nblinks

Northern South America: Latin American Art in the 20th Century: High/Newlights 4

2008-05-03T13:13:00.001-07:00

A few weeks (OK, now it's months) back I finished reading Phaidon's coffee-table book Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, and with country-by-country essays by various specialists. Since it was (apart from, say, the most famous of Mexican painters) pretty much new territory for me, at the end I flipped back through and noted the works and artists that I'd liked. I thought I might spin a few blog posts out of that list, using what images I can track down ... here's part 4, Northern South America, to the tip of the Southern Cone:

Venezuela
Manuel Cabré - Laguna de Boleíta: El Avila desde el Marquéz nope, but here's La Silla, also, I believe, of the hills surrounding Caracas:

Alejandro Otero - Colorritmo 39, nope, but here's an apparent work on paper by him:

Colombia
The book, of course, had works by the great and well-known Fernando Botero, who I like a lot, but I didn't note any specific works as stand-outs for this list...

Alejandro Obregón - Bodegón en Azules, no, but here's his Bodegón de flores con caracol:

Ecuador
Oswaldo Guayasamín - Fusilamiento, no but here's this one, from from a series of hands called Las Manos de Oración:

Enrique Tábara - Rojo Superstancial - nope.

Peru
Jorge Eduardo Eielson - Quipus, nope, but here's the similar, if I recall right, Nudo: both involve using knotted fabric/string, a reference to the Inca technique of encoding messages on knotted strings.

Brazil
Alfredo Volpi - Casas:

Waldemar Cordeiro - Movimento:

Lygia Clark - Bicho (one a long series of cute little abstract critters by the artist)
Rubem Valentim - Compsição - nope
Lygia Pape - Tercelares - nope
Mira Schendel - Desenho 2, nope, but here's an untitled from her series of graphic-design-derived works:

फूत्लिघ्त परेड

2008-04-22T15:54:00.000-07:00

The post title is Google's attempt (yeah, I turned on the Hindi-posting feature for fun and forgot how to turn it off) at transliterating Footlight Parade, the 1933 James Cagney/Busbey Berkley musical I finished watching last night. While it's no Gold Diggers of 1933, there are, of course, some amazing (and dare I say Bollywood-prefiguring) moments in the final musical numbers. The knockout piece is a sort of water-nymphs-gone-wild setup called "By a Waterfall". It takes a while to warm up, but when it does, oh boy. You could unpack a lot from an art-history, mythology, psychological, or gender studies angle ... but whatever it is, it is amazing too.

The Most Dangerous Letter

2008-04-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

The other day I was asking a friend who's living in Port-au-Prince if she knew anything about how Haiti same to have so many k's. The inspiration was the mountain village of Kenscoff, just south of the capital, that figures in Graham Greene's novel The Comedians. We're still trying to track down the origin of that name, but Kreyol (aka Haitian Creole) has lots of k's, whereas French, the country's other national language, has, more or less none.

A few searches turned up a great long answer, a chapter in the book Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory

My take-away from the article (most of which you can, and should, read) that Kreyol orthographies are various and contested, and that the first major promoted one (McConnell-Laubach) seems to have been introduced by American protestant missionaries (hey, we do love translating into local dialects!). The Wikipidia entry on Haitian Creole points out that most Kreyol spellings are very similar to the words' renditions in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Meanwhile, I'll type for you my favorite sentence from the Language Ideologies chapter...

Among the most contested letters is k, which not only represents the danger of U.S. imperialism but has even been claimed to represent the threat of communism.

As for k's in French, they're all from other, non-romance languages. Here's the entire k section from the admittedly pocket-sized 1968 Dennison French Dictionary ("All Important Words"):

kangaurou, kayak, képi, kilogramme, kilometre, kiosque

What's really fun is imagining using all six of those words in a single sentence!

--

The whole idea of dangerous letters leads us, of course, to Costa-Garvas's 1969 film Z, a very slight fictionalization ("Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not the result of chance. It is DELIBERATE.") of a political murder in 1960s Greece.

The film (quite good and gripping, by the way), explains its title in a bit of screen text tacked at the end of the epilogue, just after we hear of the subsequent terrible things that happened to all the characters:

Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labor strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoyevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!"

Bad News for Flatbreads

2008-04-02T18:18:00.001-07:00

The Caribbean: Latin American Art in the 20th Century: High/Newlights 3

2008-03-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I finished reading Phaidon's coffee-table book Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, and with country-by-country essays by various specialists. Since it was (apart from, say, the most famous of Mexican painters) pretty much new territory for me, at the end I flipped back through and noted the works and artists that I'd liked. I thought I might spin a few blog posts out of that list, using what images I can track down ... here's part 2, Central America:

Cuba
Victor Manuel Garía - Muchacha con Manzana Roja - Nope.
Wilfredo Lam - La Jungla I think of this as a sort of alternate, happy tropical version of Picasso's Guenerca.

Cundo Bermúdez - Romeo y Julieta - nope, but here's an untitled piece that I like. I think Bermúdez he gives his women these wonderful, long, sonorous-looking noses.
Manuel Mendive - Barco Negrero - nope.
Tomás Sánchez - Buscador de Bosques - nope, but here's Indecsion.

Dominican Republic
Celeste Woss y Gil - Mujer en Reposo
Yoryi Morel - A la Fiesta - nope, but here's La calle de las chancletas:

Jaime Colson - Meringue - I especially like the visual echo between the fan and the accordion:

Gilberto Hernández Ortega - Sin Título (1976) - nope.
Antonio Prats-Ventós - Familia - nope
Domingo Liz - Ciclista - nope, but here's an untitled:

Puerto Rico
Miguel Pou - La Promesa

Lorenzo Homar - Homenaje a julie de burgos - a silkscreen I couldn't find. One suprise from the book was learning about the prevalence of silkscreen art in PR — a number of workshops were set up that did some great nurturing of talent. Here's another poster by Homar:

Rafael Tufiño - couldn't find La Botella Jazz but here are his Cortoadores de Caña

Francisco Rodón - I couldn't find a large version of his wonderful portrait of governor Luis Muñoz Marín, which manages to be both cubist and realist. Here's La Maga Duende:

Luis Hernández Cruz - alas, couldn't locate Gran Mangle, which is a beautiful mangrove island landscape done entirely in solid-colored vertical lines. Here's Cruz:

Marcos Irizarry - no Asilah, but here's an untitled postor:

Central America: Latin American Art in the 20th Century: High/Newlights 2

2008-02-23T15:23:00.001-08:00

Mexico: Latin American Art in the 20th Century: High/Newlights 1

2008-02-19T15:33:00.000-08:00

A few weeks back I finished reading Phaidon's coffee-table book Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Edward J. Sullivan, and with country-by-country essays by various specialists. Since it was (apart from, say, the most famous of Mexican painters) pretty much new territory for me, at the end I flipped back through and noted the works and artists that I'd liked. I thought I might spin a few blog posts out of that list, using what images I can track down ...

From the Preface

Juan Sánchez - Confused Paradice [sic]. What's not to like abut such a provocative yet fun set of images. If I recall (and view) right, the artist is of a Mexican-American background.

Mexico

Carlos Mérida - Retrato de mi Nieta, Ana Luna, la Niña del Triángulo couldn't be found, but here's his Tzel y el Brujo, which has a nice abstract alphabetic-populist look to it. The book had him in the Mexico chapter, since he did major work there, but he was born in Guatemala. I guess people can move:

Alfredo Castañeda - Diálogo de dos Poetas Disfrazdos de Aves (again, not there). But I may like this one, Hombre, even more, as a meditation on painting/viewing (and cool-patterned hair!).

Fernando García Ponce - Manchas Azules sobre Ocre y Gris, nope, but see Al Pie de la Letra:

Vicente Rojo - México bajo la Lluvia
theis is one of a whole series (the one in the book, subtitled Homenaje a Orosco, had I think a handwriting motif going through it. This one looks more like those crazy multicolor Bolivian patterns (Aymara?) that Evo Morales has on those jackets he wears.

Gunther Gerzso - Naranja-azul-verde wasn't there, but I do like Personaje en Rojo y Azul. His shaded/layered color blocks look great, the more so for being from before the era of Photoshop drop shadows.

Francisco Castro Leñero - Blanco y Negro

Digitally Devisive

2008-02-06T18:38:00.000-08:00

Definitely digital, definitely divisive, but I'm not sure it's quite what digital divide usually means. I started going through the different wikipedia languages' pages for Mohammed to see which ones use the images in questions. I'm not sure if you can judge much by most of them. The Arabic one, of course, is quite image-free (except for a nifty inline graphic of the oft-used (in this context) phrase-cum-glyph "Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him"

Meanwhile, I'll paste in the entire corresponding Scots-language entry:

Muhammad (Arab:محمد) is believed tae be a prophet o God bi Muslims. He stairtit the releegion o Islam. He wis an Arab leader an aw.

The Trouble with Dancing Hitler

2008-02-06T15:34:00.000-08:00

Here's some excerpts of the most complete English article I've found about the trouble Rio de Janeiro's Viradouro Samba School got into for planning to include a Holocaust themed float among the dozen or so that made up their 2008 Carnival parade.

Dancing Hitler for Carnival Shocks Over-The-Top Rio

By Adriana Brasileiro
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Even Rio de Janeiro has its limits.
The city, whose annual Carnival celebrations regularly include half-naked women and over-the-top parties, banned a samba group from entering a holocaust-inspired float in the championship this year. The float, with a pile of atrophied concentration-camp victims at its base, was to be accompanied by a dancer dressed as Adolf Hitler.
"The idea of a dancing Hitler on top of dead Jews is outrageous," said Jose Roitberg, a spokesman for Rio de Janeiro's Israelite Federation, which represents Jewish interests and sued to have the float thrown out.

At this point, if you haven't, hop on over to the Viradouro site and pay attention to the flash animation on the home page, which uses a bit-o-montage to explain the theme.

