Video Find of the Day
Here I go again indulging in my Xenomania. I could spend hours trying to figure out what is really going on here. After the a capella performance is that a jumping contest? Is the idea to appear to jump higher than any of your friends with all being judged entirely by eye owing to the utter lack of any trees or buildings or stop signs by which to compare altitudes? Or is it a celebration of the fact that there's no way to know who really is jumping the highest? Or is it to say, "Gosh, we are tall! Hey, let's get taller for a second at a time! That would be cool."
massai traditional dances
Showing posts with label xenomania. Show all posts
Showing posts with label xenomania. Show all posts
Friday, December 28, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Dancing Hair
Video Find of the Day
I think this is Algerian chaabi music. Not sure. My xenomania is highly aroused. What's up with the hair dancing? What's up with the striped suit? Why do these people play fiddles on their knees? Somersaults? Who is daoudia? How should I pronounce that?
daoudia
I think this is Algerian chaabi music. Not sure. My xenomania is highly aroused. What's up with the hair dancing? What's up with the striped suit? Why do these people play fiddles on their knees? Somersaults? Who is daoudia? How should I pronounce that?
daoudia
Friday, September 28, 2007
Road Trip II
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened late June, 1955, two or three weeks before my 6th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
From Springfield, MO, Rte. 66 goes through a piece of Kansas, then Oklahoma, then northern Texas. The only thing I remember about Texas was that Dr Pepper was king. In those days soft drinks, soda pop, or whatever you call them, came in little bottles out of a machine. They were each a nickel. The bottle caps were lined with cork, and if you were careful you could pry the cork out intact, put the cap on the outside of your shirt, and press the cork back in on the inside, and it would hold, making a little badge. We kids thought that was cool.
Don't get me wrong, I had no shortage of toys. What my parents lacked in the love and care department, they made up for as best they could by buying me crap. The US jigsaw puzzle map, for instance. But I had at least as much fun with bottle caps, sticks, and rocks, and stuff I found (like the muddy tennis ball) as I did with all the toys they bought me.
As the highway continued on through New Mexico and Arizona, more and more roadside shops, diners, and gas stations carried Native American gift items, such as baskets, blankets, shawls, scarves, beadwork and leathers. Some had abstract Navajo designs. My favorites were decorated with abstract Thunderbirds. My Father said those were junk, that the local natives didn't do thunderbirds, and therefore they were "trash for stupid tourists." I achieved a new insight: My Father always saw the negative of everything. The positives didn't register or weren't important. "Beautiful" couldn't be allowed to outweigh "Inauthentic." But, by the same token, "Authentic" would never outweigh "Ugly." What rose to the top was not any particular quality, but negativeness itself. My Father simply chose to see everything around him in the worst possible light.
I vowed not to be that way, but to look for treasure everywhere. It was another step on the way to becoming as xenomanic as I am today.
Old Route 66 passed through the middle of the Petrified Forest, AKA the Painted Desert. We made a toilet stop and everyone looked for petrified tree trunks high enough to pee behind without alarming other passing motorists. My Mother had Koko on a leash and lost her grip, and Koko raced off into the desert, so we had to sit around for half an hour until he got bored and came back. My Father fumed at my Mother. "We have to get to a motel before dark! Why couldn't you be more careful?" I don't actually think it would have hurt to drive in the dark. He did it deliberately at other times.
The next day we took a side trip north and visited the Grand Canyon. Dad wasn't taking chances now. Favorite son Koko was kept in the car except for a brief walk.
Every time we stopped at one of those places, like the Grand Canyon, or the Petrified Forest, the expansiveness of the scenes gave me hope that I might find a way to lose my parents. I began to have fantasies of finding a wilderness Eden of my own with plenty of foragables, living off the land out of a shack or a cave.
Probably the persistence of those fantasies contributed to my homelessness later, because I became conditioned to the idea that it was only by such means I could achieve peace. As a social solution seemed impossible since I couldn't even openly discuss the problems I had, the only thing left was to run away and become a hermit. Eventually it became the solution of last resort for everything, always there in the back of my mind.
From Springfield, MO, Rte. 66 goes through a piece of Kansas, then Oklahoma, then northern Texas. The only thing I remember about Texas was that Dr Pepper was king. In those days soft drinks, soda pop, or whatever you call them, came in little bottles out of a machine. They were each a nickel. The bottle caps were lined with cork, and if you were careful you could pry the cork out intact, put the cap on the outside of your shirt, and press the cork back in on the inside, and it would hold, making a little badge. We kids thought that was cool.
