Geek of All Trades

Missing a friend

Our good friend K passed away this weekend. 

She had been fighting against cancer for more than five years now.  But while her death is no surprise, it's still a tragedy, and it still hurts.  All weekend we've been remembering the things about her that made us smile.  Some of them have sneaked up when we least expected - in the middle of a conversation about something unrelated, someone says something that triggers a memory of K.  We found pictures of her taken at our wedding.  We've been weepy. 

K's funeral is Tuesday, and we are collecting our tears and funny stories to share with K's family and other friends who loved her.  We will always miss her. 

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Nearly two months ago, right as I was becoming distracted away from frequent blogging, I mentioned the World Music concert series from which we'd chosen a selection of shows to attend.  Last Friday was our first show of the Spring 2008 series - Ladysmith Black Mambazo, at Sanders Theater at Harvard.

The South African choral group Ladysmith Black Mambazo became very famous in the US after they performed on Paul Simon's blockbuster album Graceland, but even by then they had already been doing their thing for many, many years - the group was founded in 1960 by Joseph Shabalala, who still leads the group today.  In their early days they performed in singing competitions in mining townships, and they were so good that they demolished the field - eventually they were asked to retire from the competitions to give someone else a chance to win.   

Today, most of Mambazo's original members have retired or passed on, and Shabalala's four sons are carrying on the tradition along with the other family friends and professional singers that make up the nine-man group.  But Mr. Shabalala is as energetic as ever, and seemed tireless in Friday night's performance, jumping and kicking and dancing with as much verve as any of the younger men.  Indeed, the dancing - the men's exuberance - was the best part of the show.  The songs themselves are pretty - the singers' mastery of tight harmony and complex rhythm is awesome - but a little unvarying; every song is at the same tempo and in the same mode, and each song concludes with a lengthy and repetitive vamp segment. 

Some time ago I read a review of a Youssou N'Dour album that dug at the genre of "world music" for being "as tedious as the dinner parties at which it is played."  Being a hungry consumer of music from all over the world, I bristled at this characterization, but I also understood the reviewer's point.  There is a certain strain of world music that feels particularly packaged for the West, for an NPR-listening, liberal-voting audience.  Ladysmith Black Mambazo suffers a bit from this ailment, perhaps as a result of having been Paul Simonized so long ago (they did perform "Homeless," a tune from Graceland, at Friday's show).  Still, they are an easy introduction to African music for people new to the sounds.  The choral stylings are unquestionably delightful, and the guys put on a charming and entertaining show. 

World Music - spring concert series

David and I are members of the unimaginatively named "World Music" organization, that arranges and promotes a series of concerts in the Boston area each season.  As members we get advance deals on the best seats for all their concerts, and in seasons past we've seen many excellent shows (a few of which I've written about here):  Indian performers like Zakir Hussain and Rahul Sharma, and a kathak dance demonstration by Pandit Birju Maharaj; African artists like the outstanding Oliver Mtukudzi, the legendary Hugh Masakela, and our long-time favorite Angelique Kidjo; and unusual acts like Finland's Varttina. 

We just got the catalog for the Winter-Spring 2008 series, and we went hog-wild - we'll be attending about two concerts a month from January to May and we're really excited about it.  On the menu are some great performers we've seen before, like Angelique, Mr. Masakela, Zakir sahib, and Mali's Toumani Diabate; we're also going to hear a pair of Pakistani qawwals, which I'm really excited about, and interesting-sounding loungey fusion act called Pink Martini, and a bunch of other (mostly African) stuff.  I'll try to write at least a little about each one here, as I wish I'd done for all the terrific concerts we've seen already.  And you can see World Music's event list here. 

There's translation, and there's translation

At the movies last weekend to see a newly released, highly anticipated Hindi film called Om Shanti Om (recently reviewed at Filmi Geek), we saw the usual handful of previews that one sees before a movie; this time, all previews for upcoming Hindi films.  One of these is apparently an animated feature called Roadside Romeo; the preview showed a slickly animated anthropomorphic dog - the titular Romeo - having a screen test for his part in the movie.  In his screen test Romeo undertakes a rapid-fire succession of impressions from famous films, reciting famous lines from beloved Indian films like Sholay, Deewaar, and Dilwale dulhania le jayenge.  (You can see the spot, without subtitles, here.)

