eveninghawk’s links

I hadn’t realized that it’s been 24 years since the assassination of Romero. I remember watching a movie about the whole thing in high school for Spanish class, since Mrs. Reilley wanted us to be aware of the Spanish speaking world in more than just “Me gustan chicos guapos” terms. That woman was a phenomenal teacher and was the most unobvious activist I had ever met. She was someone pushing for better responsibility and quality in education in a way that my brain was only beginning to understand back then. Of course, at that point I was the only high school student she had ever caught reading Kozol. We had a mutual deep-seated like for each other.

When I think of Romero, for some reason, my brain conjures up images of Ruben Blades “El Padre Antonio y Su Monagillo Andres.” Not the same story at all, but another sad ending in a world that too few people think about.

What I love about Romero is that he always had words of hope in a time that seemed so absent of hope to those around him. This is an excerpt from a related prayer posted on WorldChanging:

This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God¡¯s grace to enter and do the rest.

This reminds me so much of the words from a friend of mine, Andre. I hope and hope and hope, and believe, that we can make progress, that there is hope.

Worldchanging is a clean looking journal looking at things that are improving the world. For me, who reads the news and wants to give up even though I am active about a lot of things, this makes me feel like I’m not alone and there are many people out there doing amazing things. I like to know about stuff like this in a world where failures make bigger headlines.

I really liked this piece on the pot-in-pot design for a low-tech fridge that is helping people in Nigeria. Glad to see that Mohammed Bah Abba was rewarded with a Rolex award.

I used to play with pill bugs all the time as a kid, and that was the name I was taught to call them. Course, I floated around to Hinterlands and saw the biggest pillbugs I’ve ever seen.

Things I learned:

Boing boing pointed to this great piece from David Gaddis titled “Piercing”. Considering I lived for a year with someone who was a body modification buff, this is a great piece that examines reactions in silence.

Finished reading Stephen King’s Gunslinger. The book is a fun romp with excellent twists of language and plot, jumping timelines very gracefully. I admire that and followed along easily as a reader, though I’m not sure what new twists the more recently revised version would bring to light. The book also has some really neat engravings that give a great feel to the whole thing, making a neat ensemble.

Aside from the language, I like the sense the neat society constructed in the story, even though that society is at its end. While the reader is learning a lot about the world and the gunslinger, the lack of information isn’t frustrating, and the story doesn’t feel rushed. The gunslinger, with his slow piecing together of things, seems somehow smarter than us all. It’ll be fun to move on to book two.

Anil Dash has made yet another insightful observation. The hospitality industry is obsessed with giving us ice, and why is this?

I thought much on it, and realized that this is a pretty weird phenomenon. Even in time share places the ice machines are everywhere. That’s a tad more understandable for me, since folks are filling up their coolers for day trips.

Thankfully, everything is boiled to cleanliness in China, so there are no ice machines here. Granted, I take ice in a drink or two when I can get it, but I have expat friends who avoid ice as though it were the devil incarnate. The idea being that the water may not have been boiled long enough, and everything bad floating around in it may not be dead.

My feeling is this: I live in a city where the heavy metals are more of an issue than actually having a bug do you in, and those are do to lousy old pipes. Boston has lousy old pipes to, so I’m likely to get the same toxic dosage in the Boston area as I am in Shanghai. Add to that the fact that I’m lazy. If I were somewhere with more severe problems then I would be more choosy (as was the case when I visited Gansu province, and other parts of China). I do remind myself, though, that in the end it’ll catch up with us. If it isn’t water laced with all kinds of wonderful grubs to get into your gut, then it’s got enough chlorine that our intestines will be pearly white before the end of our days.

I edit a zine for my writer’s group. It’s a small, quarterly zine featuring short work from the writers in our group.

This month’s issue is up and available for everyone’s perusal. There won’t be another one until June, so enjoy. I’d love to know your thoughts.

This afternoon I saw a movie called “画魂” (Hua Hun, or Soul of a Painter). The movie stars GongLi, and as expected is a very sad, rather tragic, and moving story. While some people find her grating, she has a great talent on the screen, and it was fun to see director Zhang Yimou in a small role as well. I was interested to see that the movie was directed by a woman, Huang Shuqin. Considering the amazing works of art by Pan Yuliang, it is sad to see people more interested with her illustrious life, her beginnings in a brothel and marriage as a second wife.

