Ali Akbar Sadeghi-Zal and Simorgh

WIseman does it again

Saw Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary "Boxing Gym" last night and it reminded me of just what a national treasure he is. He manages to make documentaries that rely solely on brilliant editing and patient observance, no need for didactic narration, intrusive "mood" music, strategically arranged interviews, or mish-mash collages of stock footage. Documentaries are by far my favorite form of film, and Wiseman has been the quiet master for the better part of half a century. I love Ophuls, but he makes himself part of the story, (much like his avowed disciple Michael Moore). I remain spellbound by Errol Morris, but after "The Thin Blue Line" he felt the need to rely on the ultra-stylized approach.
Wiseman should be as well known as the Maysles Brothers but he has chosen to remain largely in the shadows, continually making sublime portraits of everyday life in America, sometimes disturbing, sometimes humorous, but always searingly honest.

Women in Iran

My friend Maxime uploaded this interesting video on women in Iran, obviously pre 1979. Wish I could understand!

Cymatics

Been away for awhile. Not really hibernating but not spending a lot of time on the computer. What better way to come back to the forum than with these films demonstrating the magic of sound?

Beirut

whoops apocalypse (part 3)

I hope that if there winds up being only three people left on Earth they start a band.

BBC doc on the "alchemists of sound"

WOW! From 2003. I am only posting the first segment here but I can't wait to watch all of them...

New Realities

I am not going to pretend that I was able to digest all of this upon my first viewing but I am going to give it another try. My Father sent this to me the other day. It brings together some of my favorite topics: ancient history, linguistics, extra terrestrial life, and metaphysics.

R.D. Laing-The Lighter Side

"Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.s if possible.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful."

Shatner does Esperanto

The 1961 sci-fi film "Incubus" is the only movie I know of to be shot entirely in Esperanto. At the very least, it is the only Esperanto language flick that William Shatner ever did.

Lingua Ignota

On tour, I just had the privilege of some much needed reading time and I was able to breeze through Arika Okrent's highly entertaining "In the Land of Invented Languages". She spends long chapters on the curiously durable Esperanto, the bizarre but beautiful Blissymbolics, and the befuddling Loglan.
The first "invented" language though, was the work of Hildegard of Bingen, the noted Medieval Christian mystic. Meaning "Unknown Language" in Latin, Hildegard devised a vocabulary of about 1000 words, and a corresponding unique orthography of her own invention. With terms like "phazur" (grandfather) and "scirizin" (son), the language almost appears to be a mixture of Latin and German with a bit of Basque.
There has been speculation as to the possibility that Hildegard had designed the language for Utopian purposes, much as 19th century language inventors such as Esperanto's Zamenhof. But the stronger likelihood is that she intended it to be a sort of secret language, perhaps for divine communication.

Ma'Aloula

This picturesque village, a little over an hour's drive from Damascus, is one of the last villages on earth where Aramaic is spoken. While not a dead language per se, Aramaic is largely a liturgical tongue used by Arab Christians, although at the time of Christ it was the lingua franca of much of the Levant. The convent holds the remains of the early Christian saint Thecla, who was a contemporary of Paul.

Somali Vintage pop part 2

Love the drummer's Vistalite set....

Big Brother's Theme Park

The October War museum and memorial, commemorating Syria and Israel's 1973 conflict (known in our circles as the Yom Kippur War), is a remarkable edifice of zero-context propaganda and kitsch brilliance. As befitting its stylistic dissonance, at least in comparison to the old quarter of Damascus, the memorial is pushed out to the fringes of the city. Paid for largely by the government of North Korea, the memorial boasts a series of mural paintings that are impressive in their scope and soulless in their composition, and the stern Soviet style sculptures that surround the building are much of the same. Most curious is the array of captured Israeli weaponry, simply arranged on the front lawn of the memorial like bizarre ornaments. Granted, most of the exhibits were in Arabic only, but the short film purporting to tell the story of the 1973 war was so transparent in its ideological agenda that even I could have driven a tank through it, American or Soviet made. Traveling in Vietnam I had noticed a lot of the same thing when it came to museums. When you don't have free speech and you are brought up with only a steady diet of approved propaganda, you are presented history in a way that must be comfortably digestible and simplistic. Of course, I am not sure American school children are off any better, but at least my high school history teacher didn't skip over the Trail of Tears or the Ludlow Massacre. I have my own issues with the question of Israel and the Palestinians, and I don't support any group that believes they are entitled by history or some deity to a given chunk of land. That said, I am amazed at how the old, tired dichotomy of the Arab vs Israeli is beaten into the minds of people in this part of the world. This museum presents the creation of the state of Israel much like a sudden but natural travesty, an earthquake or flood. The political complexities that led up to 1948, not to mention the Holocaust and the flood of refugees it produced, are never acknowledged in Arab propaganda, because if they were they would take a lot of teeth out of the anti-Israel side of the dialectic. If we choose to be more honest about our own histories, it's a lot harder to judge any one else's as harshly. And hopefully it would force us to be a little more empathetic. All of us have been refugees at one time or the other, and most of us have been oppressors as well.

