Indie Vibes & World Tribes: music, film, travel and...: September 2015

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Terakaft: New Album 'Alone', Still Second Best, and that's good...

Any discussion of the musical genre 'Tuareg Desert Blues” starts and

ends with one word: Tinariwen. They basically invented the genre,
built the playbook and have since spawned dozens of friends, fans,
and imitators from all adjacent regions, from Libya to Burkina Faso,
from Bombino to Tamikrest, usually with native costume, always with
jangly guitars. I've even considered learning the language myself
just to get some lyrical insight...

Saturday, September 19, 2015

DVD review: Rosewater and Julep, Movies and Reality, USA and Aryan Iran...

Imagine a place out on the steppes of Asia, the stepping stones to Europe, maybe the Caucasus, or somewhere farther east, out on the outskirts of the civvies and the cities, say maybe 5-6000 years ago, with the climes warming up and paths leading north, where a group of people probably only a few thousand strong, not so urban, but not so stupid, playing around with wheels and ales and axles and weapons, found a will and a way in this world, spreading outward until they gradually lost contact with each other and their languages became harder to understand, eventually to become the Celts of Europe and the Persians of Asia and the Greeks of the Mediterranean, and the Hittites who never really left, now North Europeans, South Europeans, Indians, Iranians, and... Armenians, who never really left...

...speaking related Indo-Aryan-European languages, Aryan the same word as Iran, long before it meant 'Nordic', swastika a Hindu symbol, Persian sharing words with English and Spanish, “Swas Ti Ka” meaning “hello” in Thai via Sanskrit, long before Hitler crapped on us all, long before Muslims felt like they had to fight for their lives to survive Western colonization, long before Jews decided they weren't really Middle Easterners at all, more like Europeans in fact, with all that represents...