Love, today, as any other day

This blog has moved to a new address. Please visit  Chronotopia.

It’s a beautiful day today in Chronotopia. That’s the day when She will put on a gorgeous white dress and meet her Beloved, and they will get married, as they have dreamed for so long. But they won’t be alone in their celebration of love. They will be joined by ten thousand other couples on the city square. You see, all of them will be married at the same time and all will pronounce their vows together, in a chorus. That’s because today is the Day of Love in Chronotopia. It’s the official day when couples declare their love for each other, so all have to get married on that day. As an added bonus, they’ll also have their anniversary on that same day. How romantic, right?

Molas from San Blas Island – a traditional feminine art with a global reach

This blog has moved to a new address. Please visit Chronotopia.

Molas, a traditional female shirt of the Kuna people of coastal Panama, are an interesting case of a traditional art with a special role in today’s globalized culture. Kuna people have an unique culture that has survived centuries and although their lands are a popular tourist destination, they have kept their traditions and customs, as well as their group identity and unity.

Photo: Rita Willaert

Molas are made of a back and front textile panel stitched together, each of them made of small pieces of colorful strips of fabric, forming an intricate pattern. The designs range from simple to very elaborate and the themes can be abstract, flowers and animals, mythological and political. Actually, even though now they are a from of art identified with Kuna culture, molas’ origin came with colonization and they are in fact a colonial tradition. They came into existence to replace the designs Kuna women used to paint on their own bodies. When Spanish missionaries came to the islands of today’s Panama some 150 years ago and introduced an European type of clothing, those designs were transferred to the shirts Kuna started wearing. Here are some examples of molas with abstract geometric, flower and animal and mythological patterns.

Travel photography

This blog has moved to a new address. Please visit Chronotopia!

I dislike the term. It can be unfair and even arrogant because it puts the emphasis on the personal experience of the photographer rather than the subject. And so it patronizes the subject to a large extent. I understand that all artistic expression is about the artist’s point of view. However, in this case almost all photography is travel, in a sense. Every kind of photography is exploration, maybe related to a literal, even if short travel,  and presents the point of view of the artist. But it is not necessarily called travel photography.

For example, nobody really lives on the Grand Canyon and you have to literally visit it to take a picture of it, yet those pictures are called landscape photography, not travel.  If I don’t know much about a subject, say, cowboys, but live in a cowboy area and decide to take pictures of cowboys on Sunday, is this travel photography? Why is the term only applied to people going on vacation, basically to places considered exotic? I don’t think all pictures of the Eiffel Tower were made by native Parisians, yet they are not labeled “travel”, unless it is a snapshot of a tourist in front of it.

How important is truth in a story?

This blog has moved to a new address. Please visit Chronotopia!

The case of Herman and Roma Rosenblat’s love story and what critics called their “fake memoir” definitely makes us reevaluate the narrative role of truth in a story.

Why is it important that a memoir be a true accounts of its author’s life? Obviously, it reflects the way its author remembers it. Yet as we know, the list of memoirs pulled by their publishers grew by one last week to include Angel at the Fence by Herman Rosenblat. He had told a purportedly true story about his concentration camp experience except for one little detail: he made up the girl coming to the fence, throwing apples over it to help him survive. Then, as told by him, he met the same girl on a blind date years later, they recognized each other and married.

Why the literary and publishing scandal? Isn’t it agreed by all a memoir is a partial version of a personal reality, rife of inaccuracies and bias?

Rituals for ringing in a New Year

ViaMoi

This blog has moved to a new address. Please visit Chronotopia!

The tradition to celebrate a New Year is perhaps universal, although not the precise date of its occurrence, which can be the winter solstice, the end of harvest time in the fall, the beginning of spring.

But what about that special moment announcing the actual arrival of the New Year? Is it important, how is it chosen and how is it marked? How do people actually ring it in? After all, it is the culmination of the festivities, the moment the New Year is considered to be officially here. It is the threshold dividing the Old from New, marking the transcendental step into the new and unknown.

So, it is only logical that special attention be given to that particular moment. The beginning of the New Year in different cultures may be at midnight, for cultures that rely on the clock. Or it can be at sundown, the coming out of a new moon, or perhaps even at sunrise, in cultures that mark time through natural phenomena.

Textual food criticism

This blog has moved to a new address. Please visit Chronotopia at the new place!

There was time when each kitchen had the same, single authoritative cook book, placed in its center on a little lectern and consulted with respect. Or, alternatively, some people owned the handwritten recipes coming from their grandmothers, copied word by word with care, kept in a wooden box and transmitted faithfully to the next generation. The cookbook publishing business was dull and predictable and maybe it wasn’t really a business.

What’s so wrong with Starbucks?

This blog has moved to a new address. Please visit the new Chronotopia!

I know many people around here who are not happy with Starbucks. They like to criticize it while still patronizing it. Well, I think Starbucks is the wrong target for the socially, culturally and aesthetically sensitive crowd. I don’t find much wrong with Starbucks, actually I like it.

Some people say it is expensive, but there are so many other overpriced indulgences in the world that cost much more. Plus, a simple solo espresso at Starbucks is actually dirt cheap.

Others say what’s wrong is that it is a chain. They criticize the concept of chainness itself. Yes, but wrong as it is, Starbucks’s chainness introduces it in more places in the US without actually forcing the local residents to buy it.

El idioma castellano es machista?

This blog has moved to a new topos/address. Please visit the new Chronotopia!

This witty list of terms in Spanish in their feminine and masculine forms and their related meanings has provided my students with lots of fun – and insights about language. The fun works if you know Spanish, though…

****************

El idioma castellano es machista?

The Mexican experience, interpreted through food

Photo: Gin Fizz

This blog has moved to a new topos/address. Please visit the new Chronotopia!

In Mexican culture, you don’t just eat, you experience life through food. So, it is obligatory that you experience it communally, but if you don’t cook Mexican at home and you resort to restaurant ersatz, you need assistance to recreate the communality. Mexican restaurants in the USA are never just places to eat your vegetables and R&B (rice and beans, for those who wonder what role rhythm & blues has to play in a restaurant menu). They are your local Mexican agora where, besides the get-together, debate and exchange, you also get to eat. Quietly, Mexico is colonizing the USA under the guise of providing a safe space to enjoy chicken fajitas and mole, because the space thusly created in those restaurants is simply a recreation of Mexican space, with all the details: the colorful plazas, the sunlit streets, the noises and angles of city life itself.

In memory of one of the best animators in the world

This blog has moved to a new topos/address. Please visit the new Chronotopia!

Film made in 1972.

Donyo Donev (1929-2007), cartoonist, animator and director, and a wise man.