The holocaust float was part of samba group Viradouro's "It Gives You Goose Bumps" show, which portrayed events, movies and characters that make people shiver.
"It's about all the wonderful and terrible things that make your hair stand on end," said Lucia dos Santos, who was in charge of Viradouro dancers dressing as the monsters from the movie "Alien."

Some of the other goose-bump-giving things in the parade: a Kama Sutra-themed float with gold-painted dancers of unclear attire enacting various, um, poses; a ski/snowboard ramp with ski/snowboarders; hundreds of dancing beheaded gentlemen with guillotines strapped to their backs; then a whole garbage-themed float with people in cockroach-costumes swarming around it; and a whole bunch of giant marching bugs--tarantulas and flies, I think. Then the creatures from Alien, some Japanese Geisha-types who for some reason have multiple arms. And (after the Kama Sutra float) courtly ladies with their arms bound to stakes above their heads. I'm getting the order wrong; watching all the videos mixes things up (plus they seem to be cutting between the parade proper and the folks lining up for it).

There was also a huge newborn-baby float featuring, of course, a huge newborn-baby, held up unwashed by its ankles, taking its first breaths. Presumably this was part of the positive things that give you goosebumps, but the rear part of the float had these towers constructed of smaller newborns, such that I couldn't quite decide whether they were supposed to be dead? alive? babies on a stick? Well, clearly the loss of the Holocaust float didn't hurt them in terms of variety or mind-boggling surreality. If they weren't all singing that same catchy song over and over I'd think I was seeing highlights for different Samba groups in different years on different planets, rather than part of a single, coherent theme. OK back to our reporter:

Viradouro lost in court Jan. 31, as Judge Juliana Kalichszteim of the Tribunal of Justice of Rio de Janeiro cited a federal law against Nazi propaganda and racism.

The judge warned that if the school included the float in its parade today, it would be fined 200,000 reais plus 50,000 reais for each dancer dressed as Hitler.

Viradouro didn't accept the court decision without protest. In place of the banned display, the school paraded a float carrying protesters dressed in white tunics with gags over their mouths and a sign that said "The future cannot be built by burying history." A dancer dressed as Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier, the hero of Brazil's independence known as "Tiradentes," who was hanged in 1792, watched from above with a noose around his neck.

"The restriction to freedom of expression creates a fertile territory for the proliferation of violence, disrespect, brutality and extermination," Viradouro said in a statement on its Web site. "Neither the executioners nor the victims of the tragic history of humanity have the right to hide the facts and dim our memory."

Unlike Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" and "The Producers," two successful films that took a humorous look at Hitler, Viradouro's float probably failed because it wasn't obviously a satire and may have caught viewers by surprise, said Arnold Aronson, a professor at the theater division at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

"No one was forced to watch the Chaplin film or "The Producers"," which was "presented as ridiculous farce in which Hitler and Nazis were depicted as buffoons," Aronson said in an e-mailed response to questions from Bloomberg News. "A parade float forces itself on everyone who views the parade, and Carnival has a huge and diverse audience."

I don't know about the "Forces Itself on Everyone" argument. There's plenty else that forces itself on the viewer too. Rather, I think the best tactic would be to affirm (at least a little) the performers' desire to play with conventions and distinctions. If they'd done a float focusing on the horrors of Brazilian slavery, for instance, they could have pulled it off with uncomfortable joy, an dancing-on-the-graves sense of things. But this is too much someone else's (many other people's) story for that to work.

That said, if the Nazi float had run, it would have been the worst of the lot, but in the context of a great parade of oddness and creepiness and combined celebration of life and death, the effect would have been diluted. Then again, maybe the dilution, too, would be part of the problem. Though I wonder if all the publicity, and the School's "principled" anti-censorship response really just made the outcome even worse, and less helpful, educative, or edifying all around.

Tiki in Berlin

2008-02-04T15:41:00.000-08:00

In a recent Feat of Correspondance I realized that two college friends were both doing academic things in Berlin at the moment. Emails were sent. And they did get to meet up, o'er Indonesian food, no less. A few days on, I received the following report:

We've decided that next time we're going to search out Berlin's tiki bars. We've concluded that the American presence here for so many years, especially in Schoeneberg, should mean that there's a good tiki bar remnant still around here somewhere! Let us know if you hear of anything in that magical network of yours.

Well I couldn't turn down a challange (plea for help?) like that. Thus:

Berlin Tiki Establishments
[via the requisite Google search etc.]

From the dates and pictures I found, Berlin's tiki establishments all seem to date to the last decade or so, which calls the occupation/cold war theory into question. Perhaps there were tiki bars in the 50s and 60s, coinciding with the American tiki wave, and the current establishments traffic both in the at-home retro as well as the we-love-america-now-and-then retro.

OK, back to the shortlist:

Rock-a-tiki (but it seems more like a skater-store?)
tabou tiki room (they get points for referencing French exoticism too)
Aloha-Luau Lounge
Trader Vic's (invented the Mai-Tai at their Oakland, CA location. Now a global chain w/25 outposts, 6 in the Persian Gulf!)
Tiki Heart Cafe (their Tuesday Special menu doesn't, though, seem that Polynesian, or even Pseudonesian:

Menue 29.01.08

Avocado - Rote Beete - Cocktail [Avocado - beets - Cocktail]
Barbarie-Enten-Carpaccio auf Auberginen Mousse (als veggie: Tofu Carpaccio) [ Barbarie duck carpaccio-on eggplant mousse (veggie option: Tofu carpaccio)]
Geschmorter Burgunderbraten vom Rind mit Sauce von weißen und schwarzen Feigen, dazu Kartoffel-Rösti und Wurzelgemüse (als veggie: Tofu -Burgunderbraten) [ Geschmorter Burgundy roast of beef with sauce of white and black figs, plus potato hash browns and root vegetables (veggie option: tofu roast Burgundy) ]
Gefüllter Milchreispudding [Stuffed milk rice pudding]

Tiki aggregators: some proof that folks take this stuff very, very seriously.
http://www.tikieurope.com/
http://www.critiki.com/cgi-bin/map.cgi

And he establishment weighs in:

NY Times 3/20/05:

Berlin
Where to wear it? The best people-watching can be done at White Trash Fast Food, a bar, restaurant and club in a former Chinese restaurant. It feels like a ''Cantonese Tiki bar'' gone wild, says Stefanie Roth, an editor at the German style magazine Lodown. What to wear: Veronique Branquinho suede boots. Devi Kroell python hobo, $2,690. Levi's Superlow Skinny jeans, $40. Jil Sander trench coat, $2,040. Dries Van Noten scarf, $995

NY Times 11/12/06:

Surfacing
Street Food With Ambition in Berlin
By GISELA WILLIAMS

NEW YORKERS have hot dog stands, Parisians have crêperies, but street food in Berlin is all about imbisse — a word that encompasses everything from sidewalk stalls that sell currywurst (sliced sausage smothered with curry powder and ketchup) to holes in the wall that serve Turkish döner kebabs (thick pita sandwiches stuffed with shaved meat, salad and yogurt sauce).

They’re great if you’re in a rush or need to save some beer money (the price rarely exceeds 3 euros, or less than $4 at $1.28 to the euro), but don’t expect a culinary revelation. The taste usually ranges from salty to saltier.

But lately, Berlin’s fast-food scene has gone foodie. Imbisse (the singular form of the word is imbiss) with an epicurean twist are popping up all over this city, Western Europe’s most affordable capital, bringing fancy fast food to the masses.

One of the best is the W Imbiss (Kastanienallee 49; 49-30-48-49-26-57; www.agentur103.de) on the stylish edge of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, whose logo resembles the golden arches turned upside down. If you’re lucky, Gordon W., as its Canadian chef and owner calls himself, will be in the tiny open kitchen, wearing his signature fez and manning the tandoor.

Four euros will get you a delicious and filling nan-bread pizza, topped with fresh ingredients like pesto, fresh arugula, sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts. Six and a half euros buys one of the popular rice bowls, piled high with marinated tandoori salmon, leafy greens and Japanese-style dressing. Besides being cheap, everything is made to order, so expect long waits — though no one in this tiki-inspired joint seems to mind..

There's a Hole in Mozambique

2008-02-03T13:40:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting close-up of the triple-border between Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania on Lake Nyasa (aka Lake Malawi). The two islands in the rounded enclave are Chisamula (the small one) and Likoma -- they belong to Malawi but are surrounded by Mozambiquan waters. I wonder if there's anywhere else in the world with such a perfec elipse of a border.

Also, it's interesting that whereas Malawi and Mozambique roughly split the southern end of the lake, up north Tanzania border hugs its own shoreline, giving Malawi all the water.

Dr. Livingstone, How Presumptuous!

2008-02-02T20:12:00.000-08:00

Direct-quote from the Wikipedia entry for Blantyre, Scotland, as of 8pm EST 2/2/08:

David Livingstone

Blantyre's most famous son is the lap dancer David Livingstone, and there is a museum, the David Livingstone Centre at the bottom of Station Road. This centre includes a museum, a playpark, a cafe, a shop, an African Garden and several workshop studios. An adventure assault course also existed here until a young man died in 1995.

The largest city and commercial centre of Malawi, one of the countries which Livingstone explored, is still called Blantyre, having been named for Livingstone's birthplace during the colonial era.

I was just about to do my first ever Wikipedia edit, but, oddly, when I clicked to change the section, the editable text lacked the crucial epithet:

== David Livingstone ==

Blantyre's most famous son is [[David Livingstone]], and there is a museum, the [[David Livingstone Centre]] at the bottom of Station Road. This centre includes a museum, a playpark, a cafe, a shop, an African Garden and several workshop studios. An adventure assault course also existed here until a young man died in 1995.

The largest city and commercial centre of [[Malawi]], one of the countries which Livingstone explored, is still called [[Blantyre, Malawi|Blantyre]], having been named for Livingstone's birthplace during the colonial era.

But when I clicked back to the main page, there it was, getting its jollies. So what was going on here? In the end, adding "19th century missionary and explorer" (a counter-epithet! and quite factual!) seems to have gotten rid of Dr. L's alleged other career, at least for the moment. Though it still shows up in a few sites that take content from Wikipedia. Ah, c'est le wiki.

