Various Artists: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto
An excellent collection of Township Jive tunes.
Juluka: Johnny Clegg & Juluka collection
My favorite Juluka record, Ubuhle Bemvelo - their magnificent collection of rocked up Zulu folk songs - is out of print and hard to find. This collection will have to do.
Angelique Kidjo: Oremi
Funky Afro-pop. "Itche Koutche" is the best tune ever.
Various Artists: Guitar Paradise of East Africa
A sparkling collection of bands from Kenya, Zaire, and Tanzania playing in the Jit and Benga styles.
Miriam Makeba: World of Miriam Makeba
The Grand Dame of African music in the United States, Miriam Makeba is perhaps better known here as a politically active folk singer than as an early pioneer of Afro-pop and township jazz.
Oumou Sangare: Oumou
Impressive Malian singer and songwriter.
Tinariwen: Amassakoul
More music from Mali. This band is of the Sarahan Touareg tribe. They are idolized as guitar gods in Mali and lay down a hypnotizing groove.
I snapped this picture (with my cellphone camera) out my office window earlier this week.
(Click on the image to see a larger version.) It doesn't fully capture the beauty of the full moon rising over the Zakim Bridge, but it's a start. This won't be my view very much longer - I'm moving to a different office next week, facing west instead of north. I'm not sure if I'll be able to see anything other than the next office building.
The title of this post was uttered by a friend of The Real Charlie's at a baby shower in response to an abundance of ducky-themed clothing. But the trendy appeal of the ducky has now transcended the realm of baby clothes and found its way into contemporary art. I'm not kidding.
My office building has an arrangement with the DeCordova Museum in which the museum supplies art from its collection to display in the lobby and in offices. The art changes every six months or so. The most recent set of paintings on display in the lobby is a series of still lifes featuring lemons and duckies in highly symmetrical arrangements, often on garish tablecloths.
(I neglected to note the artist's name, but I will do so tomorrow and update the post to give her credit for her work.)
The paintings are innocuous enough, but in quanitity there is something rather creepy about their highly ordered arrangements. Stare at the painting above long enough, for example, and you start to percieve an evil clown face grinning at you from the floral background.
Or maybe that's just me.
Still: Duckies and lemons?
A few weeks ago we bought a painting in the Berkshires. To be precise, it's not a painting - it's an "assemblage," which is defined as "a sculptural composition consisting of an arrangement of miscellaneous objects or found materials." Our assemblage is by Graceann Warn, an artist based in Ann Arbor, MI. Our assemblage, entitled "Laws of Motion," is not featured on Ms. Warn's website, but can be seen (at least for a while) at the website of the Hoadley Gallery at which we purchased it, and also right here, hanging happily on our living room wall.
What cannot readily be seen from this picture, or from the one on Hoadley's website, is that the dark portion on the right-center of the assemblage houses a lead bob pendulum and a piece of a yardstick. Also the circle in the center is a copper gasket of the sort used to seal Conflat flanges in the vacuum systems typically used in physics experiments. The whitish background, too, bears the ghosts of circular tracks evocative of the paths of charged particles through bubble chambers and other particle detectors of early experiments in high-energy physics. In short, what David and I liked about the assemblage was the way it evoked so many eras of physics, from Newtonian to modern, and so many eras even in the cycle of an individual's study of physics, from experiments one does in high school with a yardstick and a plumb bob to the down-and-dirty realities of today's experimental physics - tinkering with the gaskets on a vacuum chamber.