Don't get me wrong, I had no shortage of toys. What my parents lacked in the love and care department, they made up for as best they could by buying me crap. The US jigsaw puzzle map, for instance. But I had at least as much fun with bottle caps, sticks, and rocks, and stuff I found (like the muddy tennis ball) as I did with all the toys they bought me.
As the highway continued on through New Mexico and Arizona, more and more roadside shops, diners, and gas stations carried Native American gift items, such as baskets, blankets, shawls, scarves, beadwork and leathers. Some had abstract Navajo designs. My favorites were decorated with abstract Thunderbirds. My Father said those were junk, that the local natives didn't do thunderbirds, and therefore they were "trash for stupid tourists." I achieved a new insight: My Father always saw the negative of everything. The positives didn't register or weren't important. "Beautiful" couldn't be allowed to outweigh "Inauthentic." But, by the same token, "Authentic" would never outweigh "Ugly." What rose to the top was not any particular quality, but negativeness itself. My Father simply chose to see everything around him in the worst possible light.
I vowed not to be that way, but to look for treasure everywhere. It was another step on the way to becoming as xenomanic as I am today.
Old Route 66 passed through the middle of the Petrified Forest, AKA the Painted Desert. We made a toilet stop and everyone looked for petrified tree trunks high enough to pee behind without alarming other passing motorists. My Mother had Koko on a leash and lost her grip, and Koko raced off into the desert, so we had to sit around for half an hour until he got bored and came back. My Father fumed at my Mother. "We have to get to a motel before dark! Why couldn't you be more careful?" I don't actually think it would have hurt to drive in the dark. He did it deliberately at other times.The next day we took a side trip north and visited the Grand Canyon. Dad wasn't taking chances now. Favorite son Koko was kept in the car except for a brief walk.
Every time we stopped at one of those places, like the Grand Canyon, or the Petrified Forest, the expansiveness of the scenes gave me hope that I might find a way to lose my parents. I began to have fantasies of finding a wilderness Eden of my own with plenty of foragables, living off the land out of a shack or a cave.Probably the persistence of those fantasies contributed to my homelessness later, because I became conditioned to the idea that it was only by such means I could achieve peace. As a social solution seemed impossible since I couldn't even openly discuss the problems I had, the only thing left was to run away and become a hermit. Eventually it became the solution of last resort for everything, always there in the back of my mind.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Xenomania
Why are these people happy?
I don't know!
I am Xenomanic. I take sick perverse pleasure in subjecting myself to things I don't understand. Before my last bout of homelessness I had a large collection of awesome books in languages I couldn't read which I bought at cut rates from a guy who saved them from dumpsters. There were books in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Yiddish, Hungarian, and some kinds of African and Indian languages, plus some books in German and Spanish.
After having to sell those off in desperate need of cash and before the rise of non-English Wikipedias which I now use to satisfy my sick impulses, I had to indulge my appetites by searching for incomprehensible books at libraries.
I also looked for books and audio tapes with incomprehensible foreign titles at used book and music stores. Half Priced Books had a bin where they threw tapes that came in that no one in the store could make sense of. I could afford handfuls of them.
One tape I got my hands on was a tape of samples of folk music from the autonomous regions of China. It included a couple of selections from the Uyghur peoples of Xinjiang Province. [Click to see a xenomanic-friendly map.] Not knowing who the Uyghur peoples of the Xinjiang Province are made the music irresistible to me. I had to go to Suzallo Library at the University of Washington to find anything about them.
Here's what I found out at the time. The Uyghurs are modern settled descendants of certain Turkic tribes of Central Asia, which may or may not have all been formerly nomadic. They are namely the remnants of those tribes which made up what in historic retrospect is now called the Uyghur Empire, which stretched all the way from the Caspian Sea, maybe, to Manchuria, for sure, and was a dominant power in the region for a couple centuries until the year 840, when some other Central Asian people you hadn't heard of, the Kirghiz, as in Kirghistan or Kyrgyzstan or Kirgizistan, overran them. For the last millennium or so the Uyghur have been mostly Islamic and mostly living in Xinjiang Province, using an Arabic script, although there are Uyghur communities elsewhere that use Cyrillic and Roman alphabets.