Walt Whitman Speaks!

2008-01-28T15:45:00.000-08:00

Edison cylindar recording of (apparently) Whitman reading Whitman. I read on IMDB that Daniel Day-Lewis based his accent in Gangs of New York in part on recording(s) of Whitman (for that mid-19th-century native New York twang).

Gua Gua Gua!

2008-01-28T15:04:00.000-08:00

A friend, after some longstanding scrutiny of her map-of-the-world shower curtain, emailed to ask, basically, whence cometh all the gua/gui/guays in various country names. I'll paste in my response right ... now:

OK, here be etymologies:

For each I've started from my shelf copy of Place-Names of the World (Adrian Room, 1974), and then added bits from wikipedia etc.

Guadalquivir River (southern Spain) - From Arabic Wadi-al-kebir = 'river of great water' (Guada- is common 1st element of many Spanish names, from Arabic wadi = 'river, ravine').

Guadeloupe - named after monestary on Guadelupe R. in Spain ... same 'wadi' as above.

Guam - sighted by Magellan's men on St. John's day 1521. Present name native verison of 'Juan/John'. [currently Guáhán in chimorro, Guaján in Spanish).

Guatemala - Spanish version of Indian (probably Tuendal) uhazmala = 'mountain that gushes out water', though earlier explanation of origin had been from Aztec [nahautl?] quauhtemellan = 'land of the eagle' [spanish wikipedia has it meaning "place of many trees"]

Guyana, French Guiana (la Guyane; in French, Guyana is le Guyane), Guayana Esequiba (Venezuelan territorial ciaim) - explored in 1499 by Vespucci and Hojeda, latter naming territory after people, the Guaizas, whose own name = 'respected' (ie 'we who must be respected').
But en.wikipedia: Guyana is an Amerindian word meaning "Land of many waters".
And fr.wilipedia: The term "guyane" is of indigenous origin. In the guanao language, which is spoken by the indians of the Orinoco delta, GUAI means 'name', or 'denomination', UANA is a negation. ... thus Guyane means 'that which can't be named' or 'sacred ground ' or 'the house of the supreme being' (referring to the "italien" [indian?] name for the guyana massif)

Guinea, Equitorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, New Guinea - probably from Berber aguinau = 'black (-skinned people)'.
Guinea hen = fowl from Guinea. Guinea pig - 1664, native to South America and is so called either because it was first brought back to Britain aboard Guinea-men, ships that plied the triangle trade between England, Guinea, and South America; or from confusion of Guinea (q.v.) with the South American region of Guyana.

[N.B. I always found it interesting that when you jigsaw Africa and S. America back together, guinea and guiana match up!]

Nicaragua - discovered 1522 by explorer Gil Gonzalez, named territory after Indian chief who owned it. Chief's name of uncertain meaning. [es.wikipdia has the Nicarao tribe emigrating south from Teotihuacan (the classical civilization near present Mexico City). The Nicaraguan government cites unnamed etymologists to say that the name has Nahuatl [ie Aztec-lang-family] origins -- some say it can be divided ni-can-atl-hua, 'the lords of water are here' or 'place where there are great deposits of water'. Others suggest that nic-atl-nahuac' means 'here together on the water'. es.wikipedia quites that, but also suggests that the -agua is from the Spanish 'water'.

Paraguay - country after river, after native tribe, Paragua, with name derived from Indian [sic] para = 'water' en.wikipedia has this: The literal translation from Guaraní is Para=great river or sea; Gua=from or belonging to or place; Y=water or river or lake. This could lead to:
* "Water or river belonging to the sea" (the Atlantic Ocean).
* "Water or river that belongs to a great river" (the Paraná River).
* "Water or river that comes from a sea" or "water or river from the place where the sea is" (the Pantanal wetland).
The fourth version states that it could be a corruption from Pajaguay, "river of the Pajaguás", a tribe that inhabited the right bank, opposite from the Guaranís.

Uruguay - country after river, origin perhaps in Indian [sic] guay = 'tail' + uru = 'bird', referring to species of bird w/remarkable tail living in forests here. Or perhaps connected with guay = 'river', common element in South American names.
both wikipedias have: The name "Uruguay" comes from Guaraní. It has many possible meanings. Some of the proposed meanings are:
* "River of the uru" or "River of the country of the uru": a version attributed to Felix de Azara, which suggests that the name of the country comes from a small bird, called the urú, native to the banks of the Uruguay river (from uru, idem, gua, "place of", and y, "water")[4]
* "River of colorful or 'painted' chinchillas (birds) [sic? I can't find any refernces, Spanish or English, to chinchillas that aren't the soft-furred Andean rodents, apart from a city called Chinchilla in Spain]": poetic interpretation attributed to Juan Zorrilla de San Martín.
* "Rivers that have dead people of snails": an interpretation attributed to a collaborator of Félix de Azara (from arugua, "snail", and y, "water")[4]
* "River of those who bring food": an anonymous version which has been popularized since the discovery of an old document written by Jesuit Lucas Marton.

Escher Lives ... in Canada!

2008-01-20T17:36:00.000-08:00

While talking with an old friend in Toronto yesterday afternoon, I opened up Google Maps to see just where he was. Afterwards, I decided to have a look around. Click-and-dragging down Bay St. (thinking of the Ron Sexmith song "Dragonfly on Bay Street") I stopped short at Toronto City Hall trying to make the perspectives resolve, before finally realizing that it must be where two aerial photos are stitched together:

Dubai Design Downpour

2008-01-17T18:26:00.000-08:00

The Gulf News came up with a witty wet-ink cover treatment in its coverage of the torrential rain they've had in the United Arab Emirates this week -- note how the smudges run down into the article text.

Alphabet Geography

2008-01-13T15:27:00.000-08:00

I keep a 1977 London Times Atlas open on my bedroom dresser. Every morning, as part of my getting-ready ritual, I flip the page to see the next map-plate, and play a little game, scanning the map to find a city or other feature that starts with a letter of the alphabet. I jot it down in my little notebook. The next day, I turn the page and set about finding something that starts with the next letter. So on through the atlas, across the globe, and down the alphabet from A to Z and all over again. And now that little notebook's become a blog: Alphabet Geography. It's still, three days in, finding its feet as I discover what, and how much, additional info, links, and sketches to add. The goal is not to take any posting-impetus from this site, but rather to make public something I was already doing anyway, a day and a letter at a time.

Mapping Man/Woman/Boy/Girl

2008-01-13T15:20:00.000-08:00

I finally got all my sketches from the Man/Woman/Boy/Girl project plotted on a Google Map. They're best viewed in the Google environs, but I've also set up a separate blog, with the map and the initial sketchbook-slideshow here.

View Larger Map

I Monogram I

2007-12-27T15:46:00.000-08:00

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".

Mumbai Manga

2007-12-20T17:42:00.000-08:00

First, a history-vocab lesson, from the great old Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases:

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)

Speaking in Tongues

2007-12-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

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.

Have Yourself a Wimbo Zuri Christmas

2007-12-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

A Christmas Mix* from my private label**. Sample/download here (iTunes).

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.

L'Inde sans Cashmere

2007-11-19T19:22:00.001-08:00

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?

Retiring on One String

2007-11-18T13:38:00.001-08:00

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.

Bad Photoshop! Bad!

2007-11-18T13:20:00.001-08:00

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.

Falling Back

2007-11-10T15:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Helen Keller and Mark Twain

2007-11-04T15:09:00.000-08:00

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.

VIPs and VVIPs

2007-10-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

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:

Love the Blob You're With

2007-10-18T15:53:00.000-07:00

From an cell phone banner ad from a Sydney Morning Herald front page of a few months back:

Anthropomorphism: it's not just for higher organisms!

Thumper in Jerusalem

2007-10-15T15:32:00.001-07:00

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.

Take a Sad Song and Make it Better?

2007-10-14T15:29:00.000-07:00

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.

The Ballad of Aussie Raccoon

2007-10-14T15:22:00.001-07:00

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?

Rate Your Tamil Script!

2007-10-11T13:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Man/Woman/Boy/Girl

2007-09-25T15:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Very Early Cinema: Moon Guns and Rubber Heads

2007-09-15T15:24:00.000-07:00

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.

The Ruffian Bombardment

2007-09-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

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).

And There Was Much Rejoicing!

2007-09-09T16:05:00.000-07:00

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):
"

More Songs about Trains and Buildings: A World Music Fable

2007-09-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

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:

Robin D.G. Kelley: Drum Wars [1hr lecture]

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.

[French original]

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):

View Larger Map

Sabbath Poem: The Lantern Out of Doors

2007-09-02T17:15:00.000-07:00

"The Lantern Out of Doors" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Oh My (Chinese) Darlin'!

2007-08-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

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.

Music Notes

2007-08-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

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!").

The Mississippi Line

2007-08-21T17:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Various Positions

2007-08-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Sabbath Poem: The Poor Poet

2007-08-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

"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.

Life Imitates Lure

2007-08-16T13:06:00.000-07:00

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).

Exuberantly Bad Design Knows No Era

2007-08-09T15:55:00.001-07:00

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).

Dog Provides Example of Concentration

2007-08-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

Martin Luther, Table-Talk, May 18, 1532:

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.

Sabbath Poem: Praise

2007-08-05T15:06:00.000-07:00

"Praise", by R.S. Thomas.

Flamingo Bones

2007-08-04T13:18:00.001-07:00

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.

Sabbath Poem - The Maneuver

2007-07-29T16:02:00.000-07:00

"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!)

Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay

2007-07-28T15:28:00.001-07:00

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.

High-End Architecture for the Poor: Solidarity or Slumming?

2007-07-26T12:08:00.000-07:00

Simon Romero / NYTimes:

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.

Dümmer in English?

2007-07-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

Sign and Sight recently featured a translation of this Frankfurter 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"?

Sabbath Poem: Under One Small Star

2007-07-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

"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:

Library Marginalia

2007-07-18T15:43:00.001-07:00

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.

