Hindu Dieties for Christmas

I had a few hours to myself in San Francisco the other day (a wonder in itself), and I happened across The Little Book of Hindu Dieties, a remarkable book in that it seems to conflate Shiva, Vishnu and the rest with the Power Puff Girls. I was extremely taken with the image of Kali, so cute! And yet with the severed-arm skirt and the head in her hand...

The Little Book is the product of Pixar's Sanjay Patel, working via his gheehappy site, where you can get books, prints and clothes with the images on them. I really wished I could get a t-shirt of the Kali in the book, but alas, kids' sizes only (these links here don't work but a fix is promised). The links page is of some interest, too.

Then I found that, of course, bOINGbOING had already showcased GheeHappy, including a plush Kali doll made by a friend of Patel's:


It was tempting to buy the book, given that my kids are big on Hindu mythology comic books, which tell the gazillion tales about the panoply of Hindu gods. My elder daughter used to even talk with strangers about "severe penances," which she learned about while reading the story of Parvati. That was always interesting to try to explain; lots of sidelong looks. The comics can be a great teaching tool, and very entertaining (though you may have to suffer the odd looks if your kids take them to heart). You can get hindu comics here, if you're interested.

In any case, this made me think about going to check out what's been happening with Nina Paley, who created Sita Sings the Blues, an indescribably fabulous set of animations which, last I saw, were just that: a series of wonderful shorts from the Ramayana which she was hoping to parlay into a feature film. Now I find she has done just that, to my intense joy - but guess what? They moved the copyright year back again. She is having trouble with rights for the songs.
[editor's note: This is what happens when you try to get a blog post out in very little time after not sleeping enough. I need to check my sources! I am still trying to "rediscover" the source where I found out about this... More soon. In the meantime, it looks like there will be a big fight in 2018 when they try to extend again.]


I have to say, copyright is a tricky business - and I do mean business. Every time it looks like Disney's oldest character, namely one Mickey Mouse, is about to go out of copyright, our obliging (but certainly not corrupt; never that) government takes it into their heads to extend the date when things go out of copyright. Why is this? No one knows. Surely it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Disney is so fabulously rich, that they can afford the most expensive lawyers to slap down independent artists and perhaps to lobby continuously about the copyright thing. No, there must be another reason.

I'm waxing sarcastic. Unlike me to be annoyed at something like this, but I have friends who have been on the wrong end of a Disney lawsuit. And I do keep hoping they'll lose the copyright one of these days. Everyone else has, throughout the history of copyright. It's supposed to be fair, right?

In Nina Paley's case, she built the shorts around songs which were due to go out of copyright, and then the dates moved were out of copyright, but then found she had to pay for synch rights - and of course, the person or corporation who held those rights is now asking far more than any individual could possibly pay. So theoretically she could be up as a felony criminal for using them without permission. Sigh. So it might never be released.


I despair at the fact that this fab-o movie came to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago but I missed it. The trailers look marvelous. Go check it out, and keep an ear to the ground about the copyright thing; Ms. Paley has a blog, a very smart and somewhat disillusioned chronicle of neat stuff. It's a crying shame it can't be released. The movie has won more awards than I've seen attached to a single animated work before. Stunning.

Here's the trailer, in case you wanted to see it:



Update: go see what Roger Ebert has to say about the movie!

They Say of the Acropolis...

I really, really try not to just pass on stuff that's floating around the Web, but this literally had me in tears. I don't laugh easily, or at least not like this. I do love Gilbert and Sullivan.

There is also, apparently, a movement afoot to get Stephen Fry knighted. Too late to sign the petition, though.

In the comments they wonder why American TV always cuts this kind of wonderful stuff out. Good point.

La Mongolfiera

I bought these in a flea market in France this summer. I think they're wonderful. La Mongolfiera means "the [hot air] Balloon" in Italian. What they were doing in France, and whether they were even really antiques, as the man was implying, I don't know - and I probably don't care. They're really fun, and that's enough for me. Click on them for more details...









