Saturday, January 06, 2018
Friday, January 05, 2018
FRIDAY MUSIC: An Orthodox Christmas, by JD
As we come to the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas and the Orthodox Churches prepare to celebrate their Christmas Day it seems appropriate to join them with some of their traditional Christmas music -
On The Eleventh Day Of Christmas
JD adds:
It is a tradition in Spain to have a procession on the evening of 5th January of the arrival of the three wise men, the Cabalgate de los Reyes Magos:
https://www.enforex.com/culture/reyes-magos.html
Thursday, January 04, 2018
Potholes: a lesson never learned
Potholes are a popular item for discussion
around this time of the year: the first hard frosts and persistent rain bring about
an explosion of these obstacles on our roads with a regularity that is now an
acceptable fact of life.
A twenty mile journey on a local A road that
I had to make in pretty awful conditions highlighted the true state of potholes
in this area and I suspect everywhere else. Constant neglect of our road system
and the temporary repair ideology that all councils adopt in the name of cut
backs has left the road I traveled on looking in large parts like a cross
between the Nairobi – Mombasa highway - anyone who has traveled on that will
know what I mean - and no-man's-land in the Somme. The endlessly refilled potholes had as one
succumbed to the cold and wet and scattered their collective innards all over
the highway leaving an assortment of craters to be avoided.
This annual farce forced upon the populace
by hand-wringing local government officials as an inevitable consequence of “cuts” is, as has been pointed out by those
who really know about such things, nothing more than money down the drain, as the
temporary repairs last for ever shorter spans. We have one
at a small road junction nearby that has been filled three times this year
alone, showing the cost of the short-sighted approach to this and all the other
infrastructure defects in this country.
A good resurfacing will last without further maintenance for a predictable time if the work has been properly carried out, and so the costs can be reliably approximated. Continually employing people to fill ever more potholes is a
waste of taxpayers' money as eventually the road will have to be resurfaced at
greater cost than originally due to excess damage, and the refilling money has
to be added to that.
Anybody coming back from a continental trip
can see the disparity between our road infrastructure and that
abroad and the gap in the quality is growing apace, year by year .
I suspect the government is fully aware of
the problem but successive governments
have failed to do anything meaningful about it and now the cost has
reached a prohibitive level, such is the problem unless toll roads are introduced (and they are not coming anytime soon, but will come as necessity demands.) No political party wants to be
“unpopular”- which is rather funny considering none of them are popular - and they will kick the can down the road as long as possible, until perhaps another
party has to deal with it as they do with everything else.
In Africa you get enterprising men who stand
by the badly potholed roads with a large pile of gravel, and if you give them a
small amount of cash they will fill a few holes; perhaps a cottage industry on
those lines could be started up here !
If the trend in neglect continues will we
all have to fit monster truck tyres to our family cars in order to navigate the
ever increasing number and size of these craters? Will the I-Spy books make a
come back with "I-Spy the biggest pothole"? Will they become part of our
national heritage and demand national treasure status, perhaps even an AA * star
grading? All is possible, for certainly they are not going away.
_________________________________________
Sackerson comments:
Wednesday, January 03, 2018
Tuesday, January 02, 2018
The art of Rita Loureiro
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| "Boi vento" (Ox wind), by Rita Loureiro Image source: http://animaelibri.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/arte-rita-loureiro.html |
There is a mysterious illustration on the cover of the 1984 English translation of Mário de Andrade's book "Macunaíma" (1928):
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Image source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1099648.Macuna_ma |
The artwork is by Rita Loureiro (not to be confused with the Brazilian actress of the same name).
What struck me is the alien feeling of it. It does not look to me like what a European artist might do, and one senses some informed, intuitive connection with the weird subject.
It's not easy to find much about Loureiro on the Web, at least not in English, but this site gives a few biographical details: http://animaelibri.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/arte-rita-loureiro.html.
According to this, she was born in 1952 in the old rubber plantation town of Manaus, a city in the heart of the Brazilian rainforest (Amazonas Region). [Manaus may ring a bell with you: it's where an Irish fortune-seeker carried a steamship over the mountains, as in the film "Fitzcarraldo."] Loureiro moved to Rio de Janeiro to begin her career as an artist but (if I understand correctly) returned to the rainforest region to develop her art and understanding of the aboriginals/first peoples.
It seems she produced a number of illustrations for "Macunaíma", which don't appear in the English translation and as yet I haven't established exactly which edition (this limited edition from 1984? or this?) of this seminal Brazilian work does contain them, though here are a couple:
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| Image source: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/119978777556191067/ |
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| http://nabc.org.br/arquivo/nabcIII63/loureiro.jpg |
There is more of her work to be found here, at the Itaú Cultural centre in São Paulo:
http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa1387/rita-loureiro
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| Desfoliante Naranja (1983) [Orange defoliant] Image citation |
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| Boi Floresta (1982) [Ox Forest] Image citation |
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| A Dança da Morte (1989) [The dance of Death] Image citation |
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| Carta Pras Icamabias (1981) [Letter to the Amazons - illustration for "Macunaíma"] Image citation |
To me, it seems that an overarching theme or approach is seeing humans in a context full of meaning, whether social, natural or cultural-religious-magical, a turning away from the modern "homeless mind" and entirely in keeping with Andrade's disgusted view of São Paulo as seen through Macunaíma's forest-bred eyes.
This photo of Pinacoteca do Estado is courtesy of TripAdvisor
See reviews (2015 - 2017) of the gallery in Manaus here:
That's not to make the savages into hygienised Walt Disney characters; one of Andrade's chapters describes a macumba rite involving nudity, unbridled sex and uninhibited violence against a female temporarily possessed by a demon so that Macunaíma can by proxy inflict his revenge on a rival. Macumba is an umbrella term for a group of religious-magical syntheses - local, African and Christian - see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Macumba.
The Galeria do Largo in her home town of Manaus has a web page on her from her 2006 exhibition there, which also lists some of her previous shows. One of these was "Boi Tema" (Ox Theme) in 1984 and after, turned into a book in 1987. The ox is celebrated in various ways across Brazil, in death-and-rebirth rituals known as the Bumba-meu-boi. A 2004 guide to Barcelona says that in Brazil, the celebration has its roots in nineteenth century cattle farming there, though of course the ox has ritual significance in many other places in the world; but the same guide refers to a Bantu festival centred around an ox named Geroa; I had thought that the Bantu were in South or South-West Africa but it seems they originated in the angle of west Africa by modern day Nigeria/Cameroon; so quite possibly one of the roots of Bumba-meu-boi springs from the cultural complex transmitted to South America via the West African slave trade.
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| O Boi, a Morte do Verde e a Represa (1984) [The ox, the death of the green land, and the dam] Image citation |
Like Andrade, then, Rita Loureiro's art is a transmission of the old world's voice to the new and rootless incomers.
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