Topic: Around Town
Posted by: Josh

Or round the neighborhood, anyway: the Mister Softee cone, that is. Today we mourn the passing of James Conway, Sr., the founder of the Mister Softee franchise. He and his partner built an empire of more than 600 trucks on the back of that godawful song (mp3). And did you know it has lyrics?

The CREAM-i-est DREAM-i-est SOFT ice CREAM
you GET from MIS-ter SOF-tee.
FOR a re-FRESH-ing de-LIGHT su-PREME
LOOK for MIS-ter SOF-tee....

I'm not sure if knowing the lyrics will make hearing the trucks better or worse, but I'm still relieved that at the start of a new summer, Mayor Bloomberg's noise regulation compromise remains in effect: Mister Softee trucks can play their jingle while they drive, but they can't park and play it, which is what they liked to do out in front of the Gowanus Projects across the street from our old apartment. For hours. Sometimes after 10 p.m.

RIP, Mr. Conway. Let's hope you go to a heaven full of ice cream, not a hell of eternal exposure to that horrible, horrible ditty.

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Topic: Personal
Posted by: Josh

Lem is a friend of ours who recently had a bit of a breakdown, which resulted in his leaping from a third-floor window and landing on a staircase below, with seriously bad results for his knee and arm that put him in Bellevue Hospital for a while.

He went through a scary week of secondary infection and general awfulness, as well as detox from probably alcohol and maybe something else. We visited him after that, when he was woozy from morphine, and I saw him again a week later, when he'd just switched from a wheelchair to a cane. I was there with Todd and a German friend of Lem's named Beatrice, and we had a bit of a party in his room. I loaned him our old laptop so he could write his thoughts.

The next day, on the advice of his psychiatrist at the hospital, Lem checked himself into the psych ward, which you apparently can't just check back out of. He wrote a series of letters while in there, which were typed up by his mother (who has been with him most of the time, fortunately) and posted on the Polenblog (1, 2).

As our friend Erin pointed out in a comment on Lem's final post, one thing people learn in such places is that the distinction between sane and in- is more a matter of appearance than of anything more concrete or absolute. This is more profound than it looks at first: sanity is not so much the ability to construct a coherent worldview or avoid believing silly things as it is the ability to interact with others in a way that they find coherent and comprehensible. That's why radical artists, social outcasts and crazy people are so hard to distinguish, while people who believe in the Angel Moroni or Thetans or the resurrection of Jesus can be considered fully sane and functional.

This happens to be one of the areas where I think the Neo-Confucians are right. Building on the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (which works by positing a coherent self and then asking you to find and identify it and giggling while you fail), the Neo-Confucians defined the self in relation to others. You aren't a coherent individual separate from those around you, but rather a father, a son, a brother, a lord or servant, a husband, etc. Each of these roles is distinct, and you only exist as a human being in society to the extent that you fulfill these roles.

So, to turn Sartre on his head, sanity is other people.

We look forward to seeing Lem again on the outside and welcoming him back into a circle of friends.

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Posted by: Josh

Tep Monorom Dance by The National Dance Company of Cambodia (Homrong)

Fei Fei Shih Shih (Rainy Weather) by Unknown Folk Musicians of Amoy

Sapta Murti by Kertha Jaya of Abianbase, Gianyar

Via the invaluable SoundRoots, I get to share with you the Asian Classical MP3 Home Page, a rich archive of traditional music from East, Southeast and South Asia.

The music is all either used with permission or else hopelessly out of print, and TACMP3HP does a good job of documenting it with the resources available, so I don't have to. Let me just note that Amoy (now called Xiamen) is a port city on the southeastern coast of China, while the third track is Indonesian. Oh, and when it comes to that last track, I quote TACMP3HP when I advise you to "catch the quote from the 1812 Overture in 'Sapta Murti'!"