Soccer Semaphore

2007-07-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

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).

Sabbath Poem: La Palabra

2007-07-15T15:22:00.000-07:00

"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.

The View from Above

2007-07-14T15:15:00.000-07:00

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.

The Ergonomics of Terror

2007-07-12T15:36:00.000-07:00

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.

Hocuspokus-Handy!

2007-07-10T15:22:00.000-07:00

One day last year I was looking at a page from the Vienna newspaper Der Standard, and fixed on this "Hocuspokus-Handy" graphic. It took me a little while to make the Handy = mobile phone connection. I thought it might be an Austrianism—a friend studying in Berlin didn't seem to know about the term. Finally, this week, once more 'twas LanguageHat to the rescue:

Anatol Stefanowitsch in Bremer Sprachblog discusses the question Woher kommt das Handy?: where does the German word Handy 'mobile telephone, cell(ular) phone' come from? After rejecting various theories (such as that it's short for the 1940s term handie-talkie), the floor is thrown open to suggestions, and Detlef Guertler of Wortistik linked to a post there proving to Anatol's satisfaction that it comes from a term for 'hand-held microphone' used in the CB radio community.

A few years further back still, I remember a descent on Singapore Airlines in which were admonished to cease using handphones, which, with the Singaporean accent's elegant unreleased stops, I took for "headphones", which still seemed odd. But then next came the "Now would be a good time to try and flush your heroin down the toilet if you wish to avoid the death penalty" announcement (or words to that effect), so oddness was clearly relative.

How Do You Say Yvyvy?

2007-07-08T13:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes following the news from Paraguay pays off. Yesterday I checked my newsreader and found the following headline, from ABC Digital:

Ante posible búsqueda de plata yvyguy en el Botánico, ediles suspenden obras

En el Jardín Botánico se estaría realizando excavaciones en busca de tesoros escondidos según la sospecha de algunos concejales. Responsabilizan de las perforaciones a la Constructora Fortaleza, que en mayo suscribió un convenio con la Municipalidad de Asunción para la construcción de dos baños.
---
Authorities suspend excavation before possible search for yvyguy silver in Botanical Gardens.

Excavations have begun in the Botanical Gardens in search of hidden treasures, according to the suspicions of some councillers. The Constructora Fortaleza is responsible for these works, which were approved in May by the Munincipality of Asunción for the construction of two bathrooms. [my poor translation, of course]

From what I can gather from the rest of the article, apparently digging for buried treasure is forbidden in the Botanical Gardens (but is tempting), and the approval process for this bathroom-construction (which might be a front for other searches?) is a bit sketchy.

Of course what really jumped out at me was the phrase plata yvyguy. It seems to be an accepted Spanish/Guaraní hybrid phrase. And, as best I can tell refers to treasure which was suppposedly hidden around the time the Jesuits were expelled from their missions in Paraguay in 1768. (The book of Guaraní legends I have devotes a page or two about a supposed lost tribe and treasure dating from the expulsion.) In any case, this particular sort of hybrid is pleasingly symbolic of what makes Paraguay so interesting: a relatively even mix of Spanish and Guaraní, pre- and post-colombian culture, and a deep sense of a richness that lies beneath, undiscovered (in the sense that Paraguay itself has been isolated by geography, by history, and by choice over the years).

But back to the word itself, the typo-looking yvyguy—what a lovely odd-looking string of letters! A few searches later, I turned up an anternate version, plata yvyvy, which was an even more pleasing row of letter-forms. I was reminded of certain pleasing Tanzanian placenames like Ujiji (you know, where Stanley met Livingstone), with all those cute little dots in a row.

But how to pronounce the forbidden plata yvyvy? Luckily my good friend Christine happens to be in Asunción right now, studying Guaraní and blogging about it from time to time. I emailed her with my guess at pronunciation: "ee-vee-vee", but was sadly corrected:

The y here is super hard to pronounce... it's a guttural vowel unlike any that we have in either English or Spanish. My guess is that to replicate it, one should imagine the sound one might make when punched in the gut.

I tried that—lightly hitting my stomach while trying to get out a couple of v's—to much amusement but no avail. This Guaraní phonology offers more analogues (German ü, Russian y, French u) and detailed anatomical instructions ... but I still can't get it to mesh right with the v's.

I do now know that yvy means "earth", and -guy seems to be a suffix meaning "under", with the alternate -vy suffix meaning "half". That's a big maybe considering how little I know about the language, but "under-earth silver" seems a good guess for buried treasure.

Meanwhile, Christine ends her blog post on the subject with another amusing observation:

There's another guttural vowel, too. Well, nasal-guttural vowel. It's written as y with a tilde over it (looks like ñ but instead of having an n it's got a y). To the best of my listening ability, this sounds like the sound you hear, in Super Mario Bros II, when little Mario or Luigi (depending on whether you're the first player or second player) jump up into the air just at the moment when you hit the button. Is it the B button or the A? I can't remember... it's been a while since I last played.

The tilde-y is actually available in (very rough) Unicode: Ỹ and ỹ. For some reason, though, they didn't wind up encoding a tilde-g, which is also used in the language, so I think people either type it as g~ or as ĝ with a neat little French hat.

Speaking of little hats in France: another good friend, recently back from Paris, emailed me about the odd Space-Invaders-style mosaic graffiti that he saw around town. Clicking through the photo gallery, I found, among the aliens, a little Super Mario by a brasserie. Vandalism seems much less offensive when it's done using more traditional artisanal methods.

Sabbath Poem: What We Need Is Here

2007-07-08T12:54:00.000-07:00

I think I'll start a tradition of Sunday poetry recitations—largely from the sheaf of memory-poems I have clipped together hanging from a nail on my bedroom wall. I'll launch things, appropriately enough, with one of Wendell Berry's, "What We Need Is Here", from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997.

The Victoria Falls of South America

2007-07-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

Yes, the title is ironic, but not in the way you might think.

To start, let's set the scene with some video, courtesy a couple of quick YouTube searches

Iguazu Falls/Cataratas del Iguazú/Cataratas do Iguaçu, Argentina/Brazil, South America

Victoria Falls/Mosi-oa-Tunya, Zambia/Zimbabwe, southern Africa

Nothing inspires, and inspires rivalry, like a good big thundering waterfall. A few months back, inspired by travelling friends, I began researching a catarract I knew about but had never visited, Iguazu Falls in South America. What I found was that when it comes to a giant waterfall, people want to know just how giant, and speciffically whether it's gianter than any other waterfall (which is a more difficult question than you might think, given the multi-dimensionality of waterfalls: height, width, flow at a given moment—imagine if Mt. Everest's prestige point for climbers was not that it's the tallest, but by some complicated, debatable formula the biggest. Oh the arguments we'd have!).

In the comparisons I found, Niagra Falls usually gets brought in the picture, especially in the older articles and guidebooks, but that's usually for the quick dismissal of a known quantity. The real showdown, of course, is invariably with Iguazu's African analogue, the probably-more-famous Victoria Falls. Depending on your point of view, Iguazu is "The Victoria Falls of South America"; and Victoria's the "African Iguazu".

(Back in my days editing travel guides such comparisons alternately amused and annoyed. Any city with canals becomes "The Venice of Wherever". The problem with such comparisons is that you're kind of implying the inferiority of the lesser-known part of the equation. "It ain't Venice, but it's the best we've got!")

And indeed, I was amused and annoyed at the waterfall-showdowns. But then I went looking for old maps and discovered something fascinating and (apparently) forgotten.

The Library of Congress's American Memory site proved, as ever, a great good treasure trove. (though difficult to link from ... I've moved some map images over to the blog; to find out more you can, of course, pop over search by the map name or keyword).

All right, first, let's get oriented with this 1998 CIA map. The Falls aren't labelled, but they're right next to the Triple Frontier between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, where the Rio Iguazú flows due west into the Rio Paraná:

South America (1998)

Things were proceeding much as expected ... the falls were unlabeled, or marked with the name of the Brazilian border town, Foz do Iguaçu. But then I clicked onward to an 1873 map, from an atlas published by Charles Black and Co., Edinburgh, Scotland, and saw, where the Rio Iguazú flows into the mighty Paraná, an unfamiliar—or rather, too familiar—name:

Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay & Guayana. (1873)

Instead of Salto del Iguazú, it was labelled Salto Victoria—literally, Victoria Falls! Was this some kind of Rule Britannia-style joke by the Scottish geographers? Some kind of continental clerical blunder? Or a cruel brief renaming of the falls in honor of Brazil and Argentina's then-recent evisceration of Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance?

Over the next few days I dug up more info on the surprising references to Iguazu Falls as Salto Victoria. I did find one other old map (Brazilian, 1908) with it labelled as Salto Victoria. All the others either just marked it as "salto" or didn't show anything beyond the intersection of the Iguazú and Paraná rivers.

Mappa geral da Republica dos Estados Unidos do Brasil (1908)

Paraguariæ Provinciæ soc. jesu cum adiacentibg. novissima descriptio ... (1732)

Having gotten through the maps, I started in on text searches—all but the first are from the ever-expanding 19th century universe that is Google Books. Thus, I guess, the 19th century all caps headlines. Anyway.

A BRIEF, LONG HISTORY — A VICTORIA BUT NO FALLS

Here's a story of the Falls' naming from an Argentinian tour operator:

A tourist venue par excellence, it was first glimpsed in the year 1542, when Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was crossing from the Atlantic Ocean to Asunción in Paraguay. The conquistador, amazed at the sight of the falls, christened them as "Saint Mary's Falls", a name which over time was replaced by its primitive Guaraní name: "Iguazu" (I: water; Guazú: great), i.e. "great waters".
Iguazu. At that time the region was inhabited by natives of the Mbyá-Guaraní tribe, who, around 1609, began to live within the evangelizing influence of the Jesuit fathers, who set up an experiment unique to Latin America: the establishment of a system of "reductions", that at its height included 30 towns scattered throughout the regions of the Tapé and the Guayrá (currently the south of Brazil and Paraguay), all the Argentine province of Misiones, and part of the north of Corrientes.