And thanks to peacay, over at Bibliodyssey, for this link to a flickr set taken of sketches from Lyon, France - the best of which peacay himself showcased in his recent "Collected Miscellany" post. Marvelous.

My Own (Borrowed) Menagerie

My last post got me thinking, so here is a nominal set of interesting and strange animals I might consider putting around my Baroque pavilion.




• The Aye-Aye, a "native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. It is the world's largest nocturnal primate, and is characterized by its unique method of finding food; it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its elongated middle finger to pull the grubs out."


• The yeti lobster, a very recently-discovered creature which lives, of course, in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where all the really weird and interesting creatures come from nowadays.


• The cyclops kitten was an accident, and unfortunately didn't live very long. Not totally unheard-of, just less horrible than most.


• Pill Bugs, or woodlice, or roly-polies, are weirder than you think: they are actually crustaceans, related more closely to lobsters and shrimp and so on than to insects or spiders. They are one of the world's old, (relatively) unchanged species, much, much older than the species I think of as old, like sharks and kauri trees, and they have some pretty interesting and strange habits.


• I thought the Liger was a joke when I first heard about it, along with its relative the Tigon. Or at least, some kind of hoax. But no, it's not - and they are enormous, I don't know why.


• My favorite creature: the Tarsier. I have a tiny picture clipped from a magazine of a tarsier staring with its trademark surprised look at the camera with a big bug sticking out of its mouth. For some reason, it's been a symbol for me of beloved dorks everywhere, and has inspired me to go on being silly despite everything.


• The Star-Nosed Mole is just odd. Always has been, always will be.


• Leafy Sea Dragons are something I have always wanted to see. They are endangered because they are so particular about their environment and eager collectors are always trying to take them home (where they die). But in their home environment - unbeatable.


• I had to include a Komondor because, although they aren't particularly exotic, they have great hair. They do make you scratch your head and wonder how many other strange kinds of dogs you didn't know about? (And yes, they look like a tall version of Dougal, from the Magic Roundabout)


• Grimpoteuthis, or Dumbo Octopi, are benthic creatures, living at extreme depths (up to 400 meters), and are some of the rarest octopi. Plus they use at least three different types of locomotion. Cool.


• Blobfish. What can I say?

There are a few others who aren't quite weird enough, such as Cantor's Giant Soft-Shelled Turtle,


the Long-eared jerboa,


or Pink fairy Armadillos, but they're definitely strange. If I had space, I might consider them.



Come to think of it, many of the above creatures are a bit too attractive. I'd want to make my menagerie a bit more creepy, but the strangest and most disturbing creatures I know of are all parasites, which would make them difficult to display - except in jars, and that is really something more for a Cabinet.


Just for balance, though, perhaps I ought to include the Coconut Crab, a giant terrestrial hermit crab. I do find myself actually glad that I don't live where these creatures roam, cracking coconuts and garbage cans with their bare claws (thanks, Jeff!).

In any case, my beautifully-constructed, circular, conceptual menagerie needs only a beautiful (borrowed) pavilion to complete it, and I can go to sleep secure in the knowledge that I have expressed all the (borrowed) power and wealth I have to hand. Who needs royalty after all?





Thanks to World's Strangest Looking Animals for some of the pictures.

Wild Creativity: Muto, Animation on Public Walls

A friend of mine sent this link to Muto to me when I was in Croatia, but this is the first time I've actually had the bandwidth to look at it, and it's just wild. Check it out, but beware, some of it is a very tiny bit creepy-crawly, for those of you with delicate stomachs. But mostly it's just amazing.


Also, now that I'm in the land of DSL again, more posts to follow! Yay!

Clockwork in the Cold

Swiss-y Stuff, part 2


While the Val-de-Travers has so much to offer by way of absinthe history, it is also in these same Jura mountains where some of the finest clockmaking was done in the history of Europe.

I have a theory (heh-hem) about why the Swiss became such excellent clock-makers, and why it became so much of an industry in a country where the population is sparsely scattered and relatively isolated.