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Topic: Personal
Posted by: blog/robertooghe

We left from Manhattan an hour late, as our Midtown departure in the two Budget fifteen-seater vans had been delayed an hour by, well, Maggie, who'd overslept and arrived in a mad fluster of explanations about the alarm not having gone off. We were probably twenty of us at this point including Daniel Kleinfeld (the groom), Mike Bond and his brother Dave, Matt Shaw, and two friends of Sally's from Oberlin whose names eluded me [Erin and Emily. –Ed.], Lydia and Josh Axelrad, Twins A and C (Twin B already having headed up with Sally, Josh Ross and Jenny Tavis the night before as wedding photographer), Sarah and Catherine, an amiable music teacher named Steve and his boyfriend, and Sven, a ruggedly statuesque actor who was a friend of Daniel's from Alaska. Finally, we had a vaguely gothy Alaskan native named Tracy, former Dell'Artians Ross (with girlfriend) and Rainbow, with her artist boyfriend Chris carrying along with us the bamboo poles for the wedding party's chuppa.

Read the rest of the story after the jump.

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Topic: Music
Posted by: Josh

Boot-Ta-La-Za | Vol Vist du Gaily Star | Chinatown My Chinatown | Puerto Vootie | Matzoh Balls by Slim Gaillard (Laughing in Rhythm)

Today we take an unusual direction for Weekly World Music, focusing on an American artist working in an American idiom — jazz. What makes this in some sense world music is Slim Gaillard's extraordinary interest in and affection for the linguistic bouillabaisse of mid-20th-century America, especially in his adopted homes of New York and Los Angeles.

Gaillard, born in Detroit to Cuban parents, was a talented guitarist and boogie-woogie pianist who mixed easily with swing and be-bop musicians, and some of his most famous recordings include Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. But what he was really known for was his loopy vocal style, built around jive talk, an invented language called Vout, and snatches of the various foreign languages that would have formed the background noise of his life. (There is also an obsession with food, which along with his vocal approach and general attitude suggest he was stoned out of his gourd an awful lot.)

Of course, dialect records (1, 2) were nothing new, but Gaillard's approach strikes me as at once more affectionate and more interpretive than usual. Rather than making fun of an accent or language, Gaillard swallows its sounds and transmogrifies them into his own unique product.

"Boot-Ta-La-Za" seems to be some kind of Middle Eastern number, while "Vol Vist du Gaily Star" obviously takes off from Yiddish vaudeville. In "Chinatown My Chinatown" — about a part of town where black people would've been relatively welcome — Gaillard spits some extraordinary fake Chinese. "Puerto Vootie" involves a similar blast of fake Spanish, set to a convincing Carribean rhythm. And what better way to end than with "Matzoh Balls," a paean to Jewish cuisine? Plus, he give sensible instructions on how to eat gefilte fish: "Now you put a little horseraddish on it and make it very mellow." The man knows his stuff.

Bonus: Slim Gaillard makes an appearance in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which you can read here.

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Topic: Around Town
Posted by: Josh

New Yorkers know that summer is a time of free concerts in our glorious parks, and this year looks to continue the grand tradition in style. The Central Park Summerstage and Celebrate Brooklyn schedules are out, and here are a few highlights.

Central Park Summerstage:

Sunday, June 25: Feist with Buck 65
Feist is a clever singer-songwriter, while Buck 65 is a weird amalgam of country, hip-hop and straight-up weirdness — he has a rap about being a centaur.

Saturday, July 1: Noche Flamenca, Roxanne Butterfly's Worldbeats
We saw Noche Flamenca at a big world music festival about a year ago, and they were outstanding. Some of the most compelling, graceful, forceful dancing I've ever seen.

Sunday, July 30: Lady Sovereign, Pete Rock, Jean Grae, Curated by DJ Rekha
Okay, so here's our chance to see pint-sized UK grime sensation SOV in person, plus DJ Rekha of Basement Bhangra fame is involved, which cranks up the cool factor significantly.

Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park:

Thursday, June 15: Maceo Parker
The man who gave James Brown his funkiest sound. What more need be said?

Friday, July 14: Brooklyn Philharmonic

And don't forget that it's also the season for the New York Philharmonic in the Park series.

Now go shake that booty!

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Topic: Personal
Posted by: Josh

Well, I'm back from the big wedding in what New Yorkers call the mountains, and it was a blast. Much drunken revelry, much eating, much joy, and of course a couple of people ended up married. My friend Robert is working up a much longer account, which hopefully he'll post here soon.