What interested me most about these was not Romeo's renditions, not the choice of films (nor the fact that I recognized so many of them) - it was the way they were rendered in the subtitles.  The subtitles looked like approximately this:

"You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender."

"You want the truth?  You can't handle the truth!"

"Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

That is to say, instead of literally rendering the famous lines from the Hindi films ("How many men were there?" &c.) the subtitler chose a conceptual translation that slipped the category of "famous lines from Hindi films" to "famous lines from Hollywood films."  This rendition conveys the force of what is happening on the screen - the dog is reenacting famous movie scenes - much better than could have been done by a literal translation.    

I have read essays by Douglas Hofstadter about this kind of translation; the concept comes up a lot in different permutations throughout his work, especially in his book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies.  The subtitling in the  Roadside Romeo trailer is perhaps more precisely viewed as an analogy than as a translation.  And yet, if the purpose of a translation is to convey the meaning and intent of the original to speakers of a different language, then the Roadside Romeo trailer is perfectly rendered; it is not a linguistic translation only, but also a cultural translation. 

(A separate question is raised as to whether the cultural translation is required; arguably, even the non-Hindi-speaking members of the audience for both the trailer and the movie are likely to be well-enough versed in Hindi films to recognize that famous films are being referenced in the screen test.  I think the conceptual translation was the right choice, as it is the most inclusive and expansive.  I know that a lot of people who are relatively new to Hindi films saw Om Shanti Om and the Roadside Romeo trailer.  There is interest among some in the Hindi film industry in expanding the overseas markets for their films.  The fact that Roadside Romeo is being produced by the Hindi film production company Yash Raj Films in partnership with Walt Disney Studios adds some more data to the equation.)

 

Maybe we're not alone

Here is a piece of science news that gave me a little chill, and made me feel very small.  That's an overreaction, certainly, and yet there it is. 

Middle name tag

A couple of weeks ago Amodini (who has both a general stuff blog and one for Hindi films) tagged me with the "middle name tag."  I was rude and didn't respond right away, because I was overwhelmed with work there for a few weeks and haven't had time for too much blogging.  I've had a reprieve, though - a trial that had been scheduled to begin three weeks from now has been moved to the spring - and so I wanted to thank Amodini, and pick up this tag. 

The idea is as follows:

1. You must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name.
2.  If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
3. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag.

So here we go:

M: Middle name.  I have one.  In fact, unlike many people, I use mine regularly, preferring to write my name out in full  - first, middle, last - in correspondence, court papers, and even informal settings.  My name doesn't sound right to me without it.  Both of my brothers have middle names too, but they don't use them, not even an initial.  I'm not sure why that is; I've never talked to them about it.  "Miriam" is an essential part of my name, and I can't imagine not using it. 

I: India.  Why?  I don't know.   I'm not Indian; I don't pretend I am, and I don't aspire to be.  But I watch Indian movies, study an Indian language, and from time to time have been known to cook Indian food or wear Indian clothes.  There it is.  I haven't been to India; mostly because David and I are poor planners and haven't yet gotten around to making it happen.  I once joked that I decided to learn Hindi because that's the language the spoken by the voices in my head and I wanted to understand what they were saying.  Sometimes that feels not too far from the truth - I have no idea where this came from.

R:  Religion.  It comes and goes.  There have been times in my life when I could not imagine Friday night without Shabbat services.  Now is not one of those times.  David and I haven't gone to Shabbat services regularly in many years.  I wouldn't mind getting back into the habit, but I don't want to take responsibility for it; I want David to select a congregation and say, "we're going, tonight." 

I: Idols.  I have one.    

A:  Ambivalent attorney.  Attorney is my real job; ambivalent is what I am about it.   I don't dislike everything about it, and I'm trying to make some changes to my practice that, I hope, will help me enjoy my work more.  But I'm already on my second career, and I'm fairly certain I won't be doing this for the rest of my life.  No specific plans yet though!

