Australian ABC Show, 4corners did a show on the Sub-Prime meltdown in the US and it’s excellent.
You have to watch it on their website, I could not embed it, click here.
This video explains how the sub-prime market was created through a unique set of circumstances beginning with the fallout from September 11, and goes on to talk about the risk of recession this poses, to the US economy and the worldwide ripple effect that would cause.
These News blunders from the New Yorker are hilarious. Some of my favorites:
FOR ONCE, WE’RE SPEECHLESS DEPT:
From an advice column in the Lansing (Mich.) State Journal.
For fun and to try to mix this up a little, you two might develop a verbal or visual cue that is subtler than simply asking for sex. For instance when one of you mentions Vice President Cheney, that’s your code.
Or:
THERE’LL ALWAYS BE ENGLAND
From the Washington Post.
After he was exposed, Lambton told an intelligence officer that he had thrown himself into a “frenzied” round of “gardening and debauchery” to get over the fact that he had lost a three-year battle over the use of his father’s title.
Or:
SILVER LINING DEPARTMENT
From the Bath (Maine) Times Record.
Except for a tragic accident, the 35th annual Bath Heritage Days parade went off without a hitch.
There’s a nice article in the Guardian by James Campbell about V.S. Naipaul, the famous Trinidadian Author of Indian descent. Currently living in the English village of Wiltshire, Naipaul has, over time, grown to accept and like his role as an outsider. “I have always seen myself as an outsider in the country,” Naipaul says, “and it’s caused me no pain at all.” It interesting to read of his reaction when entering a shop in India, and his frustration for not being noticed. An Area of Darkness–the first in a trilogy about India, spawned from this initial trip, stresses this dissociation, this innate disgust of his surrounding when visiting, perhaps of seeing himself in every man? He calls himself, “a floating man” in the article, referring to his settling in England and his stance as a person of Indian decent in Trinidad.
Naipaul’s style of writing has always melded the autobiographical with the narrative, and he’s quick to say narrative prose is undergoing a change, the form of the novel is becoming staid and should evolve –anyone can do it and he’s right, it seems there’s constant churning out of novels–but where will the form take us, more Delillo for example, more ideas in the skeletal frame of a novel and less rendering of style?
This sentence taken from Enigma of Arrival seems to justly sum up Naipaul’s distinct merging of backgrounds and the result of these upbringings:
“To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty. Possibly, too, this mode of feeling went deeper, and was an ancestral inheritance, something that came with the history that had made me: not only India, with its ideas of a world outside men’s control, but also the colonial plantations or estates of Trinidad, to which my impoverished Indian ancestors had been transported in the last century – estates of which this Wiltshire estate, where I now lived, had been the apotheosis.
He speaks of this final passage, arriving at the manor but not the manor one hoped for, in this video interview (resembling a 60’s studio set!) from the Nobel website.
One of my favorite tombs in Delhi is Humayun’s tomb– it’s the precursor to the Taj Mahal (just as lovely, well.. somewhat more showy and terribly crowded). Humayan was the second ruler in the long line of Mughals from Kabul who invaded India.
It’s a wonderful, quiet tomb, built by his his widow–a combination of white marble and red sandstone, usually null of tourists and absolutely perfect in its symmetry. I could spend hours there and often stood in it’s large halls, empty except a few graves (Humayan’s and family) and not a soul nor tout would walk by me (self proclaimed guides, you get many of those in the old tombs–some quite endearing) It was like being given a private pass to the Lourve and you’re able to enjoy it all to yourself. For a brief tour check out the UNESCO panoramic view. This is a great web site–here’s the Taj at sunset, you really feel like you’re there!
Apparently since I’ve been they’ve put some money (courtesy of Aga Khan) into restoring the grounds and the traditional char-bagh, a 4 part water/garden system common in Mughal architecture–the Mughals also invented their own system of air conditioning, which consisted of small canal-like waterways throughout most of their palaces–an ingenious invention. The restoration hopefully has not attracted too many miscreant Europeans or Americans, please save it for the selfish local history buffs and expatriates which roam Delhi, like William Dalrymple … Dalrymple’s most recent book was about the last emperor who ruled Delhi–Bahadur Shah Zafar who also happens to be buried at the tomb. But the beauty of the tomb also goes hand in hand to the emperor it’s dedicated to, Humayun himself, whom I’m partial to because of his unfortunate luck and general eccentricity.
