Flickr set of the week is Backyard Biodiversity: Bichos by Crfullmoon, which is “A species survey in progress of “little beasts” on my property in Massachusetts in North America.” Here’s just a couple of the 307 photos.
Those are available under a by:nc:nd Creative Commons license, but most of the set seems to be fully ©.
I’ve got quite a lot of African music these days.* I bought the first CD (The Rough Guide To The Music of Kenya and Tanzania) some years ago because I had fond memories of the music I remembered them playing on buses in East Africa, a style of music I now know is called soukous.
It was only really when I started getting music from the internet that my selection of African music moved from one or two CDs to hundreds of songs, much of it downloaded from mp3 blogs but also quite a lot I paid for – Calabash particularly made it easier. Now that I have enough that it comes up on iTunes quite often, the initial touristy, exotic quality has worn off a bit and I just find it hard to believe that this stuff is so far below the cultural radar in the UK. It’s not difficult music for the Western ear in the way that music from North Africa or Asia can be; I mean, it has a distinctly African quality to it, and that’s part of the charm, just as a sense of place is part of the charm of reggae, or country music. But most of it is to some degree or another derived from familiar genres – jazz, Latin, funk, or whatever. And indeed reggae and hip hop, for the more recent stuff. And the best of it is just very good music.
I wouldn’t expect an African band to have a string of hit singles in the UK, but there’s a complete absence from the fringes of the fringes of the mainstream of even one act that a man in the street might be able to name. It just seems ridiculous. Indeed, the whole of African music hardly even gets its own genre – instead it’s bundled into the ghetto of ‘world music’ along with French chansons, dub remixes of Finnish folk songs and the Spanish klezmer.
My point isn’t really about African music. If I have a point. It’s that unwillingness to reach out beyond the culture you happen to have been born into. It’s the same complaint people have about the lack of translated novels for sale. I don’t think it’s anything as decisive as the rejection of other cultures, just a complete absence of interest.
Oh well. If the English can learn to enjoy garlic and spicy food, who knows where we’ll end. Maybe in a few years the hottest new tunes from the dancefloors of Kinshasa will go straight to the jukebox of the Dog and Duck.
*mainly via Calabash, Benn loxo du taccu, Aduna, Matsuli Music, Awesome Tapes From Africa and the Rough Guide compilations.
I don’t normally give French names to dishes I chuck together, but apart from the fact that this is very French-inspired, ‘estragon’ is such a good word. And it always makes me think of Waiting for Godot, a play I’ve never seen but which is quite famous.
Of course ‘tarragon’ is also a lovely word. Quite apart from the sound of it, it lends itself to the pun ‘Catherine of Tarragon’ (try and work that into a conversation). And is very nearly arrogant.
Cut chicken breasts into chunks. Oil and season them, then brown them in a hot pan (make sure they’re just about cooked through). Set the chicken aside and soften some shallots with butter in the same pan. Take most of the shallots out and put them with the chicken. Pour some Noilly Prat and New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc into the pan and reduce down, scraping up the nice brown bits off the bottom. When there’s not much wine left, put in a little chopped tarragon (not too much, it’s quite a strong flavour) and double cream. Bring to the boil. Put the chicken back in the pan and warm through.
Obviously any old white wine would be fine, and you could either use all wine or all vermouth and that would probably work too, but this is what I did.
Which isn’t actually going to happen. I was working on a new look for the blog a while ago, but came to the conclusion it was going to be just too memory-intensive. It’s heavy on the graphics, and because it uses lots of sharp-edged high-contrast shapes, you can’t compress the images very much without getting lots of glitching.
Anyway, I thought I’d produce a mock up to show you. If I’d worked it up into a full WordPress theme, I daresay I would have tweaked various things, not least the text styling. But it’ll give you the idea. I’ve done it as a PDF, although I don’t know why really.