M:  Morphology.  Well, not morphology specifically, linguistics generally.  (I know, it's lame - the trouble with my middle name is that I have to come up with two entries for "I" and "M;" I can't tell you how I struggled with this one.)  I've been a linguistics dilettante for as long as I can remember.  I sometimes fantasize about dropping everything and heading back to graduate school to study linguistics.  David worries that if I did that, it would kill my interest in it; he might be right.  At any rate I remain an amateur, for now.  I'm not certain what branch of linguistics I'd specialize in were I to take the plunge; perhaps some sort of comparative syntactic studies, since that is what interests me most across languages:  the different structures used in different languages use to express ideas.  (Examples of my musings on such concepts here and here and here.)

In completing this tag I am supposed to tag other bloggers, one for each letter in my middle name - six in all.  But the last time I tried to tag some bloggers it didn't go all that well - only one of them responded to the tag.  So I'm going to do something different this time.  If you read this, and you have a blog of your own, consider yourself tagged.   Just let me know, via a comment or an email, if you pick up the thread, and I'll add a link to your post here. 

Dragon fruit

With our kitchen finally intact again, we've been grocery shopping and cooking - nothing fancy, just mundane meal preparation of the sort that ought to be completely unremarkable.  Four months of take-out dinners and microwaved Indian food from a box has given me a whole new appreciation for even the simplest home-cooked meal. 

A couple of trips to the wonderful gigantic Asian grocery store, Super 88, have yielded some nice treasures.  This incredible fluorescent fruit caught my eye and I had to take it home. 

It's a dragon fruit, also called a pitaya, the fruit of a certain kind of cactus.  It's native to North America but is evidently now cultivated in southeast Asia.  It's dramatic, beautiful, and quite tasty too.

The flesh is white and peppered with tiny black seeds, and after I cut the fruit in half it peeled easily out of the fuchsia rind. The flesh is similar in texture to kiwi, and its taste is crisp, very refreshing, and not terribly sweet. 

First meal

Yesterday I cooked our first meal in the new kitchen!   

It's not completely done yet - the tiles still need grouting, there are still no handles on the cabinets and drawers, and the light over the table has yet to be hung - but it's close enough that we could start unpacking dishes and pans out of the boxes they've been in for more than four months, and close enough that I could cook a meal.

The tile looks great; it will look better when it's grouted, because the spaces in between won't be as dark.  The stove is a pleasure to use - very powerful, very spacious. 

I cooked orecchiette and broccoli rabe. 

When the pasta and the broccoli rabe were done, I mixed in some grated Parmesan cheese and served it up.

It's a very simple meal, the kind of thing that only takes about 15 minutes to prepare; the kind of thing I might cook on a weeknight.  But it tasted wonderful!  Our first meal cooked in our new kitchen after four months of waiting. 

I also used the new shower for the first time, but I'm not posting any pictures of that!

 

Numerical double-take

A couple of weeks ago, David commented that he is sometimes confused when people use the word "bucks" to refer to currency other than our own U.S. dollar.  He's got a certain sense of the meaning of "buck," of its value, and he finds himself surprised for a moment when it's used to mean something else. 

I didn't think much of the comment - I didn't see why it would be such a big deal.  But then I was happily reading the movie site Passion for Cinema when I suffered a case of mental whiplash upon encountering the following:

But the fan is pissed off. Like hell. It takes a lot of hard work to earn money and then to pay 500 bucks for a movie ticket shows passion. and what does the fan get in return - crap.

500 bucks for a movie ticket???  It took me a moment longer than it should have to remember what I was reading:  that's 500 Rupees .

Bad luck and bad backup habits - not a good combination

I had a computer meltdown this evening - this was a brand new computer so I wasn't expecting it - and I've lost a bunch of stuff that I might not be able to recover. 

If you've ever sent me email, for any reason, and you'd like me to have your email address, can you please drop me a note?  You can send it to filmigeek at comcast dot net.