Damascus: the Old City

Damascus is a city so ancient and fabled that I almost feel as if my observations are inadequate, though they are honest. This is a place whose streets have seen thousands of years of travelers, pilgrims, invaders, holy men, merchants, scholars, and writers of every stripe. Mark Twain remarked in "Innocents Abroad" that "No recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive news of it." I'm not sure that's quite the case, but in three days of prowling the alleys of marketplaces, juice sellers, daunting mosques and serenely undisturbed churches, it did feel as if history had left much of Damascus to its own devices. The pulse of the city seemed to propel a body at once very ancient and very timeless, something that had struck me throughout my Syrian travels. Part of it was the fact that politics were a forbidden topic, and the Hafez regime has silenced not just dissent but religious activism of all kinds. Still, this governmental repression gave an ironic amount of breathing room for a fragile yet very boisterous form of cultural pluralism. On my first evening, I enjoyed a strong coffee in the shadows of the imposing Ummayad Mosque, disappearing into the throngs of Shiite pilgrims as I wound my way back to my hotel. Then as night grew later, I found refuge in a small one room tavern run by a pair of Christian brothers, chain smoking cigarettes and opening tops on long bottles of beer. The pictures of Bashar Assad and his father were everywhere to be sure, but their very ubiquity rendered them almost powerless to me, the causal traveler. Rather than a sense of Orwellian surveillance, the constant reminder of the heavy hand of the Assads engendered no more emotional response in me than would a cavalcade of suburban corporate logos, be they Starbucks or McDonald's.

Whoops Apocalypse part 2

I urge everyone to see the new documentary "Countdown to Zero", which focuses on the continued danger of living in a world full of nuclear weapons. While I feel that there is little use in spending day and night worried about the possibilities of impending armageddon, it is useful to keep current geopolitical unrest (ie Iran, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea) in the context of the Nuclear Age. When one considers the list of nations that possess nuclear armaments, of which we are arguably the most prominent, a new perspective on the meaning of "rogue state" comes into focus. I don't foresee France nuking anyone in a hissyfit anytime soon, but the remaining nations on the list of the nuclear club (England, China, India, Pakistan, Russia, North Korea, and the United States) are anything but stabilizing global influences. Far from it. We are still the only nation that has used atomic weapons, and throughout the last half century the nuclear armed nations have held the rest of the world psychologically hostage with the terrible scenarios imaginable should their arsenals be employed.
Something that is touched on in chilling fashion halfway through the narrative of "Countdown to Zero" is a close call that occurred in 1995. A surveillance rocket fired into the atmosphere by American and Norwegian scientists was misconstrued by Russian radar as a first strike nuclear assault. Then Russian President Boris Yeltsin was thankfully not in a bad mood and/or drunk at the time, and even though he was in immediate communication with his military advisers, Yeltsin rightfully suspected the rocket in question was not an initial bellicose maneuver on the part of the United States.
The fact that a technical glitch could potentially trigger the end of the world is, I admit, darkly humorous. And as everything since "Strangelove" has proven, we might as well chuckle at the Apocalypse since we have very little control over who or what might launch it. So as I said, I am not losing any sleep over this stuff. But I am not going to ignore it either.

Liberty Cabbage

During World War One, there was a widespread movement in the United States to rebrand sauerkraut as "liberty cabbage", an attempt to shed German affectations from popular speech. This would of course be repeated some seven decades later in the course of the "Freedom Fry" affair. It's worth remembering, especially on 9/11, that propaganda can often begin as simply smug and arrogant, and very quickly proceed into bigotry.

Your moment of zen....

Peter Lang on Minnesota public television, mid seventies.

Brothers from another planet

My favorite group of Turkish siblings. Please tell me that the guitar player is rocking a double neck with a saz. If so, I would kill to know where to find one.

Dolly and Porter

Pretty hard to top this...

happy labor day

How lucky can one man get? Or to quote Cowboy Jack Clement, "When all else fails, get lucky."

