A young red squirrel having trouble finding purchase on the flaky bark of a plane tree
I’ve been offline a little while, enjoying this sort of thing in the land of the pause-midi:
Sunflowers in the Camargue
A mallard duck surveys the Canal du Midi
Archive for June, 2007
Lighting in an alcove at Cargo in Shoreditch
Since a couple of people have asked, I will be going back to Kinshasa, yes. In the meantime, I’m very excited to have the honour of contributing occasional coverage of blogs from or about the Democratic Republic of Congo to Global Voices, a non-profit website that “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online – shining light on places and people other media often ignore”.
My posts are conveniently collected here.
One of the standing figures that form part of Event Horizon by Antony Gormley
“If you get a sense of extension, or constriction, or vulnerability, or tentativeness, or generosity, or meanness, or fear, or love, or all those things, so much the better, for I think all those things are in the work.”
A reflection in the poster for Blind Light, a current exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery. (ITA stands for In the Area.)
“For me sculpture uses physical means to talk about the spirit, weight to talk about weightlessness, light to refer to darkness – a visual means to refer to things that cannot be seen.”
Quotations by the artist cited in an essay by Sandy Nairne.)
Dancers at Silent Disco on Saturday
Strange things have been happening in London while I’ve been away. Flashmobs have been around for a while, but they’re getting bigger all the time. Back in April, around 4,000 people answered the call to don headphones and dance around the commuters at Victoria Station.
As part of the cultural extravaganza surrounding the reopening of the Festival Hall over the weekend, London’s South Bank played host to the wonderful Silent Disco. Word had spread about Friday’s event, so on Saturday there was a nasty crush to get in. This was badly managed and proved too much for a few, including some French twelve-year-olds near me who had unwisely spiked themselves with a heady cocktail of poppers and red wine, as if being trampled and asphyxiated wasn’t enough.
But it was worth the price of admission (which was not money, but dignity) to see and be part of a thousand-strong crowd in wireless headphones, dancing and singing along to whatever the Dutch DJ could throw at them, from the Dubliners to Underworld. I enjoyed the novelty of having my own volume control, and being able to the headphones off to have a chat, order a drink, or just admire the silly scene and try to guess the music from the dancing.
(More photos on Flickr.)
From the cover illustration of Tintin au Congo, reproduced in many a Belgian home in Kinshasa today
Yesterday, at an impromptu outdoor salon in Hampstead, I met my first Congolese barkless dog, more correctly known as a Basenji. A close personal friend of the dog told me that it never barks, but has been known to yodel. Carvings of Basenji appear in Egyptian tombs, and they used to be popular hunting dogs in the Congo. I don’t imagine many are left there now, but here is an account of a hunt by an Englishwoman visiting ‘the interior’ in 1937:
At the end of the dry season, the natives burn whole tracts of bush – strictly forbidden by the State – to round up game. The excitement – and, I may add, the danger – is great. Imagine the roar and crackle of mighty flame. Terrified game – antelope, bush pig, wild fowl, not to mention snakes – rushing out from the advancing inferno – unclad, gleaming figures of shouting, gesticulating natives! Old flintlock guns going off with ear-splitting bangs! Arrows flying, and everywhere, little red dogs, darting hither and thither, adding more excitement to the scene. They will follow up wounded game for miles, and pull it down, holding it until the hunter catches up. As they run mute, they wear little wooden gourds, tied round their loins, filled with pebbles, which rattle, so that their masters can follow them through the tall elephant grass.
Six years earlier, Hergé published his second Tintin book, Tintin au Congo, in which the young reporter (who brought his own dog) has lots of fun on safari, blasting away at the wildlife and even, believe it or not, dynamiting a rhino. Hergé apparently based much of the book on travelogues by contemporary European explorers of Africa.
In last week’s New Yorker, Anthony Lane described Tintin au Congo as ‘an unmitigated parade of racial prejudice, with bug-eyed natives swaying between ignorance and laziness’. Hergé was subsequently embarrassed enough (and perhaps freer of the influence of Wallez, his employer) to tone down the colonialist fervour for a new colour edition in 1946. For example, in the later version, Tintin teaches the locals the joys of extremely simple arithmetic instead of the wonders of Belgian rule. But the renowned illustrator remained reluctant to discuss this particular adventure, and it seems that his publishers and most of his fans would prefer to forget about it altogether.
There is no chance of doing that in Kinshasa, however, where street-traders still do a brisk trade in reproductions of the front cover and elaborate carvings of the Tintin’s jeep.
Extra: Tim Butcher on the Tintin phenomenon in DRC.