hallighaus

Carmen Immortal

Night Tremors of the Sleeping Giant, part 1

Scratches on the surface of the variety of influences on Chinese culture and identity. Internal, adjacent, tangential.

Text is taken from the description of one video of a Tibetan woman singing in competition on TV in China:

To win a medal at the National Singing Contest, the following criteria should be met.
1. The singing technique should be excellent.
2. The singing performance should be affecting. That is, if the singer sings a love (or sorrowful) song, the audience should feel that their hearts are full of love (or sorrow).
3. The singer should be the best singer (or at least one of the best singers) among all those who can use the same singing technique in the world.
4. Since this National Singing Contest is not for a single ethnic group, but for all Chinese ethnic groups, so the singer should show the most beautiful part of her ethnic culture during her performance. And the audience should be shocked by the beauty of her ethnic culture.

Nationalism is a strange beast.

Double-Take Image - 24 Stories of Filial Piety

7. Filial Piety of Yen Tzu (1122 B.C.)

Yen Tzu's parents are old and have eye trouble. The doctor recommends treating them with deer milk. Yen Tzu wears the fur of a fawn to assume the form of a child of a deer. In this way he really gets some milk. His parent's eyes feel better. He has to get more again. Once he meets a hunter who mistakes him as a real fawn and is about to shoot him. He cries loudly and tells the hunter the truth and so is saved.

Nothing cannot be gotten by a son with filial piety. Readers will find some more examples in this small booklet. It is not that those good sons really possess supernatural powers but that they are always helped by the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Gods, and All Protectors.

His parents do like to drink the milk of deer,
They do not know the price of it's dear.
He must wear the fur of fawn,
Almost is killed by the hunter with fear.



Text taken from the Website of Buddhist Yogi C. M. Chen. It's worth looking around the site if you're interested in other realms.

Each With His Own Brush

...from a book of the same title, by Daniel Johnson Fleming. I have been meaning to scan these images for months. It was hard to choose which ones to post. They are painted by Chinese artists, except for the Five Japanese Martyrs.
I photocopied the Self-Realization Magazine during college.

tatar lady; chechnian girl

circus of houses pt 1

the cat came back

My favorites from a chapter of The Book of Lists.

1. SUGAR - 1,500 miles
Sugar, a two-year-old part-Persian, had a hip deformity, which made her uncomfortable during car travel. Consequently, she was left behind with a neighbor when her family left Anderson, California, for Gage, Oklahoma. Two weeks later, Sugar disappeared. Fourteen months later, she turned up in Gage on her owner's doorstep - having traveled 100 miles a month to reach a place she had never been. The case was insvestigated in person by the famous parapsychologist J. B. Rhine....

In the book these are arranged by distance, so Murka, who should come in first for style, is

8. MURKA - 400 miles
In 1987 Murka, a stray tortoiseshell, was adopted by Vladamir Donsov in Moscow. Murka killed his canary; a year later, she unlocked the bird cage and killed another one. She was banished to live with Mr. Donsov's mother in Voronezh, but disappeared after two years. A year later, on October 1989, Mr. Donsov found her in his Moscow apartment building, hungry, dirty, pregnant, and missing the tip of her tail. She ate a large meal and slept for three days.

Image forthcoming.

man mimics bird, bird trumps man

submerged civilizations

湘妃竹 at a measured pace

Finally, a few good konghou videos showing up. This song has special significance to me.

happy new love

meteora: china, montenegro, greece, turkey

Esma & Makedonske Narodne Pesme

DANCE OF DOTS

Misters Muffet vs. Anna and the King

Thank you, Charley, for the recommendation of W.S.Bristowe's publications. Although I could only get my hands on a very slim volume, it was not remiss of kinky spider sex. There was also romance:

When Pisaura goes a-wooing he puts aside his own natural hunger, catches an insect, wraps it up in a parcel of silk, and hands it to his prospective bride as a wedding present!...Semaphore tactics would be useless for the males who have to court females that build webs. In these cases he signals his identity by means of distinctive jerks of the threads, a kind of Morse code. Many Linyphiid and Theridiid males set up distinctive vibrations along the threads by scraping a stiff spine or special tooth against a series of hard ridges, like a file, elsewhere on his body.

W.S.Bristowe was a well-travelled arachnologist, and visited Thailand. There he researched the story behind The King and I. He concludes that the real Anna Leonowens was not truthful in her accounts, which I feel ready to accept if only because I'm so charmed by his ADDENDUM to Spiders:

To the 1658 edition of Topsel's book was added somewhat unobtrusively Dr. T. Muffet's Theater of Insects. My quotations on p. 5 should have been attributed to Dr. Muffet and I now seek atonement by calling attention to Muffet's other claim to fame. I have suggested...that Patience, his daughter, was the Miss Muffet. The only correspondent to demur called my attention to an incident in Muffet's Diary describing a picnic in Epping Forest when he was forced to fly from some enraged wasps beside whose nest he had spread his lunch. The implication here would be that he himself was Miss Muffet and that the wasps were changed into a spider in order to help the Nursey Rhyme.

BLOG POST ADDENDUM: If you haven't heard, spiders can also travel to faraway countries. Look up ballooning spiders!

Curious catch of the day from Captain Sara

(your viewing experience may be heightened if you don't understand Japanese)

Wild child with your wild style