Thursday, September 12, 2019

The War in Afghanistan is Approaching Its Eighteenth Birthday.

I haven't written this before. I'll save the tearjerking details of "where I was" and "the moment my child saw the video" for some other time. What is on my mind this morning is the night of the eleventh. My memory is this: I'm in the bedroom with my wife, we're both exhausted by that day.

I know that memory is tricky, but what I recall is telling her "I'm afraid our country's response is going to be bombing a bunch of brown people." Probably about the same time (if not earlier), Dick Cheney was in a meeting and wondered aloud whether the attacks could be our pretext for "doing" Iraq.







Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Shaving Horse in Action: Hungary 1940

I found this on Fortepan. A man cuts stovewood (or something like it) with a bent-wood bowsaw, using a shaving horse to hold the wood still, or so he can cut wood while sitting down:

Source: www.fortepan.hu, Rosta László, tags: "barefoot," "pillow," "saw."

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Georgia Music Show on WRAS

Last night on the way home from class, I had the radio tuned to WRAS, because they still let the college kids run it at night.

Tuesday from 8 - 10 is the Georgia Music Show. Last night, for the first time I know of, they featured some jazz by Georgia artists. Here are two I think are worth sharing:

Larry Wilson:  Our Thing

Stephen Cox: Transitions


The name I give in each case above is the album name; track names linked to vary.

The track played on WRAS following the Larry Wilson number is also worth sharing, and I didn't catch the name. If I learn that, I'll edit the post to include it.

The story of WRAS is . . . complicated. When I arrived in Georgia 21 years ago, Album 88 was one of my first signs that I could make a home here. It seemed to be the only place on the radio dial that wasn't fully corporatized and programmed into utterly uniform blandness. (WREK's signal didn't make it out that far back then, and WRFG was just talk, talk, talk.) Then Georgia State helped Georgia Public Broadcasting take it away from the students. There was wailing, gnashing of teeth, protesting, etc. but in the end . . . let me just say Bill Nigut has a lot to answer for.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Hungarian Photo Archive

Thanks to Hyperallergic (an arts e-newsletter), I have discovered Fortepan. Fortepan is a treasure trove of photos taken in Hungary (or by Hungarians) in the 20th century. 



---minnow traps, 1941


The photos can simply be looked at in simple chronological order, or searched by subject. Use Google Translate to find the Hungarian word for your subject. Usually this results in awkward half-fitting results, but you can go from there. I found the above image by searching for "halasz," which Google Translate tells me is Hungarian for "fisherman."