Categories
links and ideas

africans to bono: for gods sake please stop.


After his impassioned defense of aid, an African man in the audience asked Bono, “Where do you place the African person as a thinker, a creator of wealth?”

Celebrities make easy targets. Many at TED attacked Bono (ironically the catalyst for holding a conference in Africa in the first place) less for what he has done and more for what he represents. He has done more for raising Africa’s profile and our awareness about debt relief, unequal trade, malaria and HIV/AIDS than perhaps any human being in history. He represents a game we have all played for nearly fifty years whose only winners have been corrupt governments and the international development industry.

Visibly wounded by the question, confused how anyone could misinterpret his good intentions, Bono, like the proverbial white man with black friends, set out to prove how down he is with the black man.

Africans are the “most regal people on earth” and music is their DNA, he told the room of mostly doctors, engineers, and businessmen. He then began singing a traditional Irish dirge to show us how Celtic music has Coptic roots, and so is fundamentally African. I wasn’t the only one giggling in the back row.

Bono, in his awkward defense of his “Africa credo,” also represents our fundamental failure to listen.

an excellent ted article on the path to the future of africa. the classical fish vs. fishing cane problem.

Categories
in the netherlands photography

the winogrand in me

the man on the deck

it’s been almost 2 years since our trip to schiermonnikoog, a dutch island on the northern sea.

a mix of laziness, lack of budget or decent photography shops made me lose interest in developing the film i shot in the island back then. i was curious to see the pictures, but while i still had the memory of the events i shot, and all the people with me… there was no real need to “see” them again… (i guess i’ll never understand the people that peek at the pictures when they’ve just taken them, on the backscreen of digital cameras). so i let the film stay in the shelf.

i have quite a few of these “forgotten” films. they have travelled all the way to the netherlands and back, to the states and back, and now here they are in china. they’re stored in identical canisters, with no reference to what’s in each one of them. little pandora boxes, with with unknown age or stories.

to me, photography is not about rules, big lenses and trendy bags, keeping negatives in the fridge and looking out for x-rays on the airport. it’s about fun and framing. i shoot when i feel inspired, when friends are around, when i feel like being a tourist, when there are not many cameras in the area. i develop when i have the time, the patience, or whenever i itch to discover what forgotten secrets are hiding in one of those black canisters. what about you? do you develop your films right away, or not so much? do you peek on the back screen of your digital camera? :)

more, on flickr.

* bonus: two weeks with garry winogrand, by mason resnic. garry winogrand was a prolific photographer who died on 1984, leaving a total of 12000 rolls of film that he never looked at. peculiar philosophy.

Categories
just life music

song for a rainy morning

If the sun
Refused to shine
Down on me
‘Till the end of time
As long as i have your caress
Your tenderness
I will be blessed

If the stars
Refused their light
Just for me
They stayed out of sight
If you say you love me best
I won’t care less
I will be blessed

If the wind won’t blow your name
Until i’m still
I will
If it’s whispered from above
The highest hill
I will

If the moon
Up in the sky
Turned its face
From the lonely eye
I could never be distressed
Or love you less
I will be blessed

I will be blessed, Lisa Ekdahl

Categories
in china

running on empty on the lunch break

i’m waiting for my dumplings to arrive. shrimp and egg yolk steamed dumplings that i can’t wait to get my teeth on, and that are running late. *sigh* meanwhile, a short updates on the last week or so.

* the bad parts: we went to the hospital a couple of days ago to get some antibiotics for a dear infection of mine that comes back once in a while (nothing serious). and p. has come down with a cold. the weather has been terrible. hot and wet. feels like every time we go out, we’re entering the locker rooms of a steamy swimming pool. we start sweating and it’s hard to breathe, and everybody tells us this is just the start. we survive by minimizing our outdoors errands and hopping into an air conditioned room whenever we can. which is not healthy and can cause these occasional summer colds. it sucks.
by the way, thumbs up for huashan hospital,’s foreigners clinic. english speaking personnel, polite and helpful, terrific installations. not that expensive, even.