Thanks to AndreJenny

My theory (heh-hem) goes like this: imagine living in a place where you are trapped, indeed kept in idleness, for seven months or more of the year. Imagine your whole family in one very large house with three-foot-thick walls, often with the barn attached on the side or even above the family dwelling, filled with cows and hay, keeping you warm. Imagine how much you tire of each others' company, and how difficult it is to get to the other houses in your village when the wind is howling outside.

Imagine that you have time on your hands. The weather is crazy cold, and you have horrible cabin fever. You have a meticulous mind, keeping things clean and organized; and you are thinking of time, because time is something one counts when one is stuck inside all winter. Plus, where are you going to get income for the winter? Traditionally, farmers and village folk make things in the dark and snowy months, which they sell to bring in a little for those necessities which can't be stored away in the fall.


Now, if you learned how to make clocks - which was a craze in those days, everyone was buying them - think how interesting it would be, losing yourself in that small and meticulous world of rhythm and movement, of calculation and hand-eye coordination, a small world unto itself. Think how large and comfortable your house would appear when you'd been spending hours working in your little world. And, if your family and your regular work got too tiresome, you had that secret place of concentration - of communion, even - to return to.

I'd be willing to bet that the clock industry slowed down considerably during the summer months, when people were busy trying to get their houses in order, the weather is warm and everyone's outside working. But (heh-hem) this is simply my theory.

La Chaux-de-Fonds is famous for its MuséeInternational d'Horlogerie. The architect Le Corbusier was born here (and unfortunately much of the newer architecture seems to reflect this fact). The museum has a pretty good timeline for their collection on their website, color-coded for different types of clocks, with different technologies listed across the top. Very interesting (with some excellent examples, such as the rather graphic little watch from 1820 with the tiny animated picture of Jupiter seducing Callisto, accompanied by "an air of mechanical music").

The Cartier factory outside La Chaux-de-Fonds. I found it really strange, the industry in this part of Switzerland. All the famous, super-luxury watch people seem to be based here, but the factories are small and ineffably Swiss, with clean modern exteriors and usually sandwiched into a small village or out in a field somewhere, like this one is.

In Le Locle, a small town whose charm had clearly been substantially supplimented by the prosperity of its three-hundred-year-old watch industry, we went to see their lesser-known Musée d'Horlogerie before theoretically heading on to the big one in La Chaux-de-Fonds - which we never got to, because the things in this small museum, housed in an old chateau, were amazing, and the people were gracious and forthcoming.


First of all, before you even get into the museum there is a small room in the garden with a replica of ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī's Elephant Clock, done complete to every detail, and using al-Jazari's technology. There is a nice document explaining the technology, which is essentially a hollow hemisphere with a hole in the bottom, which gradually fills with water, tripping a falling ball which in turn lifts the hemisphere out of the water. It's very ingenious, and thrilling to see something of al-Jazira's in the flesh, so to speak.


Besides all the many, many beautiful clocks - engraved clocks, carved clocks, enameled or guilded or caged clocks - there was a whole room devoted to automata. Not large automata; small ones, from doll-sized dancers who whirl across the floor to a perfect foot-high old women who walks carefully on her own two feet with help from her cane, to tiny birds no more than an inch long who pop out of a hand-mirror and sing with real whistles. There were watches there, too, with extremely tiny automata of dancers and musicians and so on, and my favorite was a pair of segmented enamel and gold caterpillars, only slightly larger than life-sized, which hump their way very realistically along on whichever surface they are put.

Made by Francois Jurod in 2000 for La Semeuse coffee company.

The museum is known to be a gem, in that they house three very particular collections which contain some of the finest specimens of their kinds in the world. But some of their displays are temporary: on the bottom floor, for example, they had an exhibition of coffee technology - ancient machines for roasting and grinding, and a really great automaton of a Turk on a flying carpet pouring himself a cup of real (read: wet) coffee, which he then "drinks" so that his cup is empty again. The best part was the waving carpet, with its attendant, wonderful, mechanism.