Prior to the establishment of the aforementioned empire, the ancestors of the Uyghurs were most noted on the world stage for having been a part of the Hunnic empire and having quite possibly made up most of the mercenaries who formed the Hun invasions of Europe in the 5th Century. The Magyars of Hungary may be more Uyghur than Hun. Anyway, "Hungary" supposedly comes from a turkish word that means ten, as in ten tribes, not from "Hun", and nine of the ten tribes may have been Uyghur, for all anyone knows.
Hearing the music on the tape inspired me to create one of my theories. The theory is that the Gypsies, who are not Uyghurs, nevertheless came by Uyghur music in their travels in the region of Hungary, where it had taken root in the form of a variety of Hungarian folk music. While I am sure Gypsy vocal music has its roots in the area of Northern Indian where Romani originates, the theory is that the instrumental and dance music that is thought of as Eastern European Gypsy stems mainly from the Uyghurs, by way of the Attila connection. I'm not saying it didn't get changed in the process. As usual, I don't care if the theory is true, so it isn't important to disprove it. If I thought it was true I'd lose interest in it. That's how Xenomania works.
Here's a supposedly Uyghur song I don't understand that I think makes the theory seem plausible.
I don't know!
I am Xenomanic. I take sick perverse pleasure in subjecting myself to things I don't understand. Before my last bout of homelessness I had a large collection of awesome books in languages I couldn't read which I bought at cut rates from a guy who saved them from dumpsters. There were books in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Yiddish, Hungarian, and some kinds of African and Indian languages, plus some books in German and Spanish.
After having to sell those off in desperate need of cash and before the rise of non-English Wikipedias which I now use to satisfy my sick impulses, I had to indulge my appetites by searching for incomprehensible books at libraries.
I also looked for books and audio tapes with incomprehensible foreign titles at used book and music stores. Half Priced Books had a bin where they threw tapes that came in that no one in the store could make sense of. I could afford handfuls of them.
One tape I got my hands on was a tape of samples of folk music from the autonomous regions of China. It included a couple of selections from the Uyghur peoples of Xinjiang Province. [Click to see a xenomanic-friendly map.] Not knowing who the Uyghur peoples of the Xinjiang Province are made the music irresistible to me. I had to go to Suzallo Library at the University of Washington to find anything about them.
Here's what I found out at the time. The Uyghurs are modern settled descendants of certain Turkic tribes of Central Asia, which may or may not have all been formerly nomadic. They are namely the remnants of those tribes which made up what in historic retrospect is now called the Uyghur Empire, which stretched all the way from the Caspian Sea, maybe, to Manchuria, for sure, and was a dominant power in the region for a couple centuries until the year 840, when some other Central Asian people you hadn't heard of, the Kirghiz, as in Kirghistan or Kyrgyzstan or Kirgizistan, overran them. For the last millennium or so the Uyghur have been mostly Islamic and mostly living in Xinjiang Province, using an Arabic script, although there are Uyghur communities elsewhere that use Cyrillic and Roman alphabets.
Prior to the establishment of the aforementioned empire, the ancestors of the Uyghurs were most noted on the world stage for having been a part of the Hunnic empire and having quite possibly made up most of the mercenaries who formed the Hun invasions of Europe in the 5th Century. The Magyars of Hungary may be more Uyghur than Hun. Anyway, "Hungary" supposedly comes from a turkish word that means ten, as in ten tribes, not from "Hun", and nine of the ten tribes may have been Uyghur, for all anyone knows.
Hearing the music on the tape inspired me to create one of my theories. The theory is that the Gypsies, who are not Uyghurs, nevertheless came by Uyghur music in their travels in the region of Hungary, where it had taken root in the form of a variety of Hungarian folk music. While I am sure Gypsy vocal music has its roots in the area of Northern Indian where Romani originates, the theory is that the instrumental and dance music that is thought of as Eastern European Gypsy stems mainly from the Uyghurs, by way of the Attila connection. I'm not saying it didn't get changed in the process. As usual, I don't care if the theory is true, so it isn't important to disprove it. If I thought it was true I'd lose interest in it. That's how Xenomania works.
Here's a supposedly Uyghur song I don't understand that I think makes the theory seem plausible.
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