March 23, 2022
The Inevitability Of Bushveld
I was going to quit playing Scrabble competitively. Then something utterly nuts happened. [It was bushveld. Bushveld happened. -ed]
"I appreciate the beauty, intricacy, and hard work"
Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto (Barbareño Chumash), "When I first met this remarkable basket, it was like meeting an old friend ... I was perplexed by the date 1711 ... [W]e concluded that Juana Basilia had copied the year from the coin she used for the design." In a unit on "Native American art after 1600," Khan Academy has a ~4 min. video on the same Coin Basket made by Juana Basilia Sitmelelene, ca. 1815-1822 [YouTube]. More recently, a different Chumash basket "... Returns to Chumash Land": "Are you sitting comfortably? We have a long story to tell you." Related: Kaitlin M. Brown, et al., on communities of practice in Chumash basket weaving [PDF]; and Yve Chavez on "Indigenizing Southern California Indian Basket Studies" and "Indigenous Artists, Ingenuity, and Resistance at the California Missions" [PDFs].
But was anyone really asking for an instrumental Black Flag record?
In 1987, SST Records released a double album, "No Age," a collection of punk-adjacent instrumental music. (Not everyone appreciated this.) [more inside]
She grew up in New York City. She can have any cake she wants.
Sunday March 20, 2022, This American Life. In the prologue to this week's episode "765/Off Course", Ira talks to Yibin, who grew up in China, in the Gobi Desert in the 1970s. Her dad was lucky to have a better than average job, as a musician (though the music was in service to government propaganda). He knew his daughter would have a hard life in their town of Jiuquan, so he was determined to make his daughter a violinist, in the hope of a better life. [more inside]
Madeleine Albright, first female US Secretary of State, has died
(Reuters) Madeleine Albright, who fled the Nazis as a child in her native Czechoslovakia during World War Two then rose to become the first female U.S. secretary of state and, in her later years, a pop culture feminist icon, died on Wednesday at the age of 84.
In Iran, a florist turned her living room into a flower shop.
Revisiting Work From Home. In March of 2021, Rest of World profiled nine workers. Now that we're in 2022, how do they describe the past year? "I have noticed that people celebrate even harder these days, perhaps because they are still here after the pandemic, and the ones that are still here want to celebrate life."
The Crazy Story of Behind Eric Prydez' "Call on Me"
"Eric Prydz’ music career received a massive boost after he released the #1 UK hit ‘Call On Me” based on a sample from a Steve Winwood track. Thanks to YouTuber HowardHandsTV, he has told the story of house originally Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk fame and DJ Falcon 2 years earlier were playing in their club sets the famous sample over beats mainly as a dj tool." Thomas Bangalter & DJ Falcon - Call On Me and the original, Steve Winwood - Valerie, and finally Eric Prydz – Call On Me.
The Little Grey Wolf Returns
The 30-minute Russian animated film Tale of Tales has been more than once voted the greatest animated film of all time. Here it is with English subtitles, though they are not needed. The film is structured like a memory, and depicts war, love and dancing. One review site states "It is without precedent in cinema - maybe in all of art, because although it borrows heavily from literature and poetry, it does so in a final form that does not to any real extent resemble those media." The animator Yuri Norstein (also mefi previously) has stated that the film is about "simple concepts that give you the strength to live"
« Previous day | Next day »