Political and economic differences with the throne of Spain led to the expulsion of the Jesuits from the region in 1768. The zone of the waterfalls passed into oblivion from then on until August 1901, when the explorer Jordan Hummell organized the first tourist excursion to the area. One of those travelers was Victoria Aguirre, who, when this excursion had to turn back for lack of proper roads, donated a large sum of money to open a land-route between Puerto Iguazu and the waterfalls. This date marks the beginning of tourist trips to Iguazu, and has been claimed by the community as its foundation day, in homage to Victoria Aguirre, who then became a kind of protector, a driving force for the growth of tourism and of the population.

———

THE CONQUISTADOR CABEZA DE VACA DISCOVERS THE FALLS —BUT DOESN'T MENTION WHAT (IF ANYTHING) HE CALLED THEM

"The current of the Yguazú was so strong that the canoes were carried furiously down the river, for near this spot there is a considerable fall, and the noise made by the water leaping down some height rocks into a chasm may be heard a great distance off, and the spray rises two spears high and more above the fall. It was necessary, therefore, to take the canoes out of the water and carry them by hand past the cataract for half a league with great labor. Having left that bad passage behind, they launched their canoes and continued their voyage down to the confluence of this river with the Paraná."

—Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Commentaries, translated in The Conquest of the River Plate (1535-1555) (New York: 1891)

Also, this French chronology mentions Cabeza de Vaca's discovery of the falls "later called victoria". And an 1892 New York Geographical Survey account mentions a "magnificent but little-known cataract called 'Salto Victoria' or the 'Hundred Cataracts'. These falls occur on the Iguazú River, a branch of the Paraná, about twenty miles from its mouth." After describing the trouble one must take to get upriver to view the falls, we get the usual extreme traveller's payoff:

The numerous tributary streams pouring over these cliffs, together with the principal cataracts form such a bewildering mass of falls, that one is utterly overwhelmed with the sublimity of the scene; and probably for combined beauty and grandeur of scenery, for wildness and variety of aspect, the "Hundred Cataracts" stand unsurpassed.

———

BUT NOW: PROOF THAT BRITISH AND BRAZILIAN REFERENCES TO THE SOUTH AMERICAN FALLS AS "VICTORIA" PREDATE LIVINGSTONE'S ARRIVAL AT THE AFRICAN FALLS

"The Rio Iguassú, or Curitiba, runs east and west for about 300 miles: it is navigable in the middle of its course, but before it reaches the Rio Paraná it forms a succession of water-falls, of which one, about 10 miles from its moth, is said to be 120 feet in perpendicular height; this fall is called Salto de Victoria. The country on both sides of the lower parts of its course is thickly clothed with high timber-trees."

—America and the West Indies Geographically Described (London: 1845)

"Victoria. Cachoeira do rio Iguaçu, 15 legoas pouco mais or menos, acima de sua confluencia com o rio Paraná. Entre a cachoeira Cayacanga d'este rio, e nas terras e matas adjacentes vivem diversas nações d'Indios que estão ainda por se civilizar."

"Victoria. Waterfall of the river Iguaçu, 15 leagues, more or less, above its confluence with the river Paraná. The Cayacanga waterfall of this river enters[?], and in adjacent lands and bushes diverse nations of Indians live that are still uncivilized."

—Diccionario geographico, historico e descriptivo, do imperio do brasil, Vol. II (Paris, 1845)

———

MEANWHILE, AT THE OTHER VICTORIA FALLS

David Livingstone reached and subsequently named the African Victoria Falls ten years later, on Nov. 17, 1855. Here's his account.

———

LATER ON, AN ARGENTINEAN DICTIONARY GIVES A POSSIBLE ETYMOLOGY FOR SALTO DE VICTORIA

"Se le dió el nombre Victoria (y no de la Victoria) porque los primeros españoles, venciendo mil dificultades, salvaron ese salto."

"It is called Victory (and not the Victory) because the first Spaniards, overcoming a thousand difficulties, made it past the falls."

—"Victoria—Cataracata—Llamado Salto—Missiones—En el Rio Iguazú", in Diccionario geográfico estadístico nacional argentino, entry: (Buenos Aires: 1885)

Later in the same dictionary entry came this bit of comparison:

Nostros presenciábamos seguramente un espectáculo de primer órden, que sobrepasa a las decantadas maravillas de los Saltos de Niágara, Nyanja y otros, y estamos seguros que llamará la atencion de todo el mundo civilizado.

We are thus surely witness a spectacle of the first order, which surpasses the marvels of the Falls of Niagra, Nyanja, and others, and we are sure that they will seize the attention of all the civilized world.

I've had trouble figuring out whether Nyanja refers to the African Victoria Falls (that would make the most sense, given the comparison). Nyanja is one of the main languages of Zambia and the region around the Falls, and seems to be a more general term for lake, and one specificly applied to Lake Nyasa/Malawi, which is quite a bit further east. Livingstone records the pre-colonial name of Victoria Falls (and today the official title) Mosi-Oa-Tunya, which means "the smoke that thunders" in the Kololo/Lozi language. Other local languages give the falls names with that same meaning, e.g. Shingu wa mutitima (Bakota/Tokalaya) and aManza Thunqayo (Matabele).

———

AND NOW, SUMMING UP

What I found most surprising about this episode was not that there was a little-known former name for a famous geographical feature, but that it seemed to be so widely known 100 years ago, and yet no contemporary sources (at least web-searchable—that's a big caveat) seemed to mention the fascinating fact that the bigness debate between Victoria Falls and Iguazú Falls is, in fact, a case of even closer parallels. Surely there are historians of Latin America out there who know about Salto Victoria, Saint Mary's Falls, the Hundred Cataracts, and the Falls or Foz or Salto or Corrientes of the mighty Iguazú, Yguassu, Iguaçu.

At the end of the day, I think comparisons between waterfalls and cities with canals and so forth are fine and useful, as far as they go. I think having, and learning, multiple names for things is wonderful. The more the merrier. It's always fun trying to figure out the "original" name of some great site, but also to realize that quite often there's no one traceable original (just as, so often, there's no one traceable "discoverer", especially once you set the big-name explorers in their proper place).

Voltron Character or 20th Century Political Movement?

2007-06-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

N.B. This is something I compiled a few years back but (surprise, surprise) never found a place to publish.

PART I: POP QUIZ

For each numbered item, select the character that appeared on the television series Voltron: Defender of the Universe from the list of twentieth-century political parties, movements, and armed insurgencies.

1. a) GRAPO b) ASALA c) LOTOR d) DIKO

2. a) IRENE b) PASOK c) ZANU d) CORAN

3. a) SVEN b) DASHNAK c) AZAPO d) MEP

4. a) FRELIMO b) ALLURA c) PUDEMO d) LURD

5. a) JEM b) SWAPO c) PAGAD d) MOGOR

6. a) GERAKAN b) FISH MAN c) FARC d) RENAMO

7. a) SLORC b) UNITA c) LORN d) RUKH

8. a) PIDGE b) MOLIRENA c) KISS d) GRUNK

9. a) FUNCINPEC b) VOLTRICIA d) GOLKAR c) FIG

10. a) FODEM b) FANK c) MILF d) ZARKON

answers: 1c, 2d, 3a, 4b, 5d, 6b, 7c, 8a, 9b, 10d

PART II: GLOSSARY

ALLURA: Blue lion pilot (once held hostage by ZARKON)

ASALA: Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (seeks Turkish reparations for the 1915 genocide, founded 1975)

AZAPO: Azanian People’s Organization (South Africa; outgrowth of the Black Conscious Movement; founded 1977)

CORAN: Royal advisor to ALLURA (in charge of Castle Control)

DASHNAK (also ARF): Armenian Revolutionary Foundation (founded 1890; banned by Soviets; reformed post-independence; banned again; participant in current government)

DIKO: Democratic Party (Cyprus; center-right movement, founded 1976)

FANK (formerly FARK): Khmer National Armed Forces (Military component of Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic; founded 1953)

FARC: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Marxist, rural-based insurgency, founded 1966)

FIG: Fighting Islamic Group (Libya; advocates overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi’s government; founded 1995)

FISH MAN: Victim of transgenic experiments (restored to health by daughter’s flute-pipe)

FODEM: Democratic Forum for Modernity (Central African Republic; founded 1997)

FRELIMO: Mozambique Revolutionary Front (independence movement turned ruling party; fought lengthy civil war against RENAMO; founded 1962)

FUNCINPEC: National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia (current royalist ruling party, founded 1981)

GERAKAN: Malaysian People’s Movement (center-left, non-racial party, founded 1968)

GIA: Armed Islamic Group (Algeria; terrorist group advocating overthrow of secular government; founded 1992)

GOLKAR: Functional Groups (Indonesia; state political party during the Suharto dictatorship; founded 1964)

GRAPO: First of October Antifascist Resistance Group (Spain; extreme left terrorist movement; founded 1975)

GRUNK: Royal Government of National Union of Kampuchea (Cambodia; government in exile, closely linked to FUNK, the political-military National United Front, both founded 1970)

IRENE: Integration, Representation Message of Hope (Venezuela; personal political party of former Miss Universe and Caracas municipality mayor Irene Saez; founded 1992)

JEM: Army of Mohammed (Pakistan; fighting for annexation of Kashmir; founded 2000)

KISS: Keep it Straight and Simple Party (South Africa; advocates minimal government; founded 1994)

LORN: Lieutenant in the Galaxy Alliance

LOTOR: Warrior son of ZARKON (fell love with ALLURA)

LURD: Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (fought to oust president Charles Taylor; founded 2000)

MEP: Electoral Movement Party (Aruba; social-democratic party, founded 1971)

MILF: Moro Islamic Liberation Front (Philippines; Islamist insurgency in Mindanao; founded 1977)

MOGOR: Commander of the Doom Forces (refused to serve LOTOR when ZARKON was made to pilot a lookalike Robeast)

MOLIRENA: National Republican Liberal Movement (Panama; founded 1982)

PAGAD: People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (South Africa; community anti-crime group turned anti-Western terrorist organization; founded 1996)

PASOK: Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Greece; nationalist party; founded 1974)

PIDGE: Green lion pilot

PUDEMO: People’s United Democratic Movement (Swaziland; founded 1989)

RENAMO: National Resistance of Mozambique (right-wing insurgency backed by Rhodesian and South African governments; fought civil war against FRELIMO; founded 1976)

RUKH: Ukrainian People’s Movement for Restructuring (moderate nationalist party, founded 1988)

SLORC: State Law and Order Restoration Committee (Myanmar; military government, founded 1988)

SVEN: Blue lion pilot (killed early on, then resurrected; place in Lion Force taken by ALLURA)

SWAPO: Southwest Africa People’s Organization (Namibia; Marxist-Leninist insurgency, formed to fight South African colonial regime; founded 1960)

UNITA: National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (backed by South Africa, fought post-independence civil war against ruling MPLA government; founded 1966)

VOLTRICIA: Baby born during one of ZARKON’s village raids; named for Lion Force rescuers.

