Māori Ki Te Ao

Get ready for an autochthonous weekend with Stan Walker.

 

Low Life

Oh Hee-dong and his uncle Gwan-seok
(click any image to enlarge)

Low Life is a Korean TV heist caper set in the 1970s. It starts with a man, Gwan-seok, and his nephew Oh Hee-dong getting out of prison. They're nothing more than a couple of petty criminals. While in prison they had heard a story of a fisherman who had brought up a valuable piece of pottery in his net. The pottery had come from a wreck of an old Chinese vessel that was carrying gold and precious Song and Yuan dynasty pottery to Japan which had sunk in Korean waters in 1323. 

Gwan-seok decides that they'll try to dive on the wreck to recover some of the pottery which is extremely valuable. He connects with a shady pottery dealer, who deals in forged as well as authentic pottery, to use him as his fence. 

To fund the endeavor the fence connects him with Yang Jung-sook, the gold-digging wife a rich developer. She has her own agenda. Her husband is building an urban complex, and she plans on upping her social status by adding a museum to it where she will display the pottery. Well, display some of it in the front, the rest of the museum will be full of forgeries, and she'll sell the remaining pieces to turn a tidy profit.

Yang Jung-sook the financer for the looting

Gwan-seok gathers up his nephew and some flunkies and heads to the coastal village he'll run the salvaging operation from. The boat captain he intends on using, who is perhaps the sketchiest character on the show, decides his boat is too small and so he has to borrow his cousin's larger vessel. 

Everybody in the fishing village knows about the wreck, and so they quickly figure out what the boys from Seoul are up to. The local goons aren't happy to see Gwan-seok's gang roll into town and so a fight soon ensues. 

However, older heads prevail and they decide, due to the stakes of the operation, to pool forces because the job is too big to do alone. Regardless, bad blood simmers between the two groups which threatens to break into more fighting at any moment. Oh, they also bribe the local police to turn a blind eye to what they are up to. 

The Seoul goons face-off against the bumpkin goons

As the show goes on it becomes apparent that they really don't know what they are doing. They have no idea of how to loot a sunken ship, so most of their plans go completely awry and they try to fix things by brute forcing it with more people. This only deepens their problems because more people mean more shares to be divided, and dividing shares, which is already a complex enough problem, is made worse by their greed and mistrust of each other. And that mistrust is well deserved, because these dirtballs would, and do, back-stab each other in an instant.

Of course, it all goes pear-shaped, and watching things go off the rails is a lot of the fun of the show. It's well-done: nicely filmed, written, and acted. It is certainly worth watching. I saw it on Disney, I'm not sure if you could find it elsewhere. 

Their fine salvage ships

     

Baseball paintings

Click any image to enlarge

Now that the World Glass, or World Pot, or whatever that soccer tournament is called is over we can get back to more interesting and exciting sports. I'll admit to watching none of the World Dish matches. However, through some sort of cultural osmosis I figured out that, since penalty shots offer the highest odds of scoring, the most popular play is to flop on the ground and fake an injury to try to get a penalty shot. It sounds screwy to me, but what do you expect of a sport that uses feet instead of hands with their evolutionarily advanced opposable thumbs?

Anyway, since summer is upon us baseball teams, unless they've already bumbled their way out of contention, are entering the pennant race. So, to flush our memories of the World Cutlery matches, I offer up paintings of people playing the fine sport of baseball. They're mainly American, but since baseball is popular in Asia as well, I've also added in a few Japanese baseball paintings. 

Johnny Guitar

Get ready for an overblown weekend with Anastasiya Norenko,
Pavel Velikohatsky, Angelina Kharchuk, Tala Siekierzynska and Ekaterina Serbina

 

Preparing a meal in rural Nepal

The video is from a valley in eastern Nepal. It starts with the grandparents grinding corn and millet for flour. Their grandkids, who are visiting during a school holiday, gather fruits and greens. They tend to their animals and then gather to cook and eat a meal.

The valley they're in is very lush. I always pictured Nepal being nothing but snowy mountain tops with sherpas and Yeti running about. However, where they live it is very green with a lot of foliage. 

  

The Macchiaioli painters

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The Macchiaioli painters were active in Florence, Italy in the mid 19th century. They were revolutionaries who supported the fight for the unification of Italy. They broke from the academic style of painting and, through their use of color and form, are considered proto impressionists who emerged a decade before the more famous French impressionists who followed.  

Members of the Macchiaioli at the Caffè Michelagnolo

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Get ready for an occultationing weekend with Angie McMahon.

 

Walking in Yangon

Yangon is what the old city of Rangoon is currently called. In 1989 the military junta changed its name, as well as changing the country's name from Burma to Myanmar. The name changes business gets tiresome, but I guess since we changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, we can't complain too much.   

At any rate, the walk is through some very busy main and side streets. There were a tremendous number of food stalls everywhere. In my post on eating in ancient Rome, it was stated that the Romans primarily ate street food because their apartments weren't really set up for cooking -- I wondered if that wasn't the case in this city?

The buildings were a bit run down looking, with burglar bars even on upper story windows which is never a good sign. However, the people were dressed in new looking clothes and there were nice cars parked about. I'm guessing it was a middle-class neighborhood.

 

William James Bennett

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William James Bennett (1787−1844) was born and trained in art in England. In 1816 he moved to the United States, where the bulk of his work was produced. He is best known for using a printing method called aquatint. That is a method where acid is used to etch the plate which results in broad tonal areas which resemble watercolor painting. 

