streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 10:17 am on December 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: currency ( 2 ), history ( 42 )   

  Beyond language, sausages, architecture, and textiles, 

  lies the DNA of currency, or the name of the unit of currency at least, usually based on weight at its origin, silver or gold, once cattle became too cumbersome. Thus the Spanish word for weight, ‘peso’, yields modern-day Philippine pesos and the same with much of Latin America except where they adopted names with nationalistic overtones, such as sucres, bolivianos, colones, and cordobas, etc. Meanwhile Spain itself kept the concept in a diminutive form with pesetas, perhaps to distinguish itself from those same banana republics. The British are still using pounds, as do a handful of other countries under that influence in Africa and the Middle East. This is just like a Roman pound, libra, then the Italian lira and Romanian leu. Like banana republics, the French needed a franc to prop up their egos, bolstered especially when Belgians and Swiss and half of Africa followed suit, all of dubious worth now, with Europeans united by currency itself, not just the name. After the demise of the franc, the widest name of currency in modern use derives from the tiny Bohemian silver-mining town of Joachimstaler, living on in the dollars of the US and most of the English-speaking world and such pretenders as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brunei, and Singapore. Joachimstaler was also formerly famous for its radioactive thermal baths. Yep. That business has slowed down a bit these days. Stranger than fiction and in true DNA quantum-leap mutation fashion, the lowly pre-Islamic Roman denarius, now as dinar, and its cousins dirham and riyal live on as the currency of a dozen countries in North Africa and the Mideast. This is not to mention the reales of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, nor el dinero itself. Scandinavians also pay tribute to their royalty with crowns as currency as Portuguese do with their escudo. Rupees and rupiah cross borders and oceans in India and Indonesia, even more so if you hypothesize a connection in rubles. Germans left their mark and Greeks their drachma. If there’s no better way to put a value on the world and its many and varied things, then let it be money, regardless of the language.

   

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  hardie karges 6:03 pm on December 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Guatemala ( 4 ), Timor, weaving   

  Way beyond language, food, and architecture is the trail of textiles, 

  
  something very dear to me for its intrinsic beauty as well as its inner story line, as seen by weavers, not historians. Nevertheless traditional weaving patterns and whatever stories they might contain are frequently neglected in favor of borrowed patterns, for whatever the reason. The path of Navajo rugs from Mexican serapes, via the Navajo weavers’ sojourn at Bosque Redondo in proximity to Mexican weavers is well documented. The path of Indonesian yarn-dyed ikat fabrics across the Pacific Ocean from Manila to Acapulco in the once-a-year galleon and on to the Mexican highlands and Guatemala is easily believable. The path of a particular modern weaving and dying design from the town of Solola’, Guatemala, back across that same ocean to the newly liberated country of East Timor is mind-boggling. The galleon trade has been discontinued for almost two hundred years. Many designs are universally geometric and easily conceivable from multiple sources. This is not one of those. This is an EXACT duplication of a design whose origin lies one hundred eighty degrees away any direction you go on the planet. There are not many bookstores in Dili, East Timor, and even fewer with color glossy photographs of Guatemalan weaving. An Iberian Spanish-Portuguese connection is possible, but remote and confusing, therefore improbable. There is no shortage of folk art cowboys roaming the globe looking for groovy goods for sale to sell. But the odds of one who knows Guatemalan textiles showing up in East Timor and finding that particular weaving must be about one in five or six billion, me, and I didn’t do it. The odds of someone weaving that style of piece there again have just improved. It did sell, after all.
   
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  hardie karges 8:42 am on December 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: architecture, history ( 42 )   