ZANU: Zimbabwe African National Union (fought civil war against white Rhodesian government; founded 1964)

ZARKON: Drule king of Planet Doom (father of LOTOR)

Project Gatsby

2007-06-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

Here's a movie I put together couple of years ago, an art-film-ish documentary about my college roommates and our college sofa.

Mixing French and Arabic(s)

2007-06-25T17:31:00.000-07:00

I'm fascinated by on-the-fly language hybrids: Spanglish, Sheng (Kiswahili-English), the "HUGME" (Hindu-Urdu-Gujarati-Marathi-English) of Salman Rushdie's many-tongued Bombay. The other day I was emailing a friend about mixing French and Arabic in Tunisia, and hours later came across (via Language Log via Langauge Hat) some anecdotes on the real-world usefulness of Fusha (aka standard written Arabic) vs. French vs. local dialects.

From the Language Log post:

This situation makes the task of foreign learners more difficult, since they need to learn to deal appropriately with a very broad range of mixtures of "high" and "low" languages. This is true to some extent in any language, but the range of diglossia in "Arabic" appears to be significantly greater than in most other modern situations. You need to imagine a situation in which "Latin" is used to refer not only to classical and patristic Latin, but also to the spoken versions French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (with none of them having any standard written form).

And the longer usage anecdotes, quoted in Language Log but from a World Bank-hosted pdf:

Hela is a sixth-grade primary school student living in Tunis. She spends her summers in Nabeul with her grandmother. Her two best friends there are Hiba and Meriem. Hiba lives in Nabeul all year round and is the same age as Hela. Meriem is a year older and lives in La Marsa during the school year. Hela goes to a private school where she started French and Arabic at the same time. She has more than 20 hours of classes in Arabic and about 10 hours in French a week. All the subjects other than French, such as Math and Biology, are taught in Fusha. Sometimes the teacher explains things in Arbi, but the students often have to speak in Fusha. Hela does not like Fusha as much as Arbi, it feels too alien to her. She even likes French better than Fusha. Meriem’s classes are a lot like Hela’s. She prefers French and often uses French words when she’s speaking Arbi. She thinks it makes her sound cool, like an adult. Hiba, on the other hand, didn’t start French until the third grade. Even though she now has the same number of hours of each language as Hela does, she prefers Arabic (both fusha and Arbi) to French and reads more Arabic books.

The three girls play together and watch television. Their favorite shows are Saoussen, which is in Fusha, and Les Schtroumfs, which is in French. Sometimes, when they play, they pretend to be the cartoon characters and try to sound like them. Hiba likes playing Saoussen best, because she doesn’t play well when they speak in French. Meriem prefers Les Schtroumfs because her Fusha is poor. They usually just speak Arbi together. After the summers over, Hela and Meriem go back to their homes. They decide to write each other letters over the school year. After the first day of school, Hela runs home to write letters to her friends. She starts to write a letter to Hiba, in Fusha, but feels that this is not a friendly letter. It feels more like homework. She thinks in Arbi, but cannot write what she means, and has to translate. Frustrated, she decides to write to Meriem first. She quickly realizes that her best bet is to write in French, but still struggles with finding the right words to say what she means. Finally, she settles on using Arbi words that she approximates phonetically and finishes one letter. For Hibas letter, though, its harder for her to do this with Fusha, so she just writes a very short letter and writes some words in French. These solutions work, but leave her feeling unsatisfied. She feels closer to Meriem because she can communicate with her better. She rapidly loses interest in writing to Hiba, though.

Hela's cousin, Farah, grew up in Saudi Arabia. She is the same age as Hela and is in the fourth grade. Farah only speaks Saudi Arabic, Fusha, and English, which she studies at school. She feels that Fusha is strange and silly. Nobody really speaks it there either. When Farah and Hela get together, they can only speak a mixture of their dialect with Fusha. It is very strange for both of them. They hardly ever write each other letters, because they’d have to do it in Fusha, which neither feels comfortable with. Farah feels resentment towards Fusha and reads even less. She doesn’t like music in Arabic as much as English or French music and only reads in Arabic if it is mandatory. Her French continues to improve and her Fusha remains poor. This does not bother her though, because she knows that once she gets to secondary school, Fusha would be much less important and if she wants to be a doctor when she grows up, she will only need French.

Power, Justice, Love, Dinner

2007-06-23T15:17:00.000-07:00

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting that which stands against love.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

It is as though [David, the psalm's writer] would say, "The Lord indeed makes a most unusual warrior of me and arms me quite wonderfully against my enemies. I thought that He would have put armor on me, placed a helmet on my head, put a sword into my hand, and warned me to be cautious and give careful attention to the business at hand lest I be surprised by my enemies. But instead He places me at a table and prepares a splendid meal for me, annoints my head with precious balm or (after the fashion of my country) puts a wreath on my head as if, instead of going out to do battle, I were on my way to a party or a dance. And so that I may not want anything now, He fills my cup to overflowing so that at once I may drink, be happy and of good cheer, and get drunk. The prepared table, accordingly, is my armor, the precious balm my helmet, the overflowing cup my sword; and with these I shall conquer all my enemies." But is that not a wonderful armor and an even more wonderful victory?

—Martin Luther, "Psalm 23, Expounded One Evening After Grace at the Dinner Table" (1536)

Nashville, New Orleans, Kingston

2007-06-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to pass on this tidbit to music-loving friends for a while: It's a 1997 radio interview with Keith Richards (with Liza Richardson on KCRW), promoting his Rastafarian drum and chant project "Wingless Angels".

Commenting on reggae music's multiple roots, Keith notes that, back in the formative days, in Jamaica they could just recieve the high-power radio transmissions from two U.S. cities: Nashville and New Orleans. Keith posits that reggae fused those influences: the back-beat of New Orleans funk becoming the reggae off-beat rhythm (I'm sure I'm muddling the rhythmic terms here), and the melodic approach of country-western informing the singing.

Not being as knowledgable about things reggae as some, I'll leave it as a fascinating fable (maybe mostly true) of cross-cultural pollination.

One Big Boxy Multicolored Metaphor

2007-06-19T15:57:00.001-07:00

My friend Koranteng had a wonderful blog post a few weeks back about the woven-plastic bags, generally plaid, known the world over by various names but in Anglophone West Africa as the "Ghana-Must-Go". I'd seen them too on African buses, and if they had a name in my mind it was probably "South African Street Merchant Bags". A column on the Daily Telegraph points out that, as with just about everything these days, most of the bags are made in China. Koranteng, meanwhile, points out that, apart from that China fact, many of the better details in the Telegraph's column were lifted, without attribution, from his own inital essay.

I, meanwhile, will do my own lifting: Koranteng's photo of a woman dragging her own Ghana-Must-Go through a bus terminal reminded me of the cover image from this month's Atlantic Monthly, an image of a cargo terminal in southern China, stacked with shipping containers. Interesting how both in form and coloration the containers echo the bag, how they're both emblematic of trade and transit, to and from the world's far corners—the one touchingly (or maddeningly) personal and individual, the other anonymously corporate.

(Something to look into: what do those different container colors signify? Are they chosen by container-manufaturer? Shipper? Do they have any relation to what's inside?)

Re:Rereading. Also, Men in Boats Asleep

2007-06-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

PATRICIA: Have you ever slept on a boat before?
JOE: No.
PATRICIA: It really affects your dreams. I look forward to it. Even though, sometimes, the dreams really shake me up. Okay. Good night.
JOE: Good night.

—John Patrick Shanley, Joe Versus the Volcano

A few days ago I finished rereading the Odyssey—I think this was the third time to completion. Among other things it brought back to mind a question I've asked myself before, whether it's better to read three great books once or one great book three times (or, indeed, whether they amount to somewhat the same thing). In the past year or so I've fallen out of the habit of having one of the 6–8 books I'm working through at a given time (not counting the Bible and Book of Common Prayer) be a reread. New ground is always so tempting, but I think it's a good discipline. But did I start a new-oldie after the Odyssey? Not yet anyway.

One detail of Homer's plot that I was especially thrilled to rediscover is that Odysseus, the great wide-awake sefarer, sleeps through the whole of his final homeward voyage. The crew that's bringing him back to Ithaca carries him and his parting gifts ashore so he wakes on dry land. There's something very moving about that image, and its other ancient parallels: Jonah asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed ship that's (trying) to take him away from Ninevah and God's calling; and Jesus, asleep in the bow of a similarly wind-vexed boat on the Sea of Galilee, right before his disciples woke him up and he calmed the storm. Three great wanderers, asleep at the wheel.