On the top floor they had an almost overwhelming exhibit on the theory and nature of time and its measurement. Geological time, astronomical time, personal time (birth to death), the rise and fall of civilizations, chronological time such as calendars (perpetual calendars, lunar calendars, calendars from different cultures, etc.), almanacs, datebooks, and many more. There was an area devoted to "le temps approximatif": sundials, astrological instruments, and hourglasses. And then, of couse, the area with watches, gear-cutters, and precision watch-making tools, a compliment of the excellent display on the history of movements on the ground floor.


They have a really quite amazing film of the tiny automats all doing their stuff, one by one, in extreme closeup - worth seeing because then when you see the real thing you understand the amazing actions of their mechanisms. The film is interesting in its own right, and they sell it for 30 francs (about $20), but alas, they were out. They do accept money through the mail and will send you a copy if you do so - I will be getting a copy and I will try to post a sample so that you can see how great it is - I think they could do with the business.

Both towns, and indeed many small clock-making villages in between, are in the canton of Neuchâtel. The Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, in the lovely city of Neuchâtel, houses the amazing Jaquet-Droz Automata. You can go see the automata anytime (there is an accompanying film in several languages), but they only demonstrate them the first Sunday every month - it is the same man you see in the videos (the Writer, the Artist, and the Organ Player) doing the demonstration, and he will answer questions happily if you are willing to ask in French.

They are truly as wonderful as I had heard, and I was lucky enough to stumble on a special demonstration outside the usual time. The writer wrote, the artist drew, the man showed us their insides, and the organ-player played her tunes, her wooden fingers actually pressing the keys on her specially-made organ. Most wonderfully, my elder daughter and I sneaked back for a last look at the three pseudopeople and were astonished to find the organ-player sitting in the dimness breathing and tipping her head, long after the demonstration was over, the lights turned off, and everyone had gone home. Apparently her breathing and head movements are natural effects of the mainspring being allowed to wind down so that it doesn't stay tight all the time and lose its...well, springiness.

So we sat there in the dark and watched her eyes gleam slightly as she shifted in her seat, her chest rising and falling, silent and companionable. We kept her company for as long as we could, and then we went home to France.




Links

The organ player

The Writer

The inner workings of the Writer - a true early computer.

The Artist, who actually blows away the pencil crumbs...

The Rise and Fall of the Green Fairy

Swiss-y Stuff, part 1


On the spur of the moment we decided to go to Switzerland for a couple of days. True, it's four hours from Bourgogne, where we are staying, to the Jura, the Swiss mountains on the edge of France, but we had recently heard about an option for sleeping in the straw at farms around the Swiss countryside, so what had been unaffordable before was suddenly within our grasp.

So what do you think of when you think Switzerland? I had all sorts of programmed preconceptions which had gone completely unquestioned: I saw Switzerland as this country full of ultra-clean people who were money-minded and held themselves apart from the world. There was also, of course, Heidi and the sort of "Hills Are Alive" views (yes, I know that movie's about Austria); the low wooden houses and the Swiss chalets; ski resorts, cuckoo clocks, cheese and snow. Oh, yeah, and the Matterhorn. And yodelling.

However, when we got there I think my daughters summed it up: "I thought it would be all cold and..." said the elder, and the younger finished her sentence "...Swiss-y." Instead we found this place with a wild variety of - well, attractive - attractions: a nationwide system of excellent bike trails; old underground mills full of wooden gear-work; a cliff-walk, where you hang on ropes and creep along above a hundred foot drop; two separate luge ("la ligne fée") and toboggan runs; a strange entertainment where they take your bike up to the top of a mountain and then let you ride down real fast (1000 foot descent in 4 minutes); and the farm we stayed at had not only animals and so on but a zip line, a trampoline and wine with the (relatively) inexpensive swiss-french farm dinner.

All right, this is sounding like a travelogue. But when we left for this trip the thing that I had forgotten was that this was the canton of Neuchatel, and the town we accidentally chose to stay near was called Travers. As in, the Val-de-Travers. As in, absinthe country. And two valleys away? Le Locle and Chaux-du-Fond: the center of clock-making country.

