swimming freestyle

"So long as you're not afraid to die, it's OK"

Video of the Lantern Festival in Nuanquan, China where the locals melt iron ore and throw it against a wall.  Called "Dashuhua", it's pretty spectacular.  And pretty dangerous.

Ry Cooder is searching for California

Musician extraordinaire, Ry Cooder, has made a career out of exploring the far territories of popular music.  From Cuba to Mexico to India, Cooder has produced authentic, enlightened music that honors those national styles.  The New York Times includes a terrific article in today's edition (the Travel section, no less) about Ry Cooder's new project.

Ry’s latest project may be his strangest and most ambitious. It’s a trilogy of concept albums, plus a short novel, that resurrects a lost California of places and people that Ry, who is 61, remembers from growing up in the 1950s. It was a dryer and poorer place then, but rich in things he likes, like simplicity and ingenuity, good musicians, cool cats and hot cars. Time and neglect have bulldozed most of it into oblivion.

...After lunch we walked in the desert to examine a bricked-up mine shaft and to collect sand for gold panning back at Mister Jalopy’s workshop. Watch out for snakes, he told me as he walked ahead through a gully. Turning over rocks for reptiles, I found an old, neatly torn and folded girlie picture, perfectly preserved after escaping some trucker’s wallet. I refolded it and put it back.

We headed to Chávez Ravine, once a poor Mexican-American neighborhood and now the hilltop fortress of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The view of downtown from the hillside, across to Chinatown and City Hall, was just like the one captured in 1949 by the photographer Don Normark, who stumbled across the neighborhood one day. It was a collection of shacks and vegetable plots, like a hidden farming village, and looked to him like a “poor man’s Shangri-la.” The nickname and his haunting book of photographs are all that remain — in the late ’50s Chávez Ravine was buried, literally, and the stadium built on top of it.

Ry wrote a song about how old-timers locate themselves, by a memory plumb line down through the playing field, “to the town underneath all that cement”:

Here's a video of Cooder's "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium" from "Chavez Ravine"

Do You Prefer Your Guinea Pig Roasted of Pan Fried?

Great article in the Guardian about the food culture of Peru.  An excerpt:

Here groups of middle-aged women expertly carve the fish, prepare the marinades and hawk their wares with formidable voices all day long. 'Come inside, come inside, enjoy the heating and the fine table settings of our magnificent restaurant my big strong king with your beautiful queen,' is a rough translation of the greeting we received. The ceviche women of Ancon are the Latina equivalent of Cockney market traders, and have a patter to match.

The restaurant, of course, has no heating, no fine table settings and indeed no walls. It is merely a series of tables and chairs set out along the jetty under a tarpaulin roof. But the food is sublime. Here you can feast on ceviche mixto - a mix of conchitas negras (black cockles), shrimps, octopus, flat fish, and pejerrey, a sort of anchovy.

If you want to invoke yet more cackling innuendo from the ceviche women, ask for extra leche de tigre or tiger's milk, a blend of hot peppers, lime juice and the fishy goodness in which the raw fish is soaked. According to the ladies it has certain medicinal properties. I am sure you can guess what they are.