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Topic: Personal
Posted by: Josh

It has gone a bit quiet here at the Palaverist, and it will probably remain so into next week. Weekly World Music is on hiatus until then. The reason? I will be attending the McKleinfeld wedding — the marriage of our good friends Daniel Kleinfeld and Sally McGuire, which will be taking place at a weekend-long extravaganza up in the Adirondacks, and for which Jenny has been the principal planner. So there's lots of last-minute wedding stuff to attend to, leaving less time than usual for bloggeriffic ramblings.

I'll let you know how it all goes.

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Topic: Politics
Posted by: Josh

Forget everything you know about polls and fundraising, about motivating the base, about political viability, campaign counterattacks and the New Hampshire primary. When I ask myself not who can win the white house, but who I want running the country, I come up with one answer: Al Gore.

Way back in 1992, I remember wishing that the ticket were reversed. Bill Clinton seemed like a great guy, but he was untested on the national stage, never more than the governor of a backwater state. Al Gore was talking about things that mattered to me — the environment, for one, which I thought then and still believe is the single greatest issue facing humanity. He was an experienced and distinguished senator who was thoroughly uncorrupt. I wanted him to be my president.

Over eight years as vice president, the dirtiest thing Al Gore did was make some fundraising phonecalls from his office rather than from another location — paltry even by the standard of scandals in the 1990s, much less the present era of corruption and mismanagement. The worst thing he did was run a lackluster campaign for president, too beholden to consultants, too unwilling to speak honestly and openly.

Al Gore seems to have learned from that mistake. I haven't seen his new movie, but I did catch him on Saturday Night Live, and I've read about some of the things he's been saying. He opposed the Iraq War at a time when few Democrats were willing to stand up for what they believed in, and he is speaking loudly about the dangerous, pressing crisis that is global warming. He's intelligent, ethical, decent and in favor of the right things.

Yes, he can be a pedant, insistent on getting the details right and grasping the whole picture. And I so want my country run that way! The slipshod, haphazard half-assedness of the Bush administration has been deadly, costly, destructive and morally depraved. I want my country led by a man who likes all his ducks in a row and would prefer that they not go extinct. I want Al Gore to be my president.

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Topic: United Nations
Posted by: Josh

At the elections yesterday for the new UN Human Rights Council, South Korea was one of the 44 countries selected.

There is some controversy over the inclusion of habitual rights-violators China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan in the new Council, particularly since the Council was intended to replace the Commission on Human Rights, which lost credibility for including countries with poor human rights records. The election of the six troubling countries to some extent justifies American concerns that the new Council fails to resolve the problems it was meant to fix, though it doesn't justify America's sitting on the sidelines throughout the negotiation process and jumping in only at the end to condemn the results.

Nevertheless, I know that a number of people at the Korean Mission worked quite hard to get South Korea elected, so the election must be happy news for them.

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Topic: Culture
Posted by: Josh

One of the pleasures of foreign travel is learning the sports of other countries. I learned cricket in India — it's a good game, really — and in Ireland I discovered hurling, a sport in which it is still possible to swing a long wooden stick into the unhelmeted side of a man's head.

But it was in Korea that we had our most intense exposure to a foreign sport. Our stay coincided with the 2002 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted in Japan and South Korea, in which the Korean team exceeded all expectations and survived to the quarter-finals, coming in a respectable fourth place. At the time, I wrote about the powerful emotions that the World Cup unleashed and the strangeness of Korea's attempts to play host to the world.

Now the World Cup is back again, and a gorgeous series of Nike ads (via Slate) serves as a reminder of the beauty inherent in the game itself.

It's a truism that Americans have never warmed to soccer, and perhaps we never will. It's true that there can be 45 minutes of nothing happening, which can be pretty dull to watch. Unless you care who wins. And that's the secret. If you couldn't give a shit whether Ukraine beats Tunisia to make it out of the first round, then watching the two teams toss the ball around listlessly for an hour while the score stays 0-0 will understandably be duller than televised bowling. But if Ukraine's fate is important enough to you that you will cry if they lose, that hour of stalling takes on the emotional intensity of an hour spent stalling Krushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis: What are they doing? When will they strike? Are the Tunisians gearing up for an attack, or are they just weakening? Oh, God! WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN?

At the moment, I can't see America mustering that kind of passion about an international contest we're unlikely to win. We can barely stay focused on the Olympics these days. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, our international rivalries have been reduced to feuds with warlords, gangsters and smalltime Oriental despots who know how to enrich uranium. The real passion will be in the countries that love soccer, like Brazil and Germany, who met in the 2002 final (Brazil won), and in countries like Korea, where simply playing in the Big Leagues is still cause enough for a burst of national pride.