Edited to add: these images are from the Meisterdrucke website. You can reproductions at it. There are more at the link.

Georgia On My Mind

Get ready for a peachy weekend with Andrzej Fenner.

 

One of my greatest fears is...

Monkeys. As a Floridian I can't begin to tell you the number of nights I've laid awake worrying about monkey hordes overrunning my fair State. We already have pythons, kudzus, and snowbirds; we don't need to add felonious little primates to the mix. 

I had planned on spending my Golden Years sitting on my porch sipping on mint julips, but increasingly I fear it will end up being a desperate defense of my homestead against vociferous monkey flocks. Racoons are bad enough, but these creatures with their little primate fingers and black hearts will terrorize any neighborhood they visit.

Why, oh why, do my retirement years have a simian Sword of Damocles hanging over them?

 

Paul Sérusier's paintings

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Paul Sérusier (1864-1927) was a French post-impressionist painter. In 1888 he joined an artist's colony and was closely associated with Paul Gaugan. I can't say that I am a fan of his color palette. He seems to have grayed-down his colors and some of his works look a bit muddy as a result. However. that may just be an artifact of the reproductions of his works.

Paul Sérusier by G Michelet

Listen to the World Spin

Get ready for a vertiginous weekend with Paper Wings.

 

A fool's errand

Stone Operation by Rembrandt van Rijn
(click image to enlarge)

A Daughter of Eve - Christina Rossetti

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
  And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
  A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
  Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
  It's winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
  And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:—
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
  I sit alone with sorrow.

 

Paintings of convenience stores

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Convenience stores are ubiquitous. They are small markets that serve everyday needs: drinks, food, snacks, toiletry, aspirin and other medicines, and in the U.S. gasoline pumps. 7-11 started in Asia and spread to the States, the Philippines have their sari sari stores, and small utilitarian markets are everywhere.

A River Flowing Away

Get ready for a bidding farewell weekend with Colectivo Panamera and Georgina.

 

Making money in Argentina

I'm sorry if you're an aspiring entrepreneur hoping to get tips on some wackadoodle South American get rich quick scheme. This post isn't that. Rather it is a look at the innerworkings of the Argentinian mint as it produces pesos. The video doesn't really make it clear what the steps of producing the notes are, but it is very nicely filmed.

 

Paintings of 4th of July celebrations

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It is 4th of July weekend, so here are some paintings of 4th of July celebrations. Enjoy.

Happy 250th

Below is a post I frequently put up on the 4th of July. I think Americans forget just how radical the Declaration of Independence is. "All men are created equal..." is very influential, and very destructive of the old order.   

The normal state of human affairs is for societies to divide into hierarchies, with the favored elites on the top, and the rest of us strung out below. Today you can see that old order still striving to exert itself. With our credentialed elites jetting off to Bali while they would like nothing less than to cram the rest of us into apartments where they could, for our own good of course, regulate, surveil and dictate terms to us.

The struggle continues and yet, for now at least, "all men are created equal... " is the fulcrum the world balances on.

Above is the song Dimonkransa sung by Myra Andrade of the Cape Verde Islands. Cape Verde received their independence from Portugal on July 5th, 1975. The liberation movement was led by the socialist African Party of Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV). Andrade's father was a member of it, and in fact she was born in Cuba.

Upon independence Cape Verde was a single party government, but in 1990 at a party congress the PAICV approved the introduction of multiparty democracy. In the election that followed the opposition fared well, and Cape Verde has evolved into a stable multi-party democracy.

However, this is not a post about her politics, nor the sort of third world socialism that bubbles through the undeveloped world. It seems to me there is a deeper strata, a bedrock so to speak, which lies under the languid melancholy of her lyrics.

It was said that democracy,
Lopsided democracy,
It was said that democracy
Was like a hidden treasure,
But now that it has been found.
We have all opened our eyes
And each one, relying on his judgment,
Confidently declared that what was round was in fact square,
And went to work, with a great many theories,
To prove that he was right.

(lyrics from the version she sung on her first album Navega)

Andrade is ill at ease with democracy, but for social rather than political reasons. Early in the song she calls it 'lopsided democracy' and as its lyrics unfold her complaint is that each person, not matter how foolish they are (and she clearly thinks many if not most of them are fools), now express a cacophony of opinions and arguments that bury the truth. 

She ends the song singing of English businessman and listing names from Cape Verde's past, some who have been elevated and some who she fears are being forgotten and expresses distress at this reordering of authority. 

Stripped to its bone, the song is about a lost elite. Andrade is expressing nostalgia for a short-lived one-party rule and for an escape from European domination. Of course, it is her party that should rule and she now makes her home in Paris. Perhaps it is she that is lopsided, rather than all of the happy fools she mocks?

The time will come when old Náxu’s opinions
Will not be held in higher esteem than those of a babe in arms.
People will come together and cry: enough!    

Americans forget how revolutionary we are. Jefferson's "all men are created equal..." is both intoxicating and destructive. It is a hell of a thing not to have to step into the gutter to clear the sidewalk for a swaggering aristocrat. Andrade is intimidated by and dismissive of people who have opened their eyes, and each one, relied on their own judgment, but a free man knows better.

As for coming together and crying "enough"? That is exactly what our 4th of July celebrates. Happy 4th of July to you all.

America the Beautiful

Get ready for a flag waving weekend with Lina Frances.