Urdu Desktop Publishing

2007-06-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

The ever-stellar Language Hat linked to this refutation of a recently circulated story about the last hand-lettered newspaper in the world, an Urdu paper published in Chennai, India. Not so, says Iqag Notes:

The vast majority of “printed” Urdu works are hand written. That includes books, newspapers, magazines, posters, and so on. It’s true that there is at the moment an incredibly fast pace of change towards computerization amongst the major newspapers, and a slower pace for books, but this has been only over the last five years. In fact, one of the only things which are almost always computer composed are wedding invitations, because it’s cost effective for these small batches, and because the consumer bears the higher labor costs of DTP vs. caligraphy.

After which follows a fascinating history of efforts to render Urdu script in printed form - old-school typography, lithography (making a facsimile of a hand-lettered page), and desktop publishing.

Lithography was easier and cheaper than block type, and there was no particular reason to look back. That is, until the invention of computers and the various stages of mechanical and computerized typesetting. Still, developing the algorithm for proper rendering of nasta`liq was just not attracting the necessary investment. One factor may have been the fact that those kids from Urdu speaking families who went into computers in India - and even, to some extent Pakistan - were those least likely to be able to read Urdu. Even now, if you are Muslim and go to an English medium school, you take Arabic as your second language, and if you go to an Urdu medium school, the chances of you pursuing engineering are slim.

There's also a fascinating digression about printing the Qur'an:

As for the Qur’an, a trained Urdu calligrapher would be completely unqualified for that. Qur’an’s are written by teams of huffaz (people who’ve memorized the Qur’an) trained in Qur’anic calligraphy. They are repeatedly checked and certified by government bodies in multiple countries. Generally speaking, a publisher who prints a Qur’an with an error of a single diacritical mark can expect to be held responsible for recall and destruction of the entire issue. 95% of the Qur’ans you’ll run across in South Asia are reprints (mostly unauthorized) of the Taj Company edition of the 1930s. These are resized and recut to fit different editions. I watched someone spend two years cutting and pasting by hand to produce a new, large print multi-lingual interlinear edition which he hoped would become a marketplace sensation. Essentially, there are two visual styles in Qur’ans today, the Taj version, and that handed out by the Saudis. Everything else is a rarity. Many South Asians have trouble reading the Saudi version as it lacks visual cues they grew up with.

And this intriguing parenthetical:

(You must realize that most of the non-English publishing in India is done at the expense of the author or the author’s friends or students or disciples. This actually leads to very vibrant literary scenes about which people actually care quite a bit.)

Now let's see if I can do some script-comparisons—admittedly risky for scripts I can't read. Here's a headline from The Siasat Daily, rendered as a jpg with InPage's DTP software:

And here's an Urdu headline from BBC Urdu, which uses a Unicode font—it doesn't mimic the calligraphy as well—it's flatter, like standard Arabic type, but it's searchable:

سفر فیصل آباد، چیف جسٹس کا بھرپور استقبال

I'd like to find an image of a contemprary handwritten Urdu news article, but haven't figured out how to locate one yet.

Maiores Comediantes

2007-06-14T13:22:00.001-07:00

I'd known about the French affection for Jerry Lewis, but evidently it extends to Brazil as well—as this cartoon, from the front page of the always-lovely Folha de S. Paulo from about a week ago. I clipped it from the pdf at newseum, and just now looked at the article it referenced: Brazilian editors rate the national and international comedians. Chaplin heads up most of the lists; Keaton figures most of the time. But a couple, including the editor of the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone, put Jerry on top.

I watched my first Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis feature this past weekend: Living it Up. I have to say that it didn't do much to raise Lewis' comedic star in my opinion. Maybe the annoying nasal vocalizations just come out better in French or Portuguese. Or, come to think of it, maybe he's been dubbed. (I tried watching one of the dance sequences with the volume turned off, and it was definitely easier to focus on Lewis' undeniable skill). Then last night my mom and I finished watching an old Keaton silent feature, College, which was a delight, but less so than your average Chaplin.

Youtube: Brazilian comedians Mazzaropi, Ankito, Grande Otelo; and also Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis.

On M.I.A.

2007-06-12T15:07:00.000-07:00

M.I.A., "Bird Flu"

M.I.A., "Boyz"

I heard second second track yesterday on KCRW ... a preview of M.I.A.'s sophomore album, due out later on. As usual, the UK/Sri Lankan rapper (um, chanter?) is up to her in-your-face, low-resolution tricks. But musically I find it a lot more interesting than a lot of the stultifyingly repetitive dancehall-beat stuff I've heard (largely reggaetón but not exclusively) over the past few years. Beyond that, there's the M.I.A. aura, aggressively transcultural, sort of an anti-Peter-Gabriel. And the lyrics are, for a get-on-the-floor dance song, a tremendous celebration-cum-feminist-critique of rowdy masculinity and its geopolitical consequences.

One thing that comes up for me, perhaps irrelevantly, is the sticky authenticity question. On the one hand, as Sasha Frere-Jones's New Yorker review of her debut album put it, she's giving voice to the third-world street (and its first-world urban echoes), delivering music "from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot". (it's a great line by Frere-Jones, but I don't know how much M.I.A. herself talks about trying to be or not to be anybody's version of an authentic voice).

But M.I.A.'s whole approach, from music to videos to her artwork and anti-fashion attire (like a can't-stop-looking-at-it 1980s nightmare, with giant Reebok logos spraypainted on in a sort of piracy of piracy itself), is extremely canny, intellectual, and in ways more first-worldly than third-. Which is what lifts it over the bar and onto KCRW or into the New Yorker, where someone like me hears it and likes it—or at least can't stop listening—and feels a bit more authentic, hip in the way that certain NGOs are hip, for doing so ("pull up tha PEE-ple, pull up the Poor").

Le Bac

2007-06-12T13:11:00.000-07:00

France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast has been doing their annual in-depth coverage of le Bac, the graduation exams that French secondary students take before (and to qualify for) moving to university or various skilled vocations. There seem to be about as many bacs as there are, say, college majors—tests in construction or wetlands management or cooking as well as the sciences, math, psychology, etc. The tests are spread out over a week or two, which makes for lots of coverage of students preparing (preferred shot: group of students lounging on the lawn like so many high school seniors, but boning up on their last-minute Sartre).

The odd thing to me is the level of scuriny the exam gets every year on the news. It seems comparable to what my friends and I gave when we were taking the SATs—chatting about possible questions, quizzing each other about how we did after it's over. But then again, we were the ones directly involved. With the bac, which has a much more centralized (c'est France after all), one-time-only nature, there's more of the sense of a rite of passage.

Yesterday was the philosophy bac, which I think is one of the media's favorites. Students have to write essays on topics like "can there be happiness" ... so every year France 2 gets a bunch of real philosophers to take the test along with the students, and then compares their answers ("the pursuit of happiness is problematic and ends in futility"). Imagine if we in the US had our public intellectuals all write SAT essays every year to lead on the nightly news (and in a legislative election week)!

Here are some video clips from yesterday's mid-day news. The evening one had the actual questions but I can't find it:

Le bac démarre avec l'épreuve de philosophie ( JT 12/13 - 11/06/2007 )
Cinq écrivains et l'épreuve philo du bac ( JT13h - 11/06/2007 )

Last Night. True Story.

2007-06-11T14:13:00.000-07:00

In the dream I was driving. Down the road. In the car. And next to me ... was Ira Glass.

Not bad, I hope, for a first attempt at audio embedding (gracias a the Internet Archive and OdeoStudio). Well actually, second. The first attempt didn't record the voiceover at all. A third attempt might have done something about the audio levels, but that's enough going on for one day.

Also in hindsight the comments I make about television doubtless owe an arm and a leg to Rob Long's wonderful weekly Martini Shot commentaries on KCRW, most recently and specifically this one.

Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

2007-06-10T13:03:00.000-07:00

For the past few years I've had a sheaf of memory-poems kept by my dresser; I'll read/recite one every morning while I'm getting ready, sticking with each one till it's memorized. Here's one from a long time back (and coming late in the season—just a week and a half before the solstice):

SPRING

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

[via Bartleby.com]

I'm hoping to include these memory-poems from time to time in the new nblinks incarnation. I probably should look around to see the exact legality of quoting full poems before I start busting out the Czeslaw Milosz or Seamus Heaney.

Wonder Bread and the Mountaintop

2007-06-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks I've been reading a collection of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches, essays, sermons, books, and other writings. Obviously, plenty of inspring and moving stuff (what else did I expect?) — and also, given the nature of public speaking, a lot of repetition. It's a delight seeing phrases and pieces from the "I Have a Dream" speech popping up years ahead of time.

One thing that's surpised me is the extent to which MLK quotes from white intellectuals—James Russel Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Paul Tillich, Victor Hugo. I'm not sure if I can recall him quoting Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, or Booker T. Washington. I wonder if this was because of philosophical differences with those African-American luminaries, or more that he consciously needed, in speaking to the majority culture, to win their trust by referencing majority figures?

I did have a kind of amusing surprise as I read the text of King's final, deeply prophetic "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech—delivered the night before his assasination. I was familiar with the moving, slightly eerie climax, which is in the video clip above. But earlier on in the speech, he's sort of rambling along about the latest boycott the SCLC is supporting:

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain.

For me those two elements—Jesse Jackson and Wonder Bread were this strange, almost jarring intrusion of the present-day into an iconic American speech.

(I had a similar bit of cognitive dissonance when I first saw, last year, footage of Bob Dylan singing at the March on Washington. It was as if they'd taken the familar film of King's speech—those guys in the white hats standing behind, etc.—and Zelig'd the pop icon into the scene.)

Tunisian Nights

2007-06-09T13:27:00.000-07:00

This week I watched the movie, which among its other highlights features this priceless blurb on the DVD cover:

"A Tunisian answer to DIRTY DANCING!"
— Stephen Holden, THE NEW YORK TIMES

I wasn't aware that Dirty Dancing had particularly addressed a question to Tunisia, but evidently Satin Rouge is the first and foremost response.

The IMDB summary contains a nice whilst:

After the death of her husband, Lilia's life revolves solely around her teenage daughter, Salma. Whilst looking for Salma late one night, Lilia stumbles upon a belly dance cabaret and though initially reserved and taken aback by the culture of the place, Lilia gets consistently drawn back to it. She befriends one of the belly dancers and is encouraged into dancing for the audience. Lilia also starts a romance with one of the cabaret's musicians, who unbeknown to both of them, is also romancing Salma.