  Beyond the DNA of languages and the DNA of sausages is the DNA of architecture, 

  the landscape of cities and culture, sky-lines crossing borders and leaving traces where people themselves feared to tread. The red tile roofs of Rome live on not only in Italy, Romania, and Spain, but in a whole continent of bastard South American children. Likewise the columns and the arches that still stand in tribute to Rome and Greece. Medieval churches taking orders from Germans and cues from Arabs still set the tone for the religions of antiquity worldwide. The same principle operates on the village level, the best example in mind being the pueblo architecture of the American southwest and parts of Mexico. This is almost the spitting image of the African desert architecture of Morocco and Mali, just enough water to hold the mud together in bricks and the buildings together in recognizable shapes of temples, mosques, and churches. Is this coincidence, or is it more? The only historical connection between the two cultures is via a third, the Spain of the Spanish and previously by code-sharing agreement, with the North African Moors, mostly Moroccan, that era coincidentally brought to an end precisely the same year that Columbus first set sail for India and found America. That sounds like some hippies I know. To be sure, there are enough similar buildings, at the Spanish village level, possibly of Moorish inspiration, to postulate a tentative connection, regardless of the fact that Spanish cities continue heavily in the Roman architectural tradition. Though there are pueblos that pre-date Spanish arrival in the Americas, certainly the classic cliff-dwelling pueblos were long discontinued and the Arizona pueblos use much stone, like Mexican ruins, rather than adobe. The New Mexican style is much closer in time and style to the Spanish, and some southwest ‘pueblos’ are in fact purely Spanish in origin. Given the fact that the word ‘adobe’ itself is of Spanish-Moorish origins, via Arabic and Egyptian Coptic, and the fact that Pueblo Indians themselves are of diverse groups and languages united more by desert lifestyle than common culture, the line of transmission across continents is probably legitimate.

   
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  hardie karges 4:54 pm on November 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history ( 42 ), sausage   

  The heartland of Europe is the story of sausage, 

  
  a well-documented story of evolution and geography, history and drama. There’s something for everyone when people decide to stuff meat by-products into the very plumbing that watered and fertilized it in its formative years. So it reads like the map of Europe: Frankfurt and Hamburg, Bologna and Vienna, and Poland in general, a tortured medieval past converted into the fast food future of the world. Sometimes tasting good is more important than good taste. Ask Charlie the tuna.

   
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  hardie karges 9:11 pm on November 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), DNA ( 46 ), food ( 8 )   

  Forget DNA and its handmaiden language, 

  rewrite history in terms of cuisine, the trails of tomatoes and the paths of potatoes. The Chinese leave gastronomical tracks wherever they go. All people do. Thais immigrate with kitchen utensils, opening restaurants like plowing fields and claiming land, blurring the edge between origin and immigration. There’s something magic about a name on a map becoming reality in the flesh, complete with tacos and tom yam, spring rolls and pizza, sex and chocolate. The moon sets over a featureless plain as trains pass through the night and border guards check my papers. Names of cities flash by on signs like flash cards to study a language that just keeps changing everywhere you go. Just when you think you’ve about got it figured out, it shifts gears by some Chomskyan rule of transformation and proceeds by another set of standards. Those are the other borders that reside within consciousness, separating not time nor space, but operating systems, thought, virtual consciousness.

   
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  hardie karges 11:04 am on November 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), DNA ( 46 ), food ( 8 )   

  The cultural DNA of food leaves tracks everywhere. 

  
  The first thing I do in any country, outside of Asia at least, is look for Chinese food. In Venezuela, there are plenty of chifas, but no chaufa, only arroz frito. But there, egg rolls are called lumpia, a prominent Philippine dish, not the rollos or chun kun of elsewhere south of the border. I’ll have to try one to see if they’re actually the same dish. In Peru, soy sauce is known as sillao, similar to the si iw of Thailand and the original shi-yau of Cantonese, from which Japanese shoyu, typical Spanish soya, soy, and all other variations ultimately derive. Venezuelan food itself is typical of the fried greasy fare that defines the Caribbean, poor cuts of meat and an infinite variety of starches cooked in hot melted lard at varying levels of temperatures. The important thing is to soak up as much of that grease as possible to get the most for your money. Women proudly let their bellies hang out in imitation of their British counterparts, no reason to be ashamed of what’s in your genes and jeans. Hell, where I came from, if you didn’t put on fat you’d die, as did all those Roman dilettantes testing their luck in the northern winters.

