Compare and Contrast

For class last week (topic: Immigration and the roots of American culture), two cartoon versions of American history:

Contender number one: "Elbow Room" from the 1970s "Schoolhouse Rock" series of animated educational shorts, shown during Saturday morning cartoon time for, oh, all of my childhood.



Did you notice anything missing from this video? Like, um, Native Americans, perhaps? Hmmm....

Okay, moving on to contender number two: "A Brief History of the United States", from Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's documentary / rant about the NRA and American gun violence...


A bit funnier, at least to us jaded liberal types with warped senses of humor, but it definitely belongs into the "White people are all uniformly horrible, except for me because I'm cool" genre of cultural criticism. Oh, and did you notice that Southern Accent = stupid? Hmmm, again...

Did you watch them both? Okay, to compare the two - one is a gross oversimplification of American history, full of subtle and not-so-subtle racial stereotypes; the other is, well, a gross oversimplification of American history, full of subtle and not-so-subtle racial stereotypes. What makes it doubly sad is one of these oversimplifications was taught to most of us as Historical Fact all through our grade school history careers.

Moving on, thank goodness for Maira Kalman. She is an amazing author and illustrator who wrote a twelve part series of picture essays on the web last year about patriotism, American history, and civic culture in general.

Her essay on immigration, which you should look at even if you didn't watch either of the two videos, provides an excellent palate cleanser from the after effects of both cartoons. Without dodging or whitewashing our often horrific history, the essay still shows some pretty great things about being an American. Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, yes, but also Coney Island, mango lassis, and Dancing Cheek to Cheek. Check it out.

(now if I can only get the sing-songy lyrics from "Elbow Room" out of my head...)

Happy Birthday Zekey!

Zekey will be turning five in a couple of days - holy frijoles! Since we'll be leaving town for a long Easter get together weekend on his birthday this Thursday, we had a small last minute birthday party last Saturday. Jane uploaded some photos (with comments) onto Flickr, so click here if you'd like to read more.

quickie update

Life is basically good here. Even though I got out of my pajamas and put in my contact lenses at 3:30 today (or maybe because of that).

I'm stressed about our upcoming 2 weeks worth of lessons. We've got something big cooking, but haven't figured out what order to put the ingredients in. More soon!

And welcome to the (hopefully) new readers I've invited!

Jane

(people watching in the) People's Republic

In honor of our 7 month and twenty somethingth day anniversary in China, I've been doing a bit of organizing and sorting of photos lately. One result is this photo set and slide show on Flickr, containing a random selection of people pictures we've taken since we landed in Beijing last August. (Best viewed full screen!) If you can't see it above for some reason, or want more details, you can also go here to check out the set in person. Enjoy!

What's in your buckets, ma'am?

New opportunities present themselves daily here, and I take 'em! For example, I saw a woman calling something something out, as vendors sometimes do here in China. She was on the street between our long row of apartment buildings and the row on the other side of the street. I thought she might be the person to whom we could sell our mountain of recyclables that's piled up outside our kitchen window on the ledge. That mountain has been getting on my nerves!

The woman spoke a very broad Sichuan dialect. Her "r" sound was heavily rolled, her "eh" sound more like "ay." Through the accent, I couldn't tell what exactly she had, but I'd buy it, I said. Or maybe I said I'd sell it to her, as the words for "buy" and "sell" are the same, except the all-important differences in tone that I still don't remember.

She was carrying two silver lidded buckets, connected on either side of her shoulders via a long pole. To one bucket was tied a large bag full of empty plastic jars of varying shapes (hence I thought we could sell our empty recyclables to her).

Anyway, we buzzed the bell to our house so I could I ask Jiang Ayi, the woman who helps us everyday, to corroborate that we needed whatever it was she had to sell us. After they spoke, Jiang Ayi said, basically, "Uh, yes, a little."

I then got the bright idea to look in the buckets. It was honey! Heck, yes, I'd buy honey from her, even though we still had some.

We went up the stairs, and Jiang Ayi met us on the first landing, which is where the photos were taken.

It was great fun watching Jiang Ayi dip her finger right into the bucket and deeming it delicious. It was intense to see one of my young-grandmother-type neighbors walk down the stairs and hiss, "How much? 10 kuai per jin (a half-kilo)? That is too expensive! Should be 5!" A bunch of haggling - on my behalf, I guess - occurred, with the neighbor lady still muttering and shaking her head as she continued down the stairs. Ending price: 8 kuai per jin. For a large-ish container, I paid 24 kuai, or about 3 1/2 dollars.

The post-script to this story is that at Zekey's birthday party the next day, a couple was telling us that there's fresh honey available at a field just a few blocks away. Dave has, in fact, biked by that field and seen the bees buzzing around (we acquired a bike last week, more on that later). We agreed that would be the ultimate way to purchase the best honey. I asked how much they paid for their honey: 7 kuai!

I can never get a price as low as the Chinese, but oh well! I paid for the novelty of the experience of buying honey in my stairwell from a woman walking around with buckets of it. All in Chinese, spur-of-the-moment, and another mini-adventure in China.

Grey appreciation day

As you may have guessed from the recent lack of posts complaining about bitterly cold weather, spring is well underway here in Sichuan. Flowers coming out, shirtsleeve weather, sun for THREE WHOLE DAYS IN A ROW, the works!

Before I get to settled in and start taking all of this good weather for granted, I thought I'd share a set of photos that I was working on last month - when it seemed that the grey and cold was going to go on forever. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, was my thinking, so I set about recording the bits of grey and brown around campus that I found interesting. Below are a few more samples, or you can see the whole set here.

On the Transmission of Culture

Following are some video and audio clips of a few things that I showed to my students last week that may be of general interest as well. What's this have to do with the transmission of culture? Ah, you'll have to take my class to find out...


A traditional New Orleans jazz funeral. Gets more interesting once the casket comes out.


What class on culture would be complete without the Beatles?


Incidentally, did you know that the Beatles cribbed the lyrics from "Hard Day's Night" from Shakespeare? Here's proof.


Speaking of things out of their contexts, here's Van Gogh's Starry Night in a back alleyway in Chiang Mai, Thailand. More views of Starry Night here and here. Oh, and here.

If Starry Night dog T-shirts aren't your cup of tea, check out poet Anne Sexton's haunting take on the painting.


Conjunction Junction. Back to the blues. Basically one of the best educational videos in the world, in my humble opinion. Can you watch this and still feel depressed? I think not.


Lastly, educator and tinkerer Gever Tulley on, what else, turning kids loose with power tools to have them learn from their own creations. Transmission of culture, indeed.