I haven't seen Dirty Dancing so I can't tell whether Satin Rouge covers all the bases. It's definitely more risque/rebellious than, say, Strictly Ballroom. And the mother-daughter romance twist, especially at the end, felt a little like a French version of Monsoon Wedding: beautiful, witty, but more than a little creepy.

From director Raja Amari's bio info, I glean that she studied belly dancing at Tunis's top conservatory, but had never witnessed it in the cabaret context till she started work on Satin Rouge. So the forbidden aspect was not the type of dance, but the venue, which I found interesting.

I'll also note that it's the sole Tunisian film that my library system has, excluding stuff like Patton or Humphrey Bogart's 1943 vehicle (literally—it's a tank!) Sahara.

Back in Grey

2007-06-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

At a friend's urging, I've decided to give this a restart, after a two year absence. We'll see how long it lasts, but the goal is to hit a stride that's a little more formal than the fragments of yesteryear, but still slightly casual and anonymous—if you know me, you know me, but if not, hopefully there'll still be lots of interest to the interested reader. But enough with the meta-statements. On to the fascinating.

untitled

2005-04-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading "The Intuitionist", by Colson Whitehead, a strange but ultimately winning novel about race and intrigue amongst elevator inspectors. This choice was itself inspired by some great lectures and readings I found online with Harvard's Du Bois Institute -- discussions with contemporary black writers, as well as great lectures on anthropology, sociology, etc.

Also, without quite meaning to, I've started learning a bit of French. What happened was I became a fan of the "Journal de France" newscast they used to run with English subtitles on cable. But now that's off the air, and so I have/get to web-stream it from the source -- thus I'm finding I need to pick up a bit more vocab to have it make any sense.

3/5 Upload

2005-03-05T13:23:00.000-08:00

Photo of the pseudo-stream in our backyard (can't even see the plastic this way); and a self-portrait in the storm sewer out front.

untitled

2005-02-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

[email fragment]

Excellent with the accordion and all. [...] Due to my preadolescent enthusiasm for Weird Al Yankovic, I've long had a soft spot for that most huggable of instruments. Which probably goes at least part way to explaining the disproportionate zydeco representation in my current music library. Not to mention the place of Paul Simon's "Graceland" near the top of the all-time-favorite-albums pile -- with its brilliant mixing the accordions of Soweto, Louisiana, and East L.A.

[...]

Books I've been reading: Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter, about John Brown's family; a collection of short stories by gen-x Spanish-language authors. [Se habla espan~ol: voces latinas en USA] Como se dice epiphany? Not sure, not that I'm good enough to recognize them when they pop up. And I think I'm going to try a Nobel laureate a month for 2005 -- Mr. January has been the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert (depending on how you count he's my second-favorite Slavic poet, or my least-favorite, the one other being Old Man Milosz, RIP [not true -- you forgot Zbigniew Herbert, and one or two more -- ed.]). Mr. Feb will be Kenzaburo Oe, the Japanese novelist.

2005-02-04T15:12:00.001-08:00

A couple of auto-timed self-portraits on the park bench across the street from my house. I worry this might be a violation of the pseudo-anonymity of this blog. But at least there are still the sunglasses.

2005-02-04T15:11:00.000-08:00

Right now my morning walks have the sun at such a height that, when the clouds break and the pavement's wet, all sorts of great reflections result. I took these a couple of weeks ago.

fog photos

2005-01-27T13:29:00.000-08:00

Fog and spiderwebs from my 5min. walk a few mornings back.

Boston, PA

2005-01-26T13:13:00.000-08:00

Digital camera for Christmas + finally figuring out flickr's online photo stuff = images, maybe. We'll start with the above, a (literal) screenshot from last Sunday night's Journal de France newscast. The story was about major US cities affected by the recent blizzard. Two for three ain't bad.

2005-01-17T13:17:00.001-08:00

The uncritical enthusiasm of the European intellectual for tribal culture appears in the exclamation of the architect Le Corbusier on first seeing Manhattan: "It is hot-jazz in stone." It appears again in the artist Moholy-Nagy's account of his visit to a San Francisco night club in 1940. A Negro band was playing with zest and laughter. Suddenly a player intoned, "One million and three," and was answered: "One million and seven and a half." Then another sang, "Eleven," and another, "Twenty-one." Then amidst "happy laughter and shrill singing the numbers took over the place."

Moholy-Nagy notes how, to Europeans, America seems to be the land of abstractions, where numbers have taken on an existence of their own in phrases like "57 Varieties," "the 5 and 10," or "7 Up" and "behind the 8-ball." It figures. Perhaps this is a kind of echo of an industrial culture that depends heavily on prices, charts, and figures.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

2005-01-08T13:07:00.000-08:00

NY Times: Is Alaska's Only Elephant Happy? Some say that Maggie should be moved from the Alaska Zoo to a warmer climate where she could get more outdoor exercise. Zoo officials have responded with plans to build her a treadmill.

2005-01-05T13:05:00.000-08:00

LA Times: TAIPEI, Taiwan — The radio show called "Special Communications" was an unlikely hit, given that it consisted of announcers reading strings of numbers for 15 minutes.
Taiwan used the mind-numbing program in the 1980s to send coded messages to its spies in mainland China. But like many Taiwanese propaganda broadcasts, it could also be picked up locally. To the surprise of many at the government-run Radio Taiwan International, the show soon developed a cult following among Taiwanese. [full story]

2004-12-25T13:20:00.000-08:00

Radio Australia: Cricket Australia is pushing ahead with its new Long Live Cricket media campaign aimed at promoting the game and highlighting its role in Australian culture. The TV ads are also running in a number of cricket mad countries - including India - not that such countries need to be reminded of Australia's dominance of the sport. Australia demolished Pakistan during the first international test in Perth last weekend - the win only fuelling ongoing debate about whether its deadly grip was good for the sport.

2004-12-24T13:19:00.000-08:00

A stocking-stuffer from the NY Times -- an article about the growing specialized textile super-cities in southern China, including Datang, producer of one-third of the world's socks!. Add to it the fact that the word "socks" is inherently funny once it appears more than once per paragraph, and you get wonderful quotes and captions like: Each year, the town is decorated with balloons and flags for the annual sock fair. Banners promoting socks are draped across buildings.

2004-12-21T13:22:00.000-08:00

NY Times on the anglicization of German advertising. Hallo, Denglish:

A private company in Hanover, Satelliten Media Design, in conjunction with Hanover University, keeps track of one key aspect of the entire mixed language phenomenon, annually tabulating the 100 words most used in German advertising. In the 1980's, only one English word made the list. The word, a bit improbably, was "fit." By 2004, there were 23 English words on the chart.

The first four words are still German - wir (meaning we), Sie (you), mehr (more) and Leben (life). In fifth place is the English "your," followed farther down the list by world, life, business, with, power, people, better, more, solutions and 13 more.

2004-12-20T13:25:00.000-08:00

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: A war may be about to break out on the streets of the Pacific, although this time it has nothing to do with gangs, coups and disaffected army generals. An Australian restaurant chain serving up one of the western world's most popular fast-foods, pizza, hit the region this month. And with the promise of an authentic, mouth-watering cheesy topping served on a thick, doughy base, the restaurant's backers say they're ready to start a revolution. But traditional Pacific pizza purveyors say a home-grown secret weapon, referred to simply as the "Bombay", will help them fend off the Aussie upstarts.

2004-12-20T13:24:00.000-08:00

[email fragment] A few weeks back I heard a live session with Allison Krauss and Union Station that I thought you'd enjoy. The music's super-tight, the interview portions vaguely muppet-like.

2004-12-16T13:29:00.000-08:00

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: In Guam, Santa was grounded at Anderson Airforce base due to bad weather. Yes, Santa Claus ! And while it is the season to be jolly it's also monsoon season across the region with tropical storm Talas making an impression around Guam. So much so the storm made the US Airforce in Guam cancel this year's 52nd annual Christmas drop of presents across Micronesia.

2004-12-16T13:27:00.000-08:00

The latest in the "My Poet Had a Day Job!" series:
Poems, Bombs, and the Road to Baghdad

[via aldaily]

2004-12-15T13:06:00.000-08:00

[email fragment] Speaking of Japanese pop, have you ever heard the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra? They had a live session at KCRW a few months back that was a lot of fun. Their lead guitarist plays a Telecaster that is the electric guitar of my dreams. audio/video

2004-12-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

NY Times on the Catholic Worker and their quaintly radical -- or is it radically quaint -- protest tactics and all around good work. Dorothy Day would be proud.

"The interesting thing about doing silent marches in New York City is it leaves things open to reaction," Mr. Daloisio said. "When you march and yell, people make up their minds fast. When you have a long line of people walking silently it gives people an opportunity to look and think.

2004-12-12T13:31:00.000-08:00

[email fragment] I've been watching more this year than last year -- turns out we get a few commercial free movie channels along with the soccer. There was a glut for a couple months, but I realized that watching more than one or two a week wound up stressing me out: both the worrying about Is the VCR programmed right? and, more, just immersing myself in plot after new plot. Lately I stick with soccer, foreign-language news, Everybody Loves Raymond, and a triumverate of "old-seeming teens and young-seeming adults" dramas: Gilmore Girls, Joan of Arcadia, and The O.C.

But on Sunday nights the classic movies channel runs old silent films, which I like a lot, what with their being silent and all.

Faves of the past year: Tortilla Soup (Mexican-American remake of Eat Drink Man Woman); About a Boy; The Outlaw Josey Wales (becoming quite a Clint Eastwood buff); A Nun's Story; Bringing Up Baby; Langaan: Once Upon a Time in India (Hindi film about a hilariously epic colonial cricket match); The Milky Way (sound pic with silent comedy star Harold Lloyd).

2004-12-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

Lost tribe leaves the jungle for brave new world of mobiles