   
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  hardie karges 3:59 am on November 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), food ( 8 )   

  If language is the cultural DNA of high culture, 

  
  then food is the DNA of the illiterate masses. The fact that Thais eat hot chilies like fiends, but with very few varieties, and that they’re native to Mexico, with many varieties, would tell you something historical whether you read the book or not. Likewise with the potato, which has dozens of varieties in its native South American Andes, though more famous in Ireland, which has only one or two. There they suffered a potato blight and resulting famine so severe that they had to bring in more diverse DNA from the source with which to breed some disease resistance into the ‘Irish’ potato. One of the most typical traditional Tai dishes is kaow soi, found in Thailand, Laos, Burma, China, and sometimes Vietnam. There’s only one problem: it’s not the same dish everywhere. The dish in northern Thailand is properly kaow soi islam, a Burmese-style curry-like soup made with coconut milk and served over wheat noodles, not too surprising since northern Thailand was a Burmese colony for a couple hundred years. Real Tai kaow soi, like they still serve in Laos and Yunnan, China, is like northern Thai nam prik ong chili paste served in rice noodle soup, similar to northern Thai nam ngieow. Got that? Rice noodles themselves seem to have originated in Vietnam or southern China or both, given the two different names universally used for this product, pho and guaytieow, for which there are many variations in size, all taken quite seriously by connoisseurs. Then again, Thailand and Vietnam have different, but similar, products with the same name in nem and canh.

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    Pattaya Hotels 7:55 am on November 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    DNA, Stil the most important to our lifes.

    High culture too.

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  hardie karges 3:46 pm on November 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), DNA ( 46 ), language ( 177 )   

  The DNA of language can also go awry 

  when ‘smoking’ (pronounced ‘esmoquin’) becomes Spanish for ‘tuxedo’. Even more bizarre is the meaning it takes under the watchful eyes of Bangkok courtesans, probably because the word pronounced ‘soop’ also means ‘to suck’ as well as ‘to smoke’, and the rest is history. I heard white punks use the same term the same way a few days ago in a movie. Don’t think about this while eating your morning gruel. To talk about the DNA of culture is to acknowledge possibly more than just the similarities between the evolutions of Nature and culture, but also the unity, the interlocking connection between the two, culture presumably a plethora of Nature’s little experiments, little whirling eddies, off the main flow. As such, might there not be a common uniting factor, such as memory, which propels both?

   
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  hardie karges 11:03 am on November 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), DNA ( 46 ), food ( 8 )   

  Sometimes names of dishes don’t make sense, 

  
  like ‘airport noodles’ in the chifas of Peru, every one of them, mind you, but that’s half the fun. The first Thai restaurant in Flagstaff named some dish after an evil jungle princess, so now they all do. One only hopes they don’t go to Thailand expecting such, or even a jungle, for that matter. Of course, sometimes the DNA of culture can suffer horrible mutations, such as the case of Alf in Peru. Remember Alf, the walking talking dog-shaped doormat that ruled the airwaves back in 1990 or so? No, I didn’t think so. Anyway, he had a few good years in the ratings, if I remember correctly, though I can hardly imagine what sort of product would invest their hard-earned advertising budget in such nonsense. This was prime time, mind you. He WAS cute, I suppose, kind of a Garfield gone dog gone puppet. Well, anyway, it was strange enough that he was hugely popular in Peru back then, but reruns still running fifteen years later? Somebody needs professional help! A MASH*, Seinfeld, Friends, or Lucy, Alf is not. Still, the other prominent American sit-com currently on the Peruvian schedule is ‘I Dream of Jeannie’, so go figure. Escapist entertainment, anyone?

   
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  hardie karges 10:40 am on November 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), food ( 8 ), history ( 42 )   

  The Hong Kong Café in Flagstaff was my cook and kitchen 

  
  when I had nothing better. The customers were mostly Navajos and Hopis and a few intergalactic stragglers like myself, looking for succor in a plate of chop suey and a cup of hot tea. Those days are over now. Flagstaff has only one chop suey joint left out of the three I knew twenty years ago, and it’s looking more ‘fusion’ every day. Places like this are so ‘out’ that they might actually be back ‘in’ if they can hold on long enough and sell themselves as kitsch, without having to go the way of diners first. You don’t go to places like this for good Chinese food. You go there for atmosphere, a taste of the old days when people were fleeing the Midwest dust bowl, when people were fleeing the Caste wars, when people were fleeing their own personal demons. You go there for the blue-plate special under $5, with a piece of pie afterward for a buck and change. Little by little, Thai or more-modern Chinese eateries open their doors to the more sophisticated clientele that moves in when cowboy-and-Indian towns have been sufficiently sanitized for mass consumption. The same happens with Mexican places when the Mariachi décor gets traded for a more tropical look and hopefully the food gets a makeover also.