Even so, I encourage you to watch a few of the games, and if possible, to follow the flow of the tournament. All the games will be broadcast in the US, on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 (here's the schedule). Give it a shot. Root for Korea, if that helps. Maybe bet a little. And then maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to enjoy the exquisite agony of nothing happening on a football pitch.

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Topic: Politics
Posted by: Josh

BoingBoing has a link up to the entire White House Correspondents Association Dinner on Google Video, including both the terrible Double You bit and Stephen Colbert's devastating keynote address.

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Topic: Music
Posted by: Josh

Hey Boy by Las 3 Divas (Las 3 Divas)

Nuestro Himno by Various Artists

World music blogs are few and far between, so I'm happy to have discovered SoundRoots, which today has some Mexican music up in honor of Cinco de Mayo.

Considering our current immigration kerfuffle in this country, I thought I'd focus on Mexican-American music. We begin with a peppy little Tex-Mex number, in English and Spanish, by Los 3 Divas. And then we've got the song that won't be on Dubya's iPod, "Nuestro Himno."

There's been a ridiculous amount of focus on this pleasant Spanish rendition of our terrible, terrible national anthem (which should really be changed to "America the Beautiful") by a bunch of pop stars. "Nuestro Himno" is to the immigration debate as Jessica Lynch is to the discussion of the Iraq War. Nevertheless, it's an interesting little artifact and not a bad listen.

Bonus World Music: Abayudaya

Hinei Ma Tov | Deuteronomy 32:39-43 by Various Artists (Abayudaya: Music From The Jewish People Of Uganda)

Anyone who went to Hebrew school or a Jewish summer camp knows the song "Hinei Ma Tov (הִנֵה מָה-טוֹב) (Psalm 133), but you've probably never heard it like this. That's because this version is performed by the Abayudaya, a small community of Luganda-speaking Ugandans who adopted Judaism in 1919. Though they are not ethnically related to other Jews and haven't been adopted into any existing Jewish community, they have taken on the obligations of kashrus, shabbos and circumcision, so I'm not sure whether they would be considered Jewish according to Halakha. In any case, their music is a curious hybrid of Hebrew scripture with African sounds.

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Topic: Personal
Posted by: Josh

It was three years ago today that Jenny and I were married. I suppose this is a reasonable occasion to note that my time with Jenny — which really began in the spring, summer or fall of 2001, depending on how you count — has been the happiest and most successful period of my life.

When Jenny and I first hooked up, our lives were in disarray. Jenny had been laid off from her dot-com job and would soon move back in with her parents in LA while she tried to work out some way to leave the country for a while. Meanwhile, I had been planning to move to Seattle with my previous girlfriend, and somehow it was obvious to neither of us that we needed to change this plan now that we'd broken up, she'd fallen in love with a new guy who happened to live in Seattle, and I'd fallen in love with our soon-to-be ex-roommate. So when Jenny left town, I had nebulous plans to start life over again in Seattle, she had plans to go teach English maybe in Latin America somewhere, and we sort of hoped we'd meet again in a couple of years.

And then one day it dawned on me that rather than moving to Seattle to help my ex-girlfriend set up a lovenest for herself and her new man, I could instead follow Jenny to whatever odd corner of the earth she was headed for.

It's a cliché, but at that moment I felt a tremendous weight lifting, as if someone took away a vast burden I hadn't realized I was carrying. Deciding to go away with Jenny was a big step, transforming our relationship from a tenuous what-if to a decidedly major commitment. But I knew Jenny would say yes when I asked if she wanted me along, and I knew it would work out. Going abroad with Jenny instead of moving to Seattle with my ex-girlfriend is the single cleverest idea I've ever had.

The weight that lifted that day has never returned. Life has had its ups and downs — indeed, life with shy, quiet li'l Jenny is quite the roller-coaster ride — but no matter what has happened, I've always been sure that at least one big part of my life is exactly right.

I love you, Jenny. Thank you for the best years of my life and for the promise of many more. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I'm just enormously pleased that it's gonna keep happening. This marriage thing is one hell of a deal!