The Mughals have always fascinated me–brilliant, noble, ruthless and wildly interesting yet talent and luck sometimes skip generations and this certainly happened to Humayan. His father, Babur, an amazing warrior and ruler, was a descendant of Genghis Khan, and Tamarlane (who deserves his own post) and was the first Mughal to invade India. His grandson, Akbar, a scholar, patron of the arts and the most tolerate of all Mughals, invented his own religion incorporating aspects from Islam, Hinduism and Christianity. Their overall achievements are too long to list…
Jahangir was next, a bit boring and non-descript–you see talent skips a generation….His claim to fame could be Nur Jahan his twentieth wife and reputed exotic beauty and highly powerful in her own right, who eventually reigned from the inside due to his constant drunkenness (and they made a great movie about him: Mughal-e-Azam , a must see Hindi film). But he did produce Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal. Then there was Arungzab–his terrible tyrant son who imprisoned his own father, but was also the builder of the Pearl Mosque enclosed in the Red Fort in Delhi, so compact, simple, and resolute in its purpose, it melts your heart with its beauty and its perfect feeling of complete contentment upon entering.
Humayan himself was a strange one, to quote from Wikepedia:
“He was also deeply superstitious, and fascinated by Astrology and the Occult. Upon his accession as Padishah (Emperor), he began to re-organise the administration upon mystically determined principles. The public offices were divided into four distinct groups, for the four elements. The department of Earth was to be in charge of Agriculture and the agricultural sciences, Fire was to be in charge of the Military, Water was the department of the Canals and waterways while Air seemed to have responsibility for everything else. His daily routine was planned in accordance with the movements of the planets, so too was his wardrobe. He refused to enter a house with his left foot going forward, and if anyone else did they would be told to leave and re-enter.
His servant, Jauhar, records in the Tadhkirat al-Waqiat that he was known to shoot arrows to the sky marked with either his own name, or that of the Shah of Persia and, depending on how they landed, interpreted this as an indication of which of them would grow more powerful. He was a heavy drinker, and also took pellets of Opium, after which he was known to recite poetry. He was, however, not enamoured of warfare, and after winning a battle would spend months at a time indulging himself within the walls of a captured city even as a larger war was taking place outside.
But it was Humayan who began the confluence of Persian and Indian art by bringing many painters to India from Persia, influencing a style which remained prevalent throughout the next few ages. Sadly enough, he was deposed in Persia from his initial ten year reign in Delhi, for fifteen years, having been conquered by Shir Shah Sur. Finally able to come back, he recaptured Delhi only to die a year later, while tripping down the stairs in his library. No doubt due to his choreographed moves to align his steps with the planets!
How strange and wonderful it is to walk down these actual stairs on a hot afternoon in Delhi….!
Here’s a composite autopsy photo of Clell Miller & Bill Stiles, aka Bill Chadwell, members of the infamous James-Younger gang, whose star player was Jesse James. The two members were both killed at the notorious Northfield bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876, though Jesse was apparently not present during the raid. They were both propped up for the photograph after the autopsies and both look ready to go: “Well Bill, we’ve been shot to death, now let’s have a go, off to the Saloon…”
I have little interest in the wild west, it’s one of those periods – the dress, the history I find fairly bland – though I think this has much to do with 60s American Westerns and how actors/writers portrayed people/history during that time. I find the relationship/tensions between the Indians and the settlers horrifying (the treatment) and fascinating–the mix thereafter- even Bill Chadwell was half indian – you can see it in his features. Interestingly enough, Jesse James started out in his teens as a “bushwhacker” basically they were guerillas on both sides of the civil war who ambushed one another across state lines. In Jesse’s case-he was a confederate bushwhacker.
But I find the photography of the period fascinating, obviously because that’s the beginning of photography or it’s nascent leap towards something amazing. Somehow photographs from this period really show the character of the person, especially those civil war photos , even the staging of them can be forgiven, how could one not play around with scenes and cameras at the start of photography? Photography during that time is strange because if just invented a century before we could have seen photos of the French Revolution or portraits of Goethe, now we see Lincoln and the effect is eerie, the fact that you can see photographs of slaves that became political advocates itself is amazing.