Her work and outstanding place as an artist, as a woman who worked so hard to make it, to stand by her artwork, even at the risk of her life, her happiness. In fact, her perseverence and strength as an artist took a lot away from her, but she still let the art move through her. She also worked so hard to be seen in her own country. This, to me, is more interesting than her lurid past. Her amazing eye for the female figure, her use of color, her daring crossing of art styles from Europe and China. Those are what make me see her as an amazing woman.

The China Daily wrota about Pan Yuliang’s work, but fell into the same trap of sensationalism with the title, “From Red Lights to Painting the Town Red“. CRI (China Radio International) has also written about her work in a segment on culture.

Her work truly is really neat, though my words don’t really do enough justice. The movie is worth seeing, if only for it’s true to life moments and moving bits of simplicity. At times the verbal sparcity and packed meaning overwhelmed me.

This is an online gallery of some of her work. The fan dance, and this piece called woman are some of my favorit pieces. I also really like the self portrait seen in the CRI piece.

Pan Yuliang is someone I can say I admire and hope to learn more about.

Finished reading The Map That Changed the World, by Simon Winchester.

First off, I admire Simon Winchester as a researcher and a writer. This is not his most outstanding piece. I think his piece on the Yangtze River is a better book, overall. While he gets a little caught up in the voice of this book, the story is great, and touches the reader best when the focus is on people. I believe this is because Winchester is a little too close to the subject, and possibly a little too excited to pear down the words to the necessary. Even though parts of the book took me longer to get through, I really liked it, and Winchester’s passion for geology and William Smith’s work is infectious. I even wrote about my feelings on the subject in a blog entry. Winchester manages to put the information across in a captivating way without glorifying the more mundane aspects of William Smith.

The book brings something to mind for me personally: we don’t often talk about the age of the world and humanity’s relative youth in tha larger context. In fact, we rarely talk about former more diverse times than the ones we live in. We don’t think about it that way. We think about tar pits, sabre tooth tigers, Jurassic Park, and today. Today must be the best there is to offer, second only to the future, right?

Something else I think we mistakenly ignore is the history of science in a comparative context. I hadn’t realized how young geology and paleontology are in comparist with Chemistry and Physics. Why don’t we learn these things in school?

In some ways it parallels my fascination with the history of the English language, something that Winchester and I share in common. I am anxious to see what he has to say about the Oxford English Dictionary.

I wonder how many amazing people, like William Smith, we blantantly overlook in out thinking big thinks.

For more info, alan mentioned the book in cogdogblog back in December 2003. He picks out the really key points. Smith manages to bring geology into a more scientific practice, despite its implications for fundamentalists, and despite lowly class origins. Granted, the latter got the better of him for most of his life, but in the end he received the recognition he deserved. Like Alan, I appreciate a book that reads well and manages to teach me things.

I was truly pleased to read about Anil Dash’s Hair Theory. If you know me, you know that my hair is something that both amazes and frustrates me, and people seemed compelled to touch it. Granted, I’m usually pretty nice about it if you ask first, but here in China it has been challenging to deal with people who touch my hair without even saying anything. You might think “Oh, that must be people who can’t speak English, who assume you can’t speak Chinese.” This is not the case. I get it from everyone, from the people who clean the floor in McDonald’s, to the high school kids I teach English to (and I know they can ask me in English about my hair).

Regardless, I usually give a sigh and let people have their way with my hair.

What I really like about the post is the idea of coming to terms with one’s own hair. In a bigger way, coming to terms with the natural tendency of things. It took me a long time to come to terms with my hair. And here I am at 26 finally willing to let my hair be itself and work with that rather than against it. I only hope that I am doing the same with myself.

Where the theory takes it a bit further is in talking about groups of people. This is where I really had my interest piqued. It says so much about groups I’ve worked with (and continue to work with today). Our world is full of critters of habit. Change is not easy, or in some cases even possible. It’s a good point worth remembering.

Funny to get all that from hair.