God Willing and the Creek Don't Rise

There is a new documentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina by Spike Lee with this title, and I was curious as to the origin of this very very Southern phrase. I assumed, as do a lot of folks, that it was an archaic Southern reference in regards to flooding, perhaps one of those slogans that arose in response to the historic flooding of the Mississippi River in 1927.
The phrase in fact goes back quite a ways further; back to the days when the Creek Indian nation was a primary competitor to the impending hegemony of the oncoming Anglo-American invasion of the Southeast. It is an ironic case of semantic drift, and considering the relevance it has to our newly found forgotten, it is worth recalling its very disparate origins. I am humbly reprinting the following from Knol.....

If someone says, “God willing and the Creek don’t rise” they’re looking to achieve a goal. When they use this phrase, it means that they will achieve their goal as long as there are no outside forces of which they have no control preventing them from doing just that.



Origin:

The first time this phrase was known to be in print it was written by a man named Benjamin Hawkins in the late 18th century. Hawkins was a politician in the late 18th century and early 19th century as well as an Indian diplomat. This was back in the day where American Indians and the white settlers were constantly fighting for the land in the United States. While in the south, Hawkins was requested by the President of the United States to return to Washington. In his response, he was said to write, “God willing and the Creek don’t rise.”
Benjamin Hawkins capitalized the work “Creek”. Therefore, it is deduced that what he was referring to was not a body of water at all, but instead was the Creek Indian tribe. The Creek Indians were also known as the Muscogee tribe which were located in the southeastern region of the United States (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma). Since the Creek Indians were prevalent in the area where he was located, Hawkins knew that there was a great risk of the Creek Indians attacking.
This figure of speech is not only still used today, but the phrase is also in the lyrics of a 2008 song by the country music group Little Big Town. The song is called “Good Lord Willing” and the lyrics in the song say, “Good lord willing and the Creek don’t rise” instead of “God willing and the creek don’t rise”.

tony conrad-pythagoras in the park

Fascinating discussion from one of the twentieth century's boldest gurus of sound....

The Incomparable Eddie Lang

The Krak Des Chevaliers

This castle, built in the Syrian heartland by medieval Frankish Crusaders, was thought by T.E. Lawrence to be the finest castle still standing. It was he said, "the castle of my boyhood dreams." I couldn't agree more.

Aleppo's Old City, Part 2

It's hard for me to fathom that two months ago, I was traveling across southern Turkey on my way to the Syrian border. Then it was three days in Aleppo's old city, a maze of spice alleys, ancient churches, and forgotten history. This was the Middle East as it largely once was, Christians and Muslims coexisting and doing business together, signs in Arabic, Greek, and Armenian, church bells fighting for aural space with the muezzin's wail. And all of this intoxicating variety held together by the distant but firm hand of dictatorship, the Baathist rule of the Assads, which for half a century had held this vast country together. It was repression to be sure, but you were as likely to be put in jail for espousing radical Islamism as mentioning visits to "occupied Palestine", and it's sad to say that the most colorful and hospitable patchwork culture in the Levant is one with no traces of democracy. In fact, democracy would most likely put an end to the coexistence here, much as Syria's next door neighbor Iraq has learned the harsh way in recent years.
Politics in this part of the world are troubling, and so I chose to pretend that I was a wanderer in this city, discovering its charms in a time unnamed, a year unknown. So little has changed to the rhythm of this place in hundreds of years that you could pretend to be a traveler in a time less troubled, less uncertain. On my first evening, drinking local Armenian wine and eating the famed Aleppan dish of lamb kebab sauteed in a thick cherry sauce, I watched the sun retreat beneath the stones of the plaza, families milling about eating ice cream, European tourists crowding the cafes, no sign of the 21st century in sight. That was, save for the large tv in a nearby hotel bar blaring the World Cup match between England and Algeria.
Next, I moved southward, deeper into the heartland and further into the dream world of this strange land.

The Baron Hotel, Aleppo

The Baron Hotel in Aleppo was the famed terminal point of interest on the old Orient Express route. T. E. Lawrence stayed here, Agatha Christie began writing "Murder on the Orient Express" here, and in seventy something years, little has changed. The decor is wondrously faded, the antique maps and advertisements plaster the walls, and the hotel bar is apparently a must for first time visitors. I had a couple of glasses of arak and was impressed at Mr Lawrence's formidable bar tab, framed on the wall and pointed out to me with a bit of pride by the bartender. Aleppo is a time capsule for sure, but the Baron is a capsule within a capsule. Marvelous.