Sliding/Slipping into the New Year like...
Welcome to the 73rd edition of this newsletter!
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There's a German expression you use to wish someone a happy New Year. You only use it before the New Year, though. It's "Guten Rutsch", and it translates as something like "Slide well into the New Year" (much like, I suppose, you'd slide into somebody's DMs). I never thought much about it, and I don't think I actively used it when I lived in Germany. Or maybe I did. It doesn't really matter.
Somehow, that expression must have been in the back of my mind, though. A little while ago, well into the New Year, I decided to take down the trash. Up until then this entailed balancing down a set of increasingly rickety stairs in the back (that might or might not have become completely rotten inside). Any time it snows or rains, the stairs are very. I knew all that and tried to be careful, and yet...
Short story short, I slipped and fell. Technically speaking, there was some sliding involved. But given it was involuntary, the word slipping seems more appropriate.
In any case, like I said, it was already the New Year. So why would I enjoy a guten Rutsch? To say that I enjoyed it doesn't capture what happened. I managed to land on the part of my body that I use to sit on (while still balancing the various trash and recycling bags). If memory serves me right, I slid (there we are again) down a few stairs. It might have looked comical to an onlooker (apart from possibly a bird or a squirrel, none was present).
Regardless, I must have at least bumped my coccyx, the "final segment of the vertebral column in all apes" (source; I am an ape after all). As a consequence, about half of this New Year has so far been literally a colossal pain in the ass. It's interesting how much concentration one can lose when being in chronic pain.
Thankfully, I have been able to work on something that required me to stand, and I will report on that in a future email (when said task at hand is completed). Meanwhile, the year can only get better from here on.
How is your New Year going so far?
"My God, I'm Japanese," singer Gwen Stefani told Jesa Marie Calaor, "and I didn't know it." I didn't know that, either, and, by the way, no, you're not. You might be inclined to shrug this nonsense off. How or why should you concern yourself with the nonsense uttered by some pop star?
In the article, Calaor details why:
"I am a woman who has been called racial slurs because of her appearance, feared for her father’s safety as he traveled with her on New York City subways, and boiled with anger as grandparents were being attacked and killed because they were Asian. I envy anyone who can claim to be part of this vibrant, creative community but avoid the part of the narrative that can be painful or scary."
Cultural appropriation is a really interesting topic. This is just my personal assessment, and it's not based on any kind of scientific evidence. But I think white people usually don't understand why cultural appropriation can be (and often is) so problematic. They also don't understand why the one-size-fits-all rule also doesn't apply, why, in other words, someone else appropriating elements of white culture does not necessarily come loaded with the same problems attached.
The article does a very job to dive into the essentials of the topic at hand, so for sure you want to read it. It quotes Fariha I. Khan who gets to the very crux at hand:
"When a group has been historically marginalized and/or racialized by another group, the issue of power is central to cultural appropriation [...] The dominant group has the power to take (or appropriate) the marginalized group’s customs and practices and give these traditions meaning — without the original context or significance."
I feel that this paragraph not only applies to cultural appropriation but to a number of other topics that often get discussed in the world of photography. A photographer often operates out of a position of power -- that power contains more than one elements, including the power to shape a picture, but also (usually) the privileged background (which itself might split up into different aspects). And often, there is that taking of something that is then used, with the original context stripped away.
That's a discussion we need to have more of: the uses and misuses of power in photography.
Speaking of power, I came across a really interesting and somewhat scathing quote in a longer piece about the work of William Christenberry and RaMell Ross. Ross said
"There’s no white person that I know that would not be thrilled to go photograph a Black person on a porch in the South. And like, get really close to their hands. And be like, “These people restored me.” All the really easy modes of engaging with people through the camera. It’s always been white people going to the South, photographing white and Black people, then leaving."
This is not only about power, but that aspect plays a role. Obviously, there is so much more contained in this quote. All the really easy modes of engaging with people through the camera. That's such a searing indictment of so much photography even beyond the one done in the South, isn't it?
You absolutely want to read the piece for that reason alone. But you'll also get to know RaMell Ross and, in all likelihood, William Christenberry. While teaching I found that even in the US, most photographers don't know who Christenberry was. I've always found that very strange. He was such an amazing artist. Look him up.
Nooran Sisters Singing “Patakha Guddi” I Red Carpet I PTC Punjabi Music Awards 2015… - YouTube
Click to Subscribe: http://bit.ly/1gcl6FdPTC Punjabi Music Awards 2015…RED CARPET…Guest - Harbhajan Maan / Jazzy B / Sukshinder Shinda / Jassi Sidhu / Ro…
If you click on the video link above, you'll get to hear the Nooran Sisters giving an impromptu a capella rendition of one of their songs. If you want to find out what this sounds like with background instruments, this live video has got you covered:
This is absolutely incredible.
I came across the song on social media (Mastodon), where someone posted a mash up. Andre Antunes takes clips he finds online and adds instrumentation to produce metal songs. The outcomes are really pretty bad or kind of amazing (your mileage might vary). In this particular case, the result is the latter:
Still, this doesn't even remotely come close to the Nooran Sisters' own absolutely electric (and complex) live version, does it?
With that I'm going to conclude for today. I hope your New Year started out better than mine.
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg