some similar Kindergrafitti from German Art from Beckman to Richter. In the latter, a half-dozen spreads from the "about the artists" section had been annotated, the young Kunstkritik generally starting from the faces and working outwards.
Yesterday I took a (short) break from the Tour de France to watch the Copa America final, between Argentina and Brazil. Brazil won 3–0, though Argentina did at least manage to score once against themselves.
After the first Brazilian goal, I did a double-take at the crowd reaction shots: was that a Lebanese flag waving there? Rewind. Yep. I don't think the player had any connection with Lebanon (like the player from Ghana who celebrated his World Cup goal with an Israeli flag—he played professionally for a Tel Aviv club). More likely some Lebanese Brazilians up from São Paulo or even Foz do Iguaçu. Or maybe some Lebanese Venezuelans (since the final was, after all, in Maricaibo).
"La Palabra", by Pablo Neruda. [Spanish text w/translation] I first read this in a bilengual edition of Fully Empowered. The last couplet stuck with me in Spanish from the start, but only lately have I been feeling confident enough in my skill to try memorizing the whole thing in the original. At present I've got about three-quarters done (one recitation every morning for about a month). Maybe another week or two and I'll be there. In the mean time, here's what I sound like reading it. I seem to have adopted a quasi-Argentine way of pronouncing my y's and ll's, even though most of the Spanish I hear is of the Mexican-influenced Univision Newscaster Standard.
Brou Monastery, Bourge-en-Bresse, France, which looks even better from a helicopter. [flickr source]
Watching the Tour de France this week, I'm amazed by the consistently great aerial camera-work that accompanies the broadcast—not only those entrancing shots of the peleton morphing and shimmying like a shoal of tropical fish—but the postcard views of the landscape along the way.
One thing that's amazed/interested me is how the most attractive buildings from the air are just about always those that were built before there was much chance of them being seen from the air (still more so if we discount ballooning). The ones built in the past century, though, are just about always uglier from above than from the ground. Blame flat roofs and air conditioners I guess. Maybe the ubiquity of Google Earth and other identifiable aerial views will inspire top-tier architects to give greater weight to the view from above. Or maybe they'll just rent it out as billboard space.
Last week on one of the newscasts I watch (Univision? Les 20 Heures?), the jihadi-video-excerpt-o-the-day showed these three black-clad guys jumping around a corner and striking poses, almost Charlie's Angels style, but holding their Kalashnikovs sideways—a posture I'd seen only with handguns, and generally in a hip-hop sort of context ("a cooler but less accurate way of aiming").
It seemed to me that firing a machine gun held sideways would pose some ergonomic issues—would the 90 degree rotation increase the recoil stress on the wrist? I emailed a friend of Muslim background who, more importantly, spent a few years in the US Army. Here's a bit of his reply:
I have heard the AK kicks a bit, so they'd have to be pretty strong to hold it like that with one hand, not resting it on a shoulder and get bullets anywhere near the targets, so that makes me think they're just posing and not practicing.
As for cartridge release, that's probably the biggest problem for them. Being orthodox Muslims, they should be firing their rifles right handed. Almost all rifles are built for right handed people, so the spent cartridges shoot off to the right and to the back of the rifle. This pushes them back away from the person firing. If they were to the rifles sideways with their right hands, the cartridges would shoot up and back into their faces or down their shirts. Only a lefty would benefit from a sideways hold. I used to get hot cartridges in my shirt all the time. almost made me consider firing right handed. If I could get any kind of stability with a sideways grip, I'd probably have used it, but it was completely unstable with the M-16. Also, I would have been obliterated by a drill sergeant for trying to be cool.
Again, however, I don't know the AK.
The bigger question I have is to what extent the guys who make these videos are purposely referencing American-style violence, and to what extent they've just assimilated it. (Are they familiar with hip-hop videos, for instance?) My friend doubted that theory: "I fully believe that they have just assimilated. If they thought about it at all, they would realize that copying American style violence is antithetical to the purpose of their violence."
Often when I see the excerpts of these videos I start wondering more about how they're made and directed, who provides the background music (sympathizers with synthesizers?), and so forth. But—as was the case when I tried briefly to track down the video that inspired this post—this is the sort of research that makes me queasy, or at least that I have mixed feelings about entering into just because it's "interesting" in a way abstracted from the life and death matters at hand.
