Τσαχπίν ~ Χάρις Αλεξίου (1976)
26 FebI’ve always loved this song. And Haroula is so beautiful — in that idiosyncratic way that Greek women are beautiful. She would play Anna Comnene in my film version of the life of the author of the Alexiad — one of history’s great patriolatric texts — η αγέρωχη αυτή Γραικιά — “that breezily proud Greek woman”.
I had always assumed and imagined Alexiou as being of Anatolian background, given her style and repertoire, but she’s actually an Arvanita from Thebes. There go stereotypes for ya.
She is, though, the great late twentieth-century heir of the Roza Eskenazi Café Aman type song tradition. Often and unfairly overlooked, under the crushing bulldozer of the undying rebetiko phenom’.
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Best Trump bash I’ve read so far
26 Feb“Bernie Sanders Is No Donald Trump“:
“To truly be like Donald Trump, not just in the sense of being cruel in a lazy way and ignorant in a superheated one but also being anywhere near as relentlessly aggrieved, you pretty much have to be Donald Trump. It’s a time-consuming thing, and other people have jobs.”
…
“The comparison isn’t about the few things that Sanders and Trump have in common, which amount to tri-state accents abrasive enough to cut glass and the fact that both have been saying the same things over and over again for decades.”
I’m happy that NYC accent is getting the attention it deserves — even if it’s through Donald Trump.
Wait… Can Serbia take Croatia to some kind of international crime tribunal? The Sava…
26 Feb
When they dump their toxic waste (this is the country which in the 1990s needed “to take its place among the nations of western Europe of which she was always a part of” – see the Todorova reference in “Fachos – Croatians”) in a river that flows through the heart of Serbdom, right under the noses of Belgraders who love it so, right where it meets the great river-“vila” of the Danube, and then dumps whatever it leaves behind on Romania and Bulgaria…
Don’t they have the right to do anything about this “nation of western Europe” that floods half the Balkans with its garbage and poison — a good metaphor for its ideological garbage?
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I’m really proud that a NYC borough Jew is coming out with these statements
26 FebIt’s really encouraging if it means that American Jews are regaining the high moral ground on progressive issues. Not that it had been lost but, you know…
I know; people think my philosemitism is kinna weird. A good — Jewish — friend of mine once told me it was “fetishistic”.
I dunno…
But is it looking like Sanders will be the man to anybody? The New Yorker seems to think so: “Bernie Sanders Runs Out the Clock at a Chaotic Democratic Debate“
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Oh God! I can’t believe someone else said this — drafts and the Balkans
26 Feb
There’s so much to write about this that I don’t know where to start!
They actually believe — these are otherwise intelligent, educated people — that air currents of any kind will get you sick. They believe that a current can hit a particular part of your body and that you will get sick or cramped in that specific place. Taxi drivers used to have the best one: they were convinced that air coming from the open window of the right rear seat hit them right on the right side of the neck, so if you were the passenger you had to keep your window closed in 90 degree plus heat (and before air-conditioning) or the driver would flip out on you because the next day he would have a stiff neck right at that point. And it would be all your fault.
In Attica, which has the world’s most paradisiacal climate, nicer than even the Aegean islands, in big open marble rooms with gigantic windows, the second it goes below 70F everything slams shut and gets locked. (In this case, the fear of drafts becomes allied with the equally neurotic fear of robbers so that locking up house for the night becomes an elaborate ritual that would test the patience of a Hindu priest or the Kohanim at the Temple; believe me, if the scary Albanian feels like getting into your house he will; Albanians have a God-given persistent way of doing whatever they feel like; it’s just that they feel like so seldom.)
It’s like bleeding a patient in the Middle Ages with cutting or leeches or something. “Oh, we bled the patient but he died anyway.” No, the patient died because you bled him. I dread going on long car trips with friends or relatives here because someone is always cold and the windows have to be shut. So at the beginning of the trip one person might be coughing, so you close the windows and at the end of the trip everyone is coughing. “We grabbed it” — as the expression goes — even though they closed the windows. No, we all “grabbed” it because we closed the windows and we’ve all been breathing the same stale air for the past five hours.
I used to open the windows by the treadmills at the gym I used to go to in Pagrati. “But we’ll be sweating” this poor, terrified girl finally had the courage to say to me once. Yes, and sweating is the body’s way of maintaining healthy temperature so that you don’t die. Finally, everyone just moved over when the crazy American showed up.
Then they go to their doctor at a drop of the hat, who gives them antibiotics at a drop of the hat, and that just compromises their immune system worse. I know people here who do at least one course of antibiotics every winter. And that’s insanely unhealthy!
They take such tender care of themselves and they’re all always sick. And they never thought to investigate that paradox.
He dicho. Thanks for letting me rant, Mr. Esteso.
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Fachos – Croatians
26 Feb
If you ever need a good chuckle, get your hands on Imagining the Balkans by Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova. In the conclusion she abandons all pretense to professional and academic cool and flips out about a 1992 NYTimes editorial that supported “Croatia’s rightful entry into the western European world of which she was always a part.”
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“Listen: The Sound Of The Hagia Sophia, More Than 500 Years Ago” — beautiful
26 FebPlease everybody listen to this gorgeous and interesting podcast from NPR on what choral singing in Hagia Sophia would have sounded like and how it was reproduced through the work of an art historian and a sounds engineer. It’s very moving.
Sorry about the above photo. I generally don’t ideologically approve of things like airbrushing the Muslim elements from photos, like the ones you see all the time in Greek circles of the exterior of Hagia Sophia with the minarets removed, but those hideous green billboards have got to go at some point (see below), especially as they were hung right over the points where the building’s massive supporting pillars meet the even more massive dome structure, marring a critical aesthetic juncture of this miraculous piece of Roman engineering.
Dang…has it been 500 years already?
I know at least a couple of art historians who think they’re kind of “pastichy” and cool. That’s ridiculous. Would we like the Acropolis better if all the Byzantine and Ottoman clutter that had accrued there over the centuries had been left in place?
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Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 