So here we had two days in Switzerland, with nary a yodel nor cuckoo clock nor Matterhorn in sight. Instead, we had the farmer pouring out glasses of absinthe as an aperitif (and using the fresh spring water pouring into the horse trough to water it down). A local bakery had at least eight different labels of the stuff from local micro-distillers.


According to the label of La Motisanne, an artisan absinthe made by Roger Etienne (which by the way has the lot number written on the label by hand), "This home made elaboration is an authentic Absinth from the original region of this drink, the Val-de-Travers. Distilled to a recepy [sic] of the time of prohibition it develops a remarkable balance and an exceptional harmony of plants, which is the essence of its reputation. Ingredients: Alcohol, water, big and small Wormwood, aromatic plants."

Absinthe has, in the past twenty years or so, acquired a reputation as a fascinating drink, given its spotty history and the extreme rituality associated with its drinking. The traditional French way of drinking is to pour it into the bottom of a special fat, conical stemmed glass. Then a slotted spoon is suspended across the rim of the glass with a lump of sugar on it, and icy water is poured through sugar and spoon to sweeten the drink. Proper absinthe will louche, or go cloudy, when water is added.


The myth of absinthe's mind-altering properties is based on the idea that a chemical in wormwood called thujone causes hallucinations and other mental instability, and even addiction. Thujone works on the GABA receptors in mammals: "Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)... the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian central nervous system.... disrupted GABAergic signaling has been implicated in numerous and varied neurological and psychiatric pathologies including movement and anxiety disorders, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and addiction."


Nowadays, it is held that thujone taken in large doses doesn't do much other than cause muscle spasms - and in mouse overdose it has caused convulsions. But it seems it doesn't actually make you hallucinate. There is some speculation that much of the bad rep that absinthe had came from the fact that there were many inferior types of absinthe out there being drunk, especially, by bohemians that couldn't afford the good stuff and, like bathtub gin, it did rot their brains - but not because of the wormwood. It was more likely due the poisonous additives and colorants used, or the fact that the old stuff tended to contain 70 to 80 percent alcohol, as opposed to 40% for more standard brandies and whiskeys.

There is some evidence, however, that the herbal elements in absinthe actually have a mild speedball effect: some of them are stimulants and some are sedatives, and the resulting effect is one of heightened alertness and calmness. Wormwood is an antiparasitic, and some of the herbs also contain painkillers. So you can see why the drink was so popular in the 19th century, when the advent of the Industrial Revolution was filling the cities with soot and stink, and the average worker, without laws governing how long their work-days were, hardly had time to sleep at night.


"According to legend, absinthe began as an all-purpose patent remedy created by Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor living in Couvet, Switzerland, around 1792... [but] a certain Major Dubied acquired the formula from the Henriod sisters and in 1797, with his son Marcellin and son-in-law Henry-Louis Pernod, opened the first absinthe distillery, Dubied Père et Fils, in Couvet. In 1805 they built a second distillery in Pontarlier, France, under the new company name Maison Pernod Fils. Pernod Fils remained one of the most popular brand of absinthe up until the ban of the drink in France in 1915."

"Absinthe’s popularity grew steadily through the 1840s, when absinthe was given to French troops as a malaria treatment. When the troops returned home, they brought their taste for absinthe with them. It became so popular in bars, bistros, cafés, and cabarets that, by the 1860s, the hour of 5 p.m. was called l’heure verte (“the green hour”). Absinthe was favored by all social classes, from the wealthy bourgeoisie to poor artists and ordinary working-class people.