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Topic: Politics
Posted by: Josh

I finally found a decent-quality video of the complete Stephen Colbert appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, at which he savaged the president to his face before moving on to a brutal assault on the press, all delivered in his trademark faux-O'Reilly style. It's beautiful in its way. Enjoy. (Via Slate.)

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Topic: Korea
Posted by: Josh

The BBC reports today on a Korean protester who has covered himself in 187,000 live bees to represent the 187,000 square meters of disputed oceanic rock known as Dokdo in Korean and Takeshima in Japanese. "The honeybee dares to abandon its life when enemies are attempting to attack, to protect its own home," explains Ahn Sang-Gyu, who is known for beekeeping stunts. "From now on, I hope these bees will contribute to protect our Dokdo." This may be even weirder than simply cutting off your finger in protest, although it's ultimately less drastic.

Visit Wkipedia to find out more than you ever wanted to know about the Liancourt Rocks (the most neutral name available for the disputed islets) and the rival claims to them. As to why people care enough to put themselves through serious personal harm over the issue, though, I just can't work it out.

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Topic: Politics
Posted by: Josh

This is a very small gesture, but since I couldn't be at today's protests for the rights of immigrants, I just want to say that I support them. They're an important show of strength from groups that have been too easy to ignore since their arrival in the United States over the last two decades.

Living in New York and working for the South Korean government, I've become intensely aware of one immigrant group in particular, but their story is in many ways typical: they came to the United States for economic opportunity or to escape political oppression at home, they found an economic niche and worked enormously hard to corner it, they quietly formed communities on the outskirts of the biggest cities, and now they're sending their kids to our universities.

Whatever you believe about integration versus cultural preservation, whatever your views on immigration and economics, it's crucial to remember that immigrants, legal and illegal, are human beings who live and work in your community. To a very great extent, everything you put in your body is handled by an immigrant. They are here and they need to be heard and reckoned with.

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Topic: Music
Posted by: Josh

Our favorite pint-sized rapper from the UK, Lady Sovereign, has some new material up in the VIP section of her website. I highly recommend the videos for "Blah Blah," "Hoodie" and "9 to 5," not to mention the live audio of "Public Warning." And to provide a little help in parsing her rapid-fire council housing patois, this SOV lyrics page is handy.

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Topic: Korean Language
Posted by: Josh

I've been thoroughly enjoying Korean Language in Culture and Society, a collection of essays on various aspects of the Korean language, from its elaborate system of status-based politesse to slang and proverbs.

A couple of early gems are the idiomatic phrases kkori-ch'ida (꼬리치다), literally "tail-wiggle," meaning "to seduce," and obŏ-hada (오버하다), literally "to overdo," which means what it sounds like. (My colleague Young-ae gave me an example of the latter: When her sister told her three-year-old daughter to take off his pants, he took off all his clothes. "Obŏ-haeyo (오버해요)!" she scolded — "You overdid it!"

But what I really love is this: when North Korea decided to purge the counterrevolutionary Chinese, Japanese and English loan-words from its language in favor of native Korean neologisms (or occasionally Russian loan-words), the term p'ama (파마), or "perm," became unacceptable. Instead, what the Dear Leader has atop his head, now mercifully free of bourgeois taint, is pokkŭm mŏri (볶음 머리), which literally means "fried hair."

North Korea: bringing dignity to the Korean people since 1945.

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Topic: United Nations
Posted by: Josh

Will Ban Ki-moon be the next secretary-general of the United Nations?

The foreign minister of the Republic of Korea is running hard to be Kofi Annan's replacement, and Korea Focus is calling him a favorite. Two early candidates, Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai and Sri Lankan peace negotiator Jayantha Dhanapala, have stumbled, leaving Ban as the most obvious Asian choice. And according to the informal rotation system, it's Asia's turn. America's ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, said early on that the rotation formula could be scrapped if no viable candidate emerged, but that's quite different from saying it must be scrapped, and Korea Focus seems to think Bolton's recent meeting with Minister Ban went well.

Still, the United Nations has tended to settle on dark-horse compromise candidates in the past, and chances are good that the next Secretary-General will be a name as familiar as Kofi Annan's in 1996. Outside of the Korean press, the only source I can find that touts Minister Ban as the likely next SG is The American Spectator, which I generally think is wrong about everything.

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