Almost a month has passed since the last Crate, a massive heat wave has come and gone in the meantime, leaving burnt landscapes behind and now we’ve reached the sleepy August when everyone tries to take the most advantage of the remaining holidays before September hits us again. The small eateries and cafes in my neighborhood have been announcing holiday closures on social media already since last week and the few unlucky ones who are not leaving town are preparing to give their establishment a fresh coat of paint. The infernal heat has subsided into the ideal summer temperatures around 32-33C and it’s a good moment to stretch out in the ventilator breeze and open the new Crate.
The name of this week’s Crate is yet again from song lyrics – this time from ‘Desert Rose‘ by Sting and Cheb Mami. In case you happen to get curious about this dreamy duet, it sounds just as impressive in live version.
The style of singing Cheb Mami is doing in ‘Desert Rose’ is raï – Algerian working class folk music, originating from 1920’s Oran. It was performed both by male and female singers, called respectively cheikh/cheikha and later in pop raï cheb/chaba. One of the earliest stars of the genre was Cheikha Rimitti, whose ‘Charrag, gatta‘ scandalized the Algerian government and earned her a media ban in 1962. As foreign as the genre might initially sound, most Europeans would probably recognize at least one raï song – Cheb Khaled’s ‘Aicha‘. Costas Bigalis has also made a Greek version of it called ‘Μ’αρεσει’.
The intro to this fantastic HBO miniseries from Czechia – ‘Pustina‘ (‘Wasteland’). If you enjoy bleak crime series with a twist, this one is for you.
Edward Hopper did a ton of preparatory sketches for his ‘Nighthawks‘.
I’ve always had a somewhat ambiguous relationship to the Beat generation and Beat literature, but I finally gave Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road‘ a second chance in audiobook form and liked it. Quite sure that the excellent reader had a part in it (props to Constantina for the recommendation!) Now started Kerouac’s last book ‘Big Sur‘ (by the same reader, obviously). Neither of them seem to be recorded as audiobooks in Greek, but both have been translated as ‘Στο δρόμο‘ and ‘Μπιγκ Σερ‘.
Empty skies tend to have a lot of empty land underneath – and there are several places on Earth where it can be found in abundance – for instance the North American prairie with its herds of bison, Hungarian puszta with Csikós‘ – the local traditional horse riders – and not to forget Mongolia with its endless steppes and herders. (As for Mongolian history, Netflix has the ‘Marco Polo‘ series that is absolutely worth watching. The book was never intended to be an accurate historical depiction, but the costumes are supposedly very well researched.)
Airports have their own strange beauty, either nostalgic when seen from old photographs or abstract when seen from the air.
Before HBO’s ‘Pustina’, there was T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’.
9. And let’s allow The Awkward Yeti to finish off this Crate, lest it become too bleak and wind-blown.
So long and until the next Crate!