"By the 1880s, mass production had caused the price of absinthe to drop sharply. This, combined with a wine shortage [due to vine death from grape phylloxera] in France during the 1880s and 1890s, caused absinthe to become France’s drink of choice. By 1910, the French were drinking 36 million litres of absinthe per year, a quantity that was greater than their consumption of wine."[wiki]

In a curious twist, the winemaker's association, looking to the horrors of Prohibition in America, decided to take control and steer the temperance movement in France. Accordingly, they got together with the teetotalers and made the green fairy into the fall guy, working hard to publicly associate absinthe with crime, poor health and degeneracy. Various anti-absinthe people, thick in the movement, were inspired to produce scientific studies "proving" absinthe's evil properties:

"One of the first vilifications of absinthe was an 1864 experiment in which a certain Dr. Magnan exposed a guinea pig to large doses of pure wormwood vapor and another to alcohol vapors. The guinea pig exposed to wormwood experienced convulsive seizures, while the animal exposed to alcohol did not. Dr. Magnan would later blame the chemical thujone, contained in wormwood, for these effects." [wiki]


The campaign was so successful in changing the popular conception of the drink that by 1915, when the French finally banned it, it was illegal in most of Europe - and the lingering cultural effects were relatively far-reaching. The word "louche", for example, now means "Of questionable taste or morality; decadent." The roots are "French, from Old French losche, squint-eyed... from Latin luscus, blind in one eye.)" It looks from the outside like the term louche, as applied to absinthe, comes from a reference to the whitening eye of cataract, but the French dictionary carries all three meanings: squinty, dissolute, and cloudy. It would be interesting to see if one of the meanings evolved according to the media frenzy of a lost era.

Being careful and conscientious people, the Swiss make of absinthe was considered to be of the finest quality. Their product is clear, being the product of distillation, and therefore referred to as la Bleue, a term originally used for bootleg absinthe but now applied liberally to most Swiss product. The green absinthes come from a process wherein some of the herbs are then soaked in the distilled absinthe. This adds color (chlorophyll) and some additional subtleties of flavor.

I once tried to make my own absinthe by distilling it in vodka with an old still my father gave me, following a recipe I found God knows where, but it tasted awful. The exact ratio of herbs is important, and some of the herbs aren't available in the US. So now I stick to the occasional attempt at perfume manufactury, and hope it doesn't taint the still.

Absinthe has had a resurgence in legality now. Some places, such as Spain and the Czech Republic, never banned it, but also didn't seem to have the knack of making the proper distilled stuff, producing instead something called "Bohemian-Style Absinth", or just "Absinth" (without the "e"), which is inferior in flavor and apparently not too good for you. But most of the places which once produced it - and then banned it - have now repealed their laws, except for the French, who curiously don't allow liquor labeled "absinthe" to be sold in France, but do allow the same thing to be sold as long as the label says "liqueur à base de plantes d’absinth" or some such. But they do label it as absinthe when exporting it. Go figure.


As of 2005 the people in the Val-de-Travers are able, once again, to legally produce their traditional drink. Little mountain villages like Côte-aux-Fées (in English, Fairyside), which were nothing but a collection of Swiss-style farmhouses (uh, and a small and discreet building housing the company headquarters/factory of Piaget) are now proud to show everyone they are "the Cradle of Absinthe." And my, how the Green Fairy has changed.




Part 2: And Clocks on the Side - coming soon.


Links:

The Virtual Absinthe Museum has lots of interesting stuff, including a good selection of period posters and drawings about absinthe which you can buy.

One of the best books I've seen on the subject - Absinthe: History in a Bottle. Great stuff:

Decrepit But Not Abandoned

Walking on Marjan, the high hill-park here in Split, I have walked past this fascinating spot a number of times.



It's rare, in the States, to see glass greenhouses anymore - and rarer still to see one in such a wonderful state of organic funk. I wondered what this was for ages before I went to investigate.


I found that it was the Botanički Vrt, or the Botanical Gardens, a largely futile exercise in signage, as it is crumbling and seems to have very little in the way of exotic plants. There are several greenhouses, of which this is the largest (the others seeming to be a poor storage area for a motorcycle and a bunch of cast-off window-frames). The gardens are tiny and pretty, but this greenhouse held my imagination. Walking around it was an exercise in mysterious snooping.





After I'd been there for awhile a guy came out of one of the buildings to smoke a cigarette. He looked at me curiously, then asked me a question in Croatian. After awhile I realized he had unlocked it for me, so I went inside, to a scene of curiously domestic disintegration and decay.




Proof positive that it's always worth investigating...