* the good bits: one of the places where we found salvation from the heat was Garden books, a bookshop on changle lu that sells imported english/german/french books, as well as postcards and moleskines. a little hidden heaven that comes with a cafeteria.

also, we made time to visit city shop, a local (?) supermarket chain that boasts a wide selection of western products and food. no kidding! they had nice bread, roasted chicken, cookies and cereals that we recognized, actual muesli (not the kind of mixed porridge that you boil for hours before you can eat it), cheese, vegetables and whatnot.
and the best of all, they had a fair range of celestial seasonings teas! ever since we visited the celestial seasonings factory in boulder i have been a fan of their teas, not only for the flavours, but for the care and attention they put into each of the packs they produce. the people there are nice beyond courtesy and were actually very helpful when p.’s asian porsche broke down in their parking lot, on a hot september day. :)
celestial seasonings puts a smile on my face and makes me dream of going back to colorado. we got the imperial white peach tea, apple cinnamon spice and the honey and vanilla chamomile tea, which should be enough to keep me dreaming for a while.
we didn’t find paulo’s dear dutch vla in city shop though, but i think shanghai must have a campina importer, somewhere. it’s a matter of time till we find one, or we start making our own.

* the so-so: on other news, we’re headed to hong kong tomorrow, to take care of some visa-related bureaucracy. hopefully, when we come back, we’ll be “legal aliens” (literally, my application paper for a visa reads “alien application”), and most importantly, we won’t have to worry with entering/leaving china for a year, because we’ll be free to do it whenever we want to.
i’m curious to see how much of china is there in hong kong, and how much of britain/europe is there too. hong kong is celebrating its 10th anniversary of the return to china this week, so the city should be vibrant with life. sadly, it’s a one-day trip, so we won’t have much time for sightseeing, but we’ll gather some impressions and perhaps the appetite for further exploration.

(photo of the celestial seasonings tea tasting room by electra-cute)

Categories
in china

about the stories.

saturday night we went to a pecha kucha night here in shanghai. it was the first such event i attended, but the 6th that sinocities organized here.

pecha kucha is a night for designers or creative people to meet and share their ideas, portfolio and projects. each is given a precise amount of time to speak of whatever they want.

the place where it was held is called “Yangshupu Factories” and is a bit far from the city center, but worth a visit. a subtle maze of trees and lakes, with slippery dark stone paths and plants hanging on bamboo branches. when we got there (almost an hour in advance), we had time to delight ourselves in a slow coffee, relaxing on an outside patio beside a pound. the bushes around had some sort of xmas lamps on them, as if sprinkled by fireflies. :)
in the back there is a coffeehouse, hidden in a two-story building, where the organization had spread some chairs that were clearly insufficient for the number of people that decided to show up.

despite never having attended one such event before, i had high hopes for the it, but the end result was just so-so. photographers and architects showcased their recent works in succession, but most lacked the skills on how to present it right.

that was exactly the problem for me, especially because we saw too many photographers eager to show their portfolio, which turned out to be either plain uninteresting (but that’s just a matter of taste perhaps) or a mess of unrelated (best) photographs.

i tend to think that you always need a story. you need to convey something to people through your photographs. there needs to be a sequence, fictional, emotional or factual circumstances, an explanation or a connection, no matter how irrational.
but there wasn’t and in the end i thought, although some of them had good pictures, they had just wasted the opportunity to explain themselves. the why, the how, what sparkled their interest, what had they felt when portraying those people or places.

nonetheless, i liked some of the architectural projects that their authors explained. innovative with simple details, and very real.

my favorites? a presentation by Olympia Kazi on critical mass and a surreal presentation by a mechanical engineering student on herself, life and poetry. very non-sense, fresh and yet daring, engaging and amusing.

check out the pecha kucha website to see if there’s one happening near you!