In the previous post, I wrote about the 1933 recording A raid on the hashish den, a comedy sketch with music, featuring one of the earliest recordings of Markos Vamvakaris. In the process, I got the bug for GoAnimate, and so I created an animated music video for the song. (Now with subtitles.) My second […]
Among Markos Vamvakaris’ 1933 recordings—among his very earliest, that is—is Έφοδος στον τεκέ, “A raid on the hashish den”. This was a musical revue number by Giannis Kamvysis and Petros Kyriakos. Kyriakos was a musical theatre actor, and the underworld that gave rise to rebetiko music was part of what he documented in song. With […]
Rebetiko music was a fusion of styles, and the fusion can be seen in progress through the ’30s. The antecedents of rebetiko are murky, but the most visible antecedent is Smyrneika, the music of Anatolian cafés, which came with the Anatolian refugees to Greece in the ’20s, and was taken up as the emblem of […]
I: May As if I was the first To sail beyond the west, Fall off the end of Earth, Sink, swim, and gasp for breath. As if no man knew thirst, Before I stopped to rest Beside the spring; or birth, Before I heard of death. Beyond the west: each day A year, each step […]
This story picks through the ashes. When I was finishing my undergrad and moving through to linguistics in 1993, the war in Abkhazia was underway. There was plenty of grubby conduct on both sides, and Abkhazia was in the end thoroughly ethnically cleansed; but outsiders with no stake in the Caucasus had sympathies for the […]
I have been wanting to write, since reading of it, about the deaths in Athens. And unhealthily (because of such recursion is our society enmeshed), I have been wanting to write about the reactions to the deaths. What I would write would be reactionary, and vindictive, and uninformed. I don’t particularly want to say I’m […]
I’m leaving New York. I haven’t been leisurely blogging for the twenty-four hours I’ve been here; I’ve been too busy talking with my regular commenter John Cowan (6 hrs, finishing 2:30 AM—good to know I can still do that kind of thing, though jet lag helps), and my friend Genevieve (1 hr, and we had […]
I’m in a hotel in Northern Virginia this time, and am negotiating its large highways on foot; ten years ago, I was visiting a residence, and not really going anywhere much. So I had not been subjected to its large highways any way other than how God intended them to be encountered—out the car window. […]
You’ll have noticed even more extended radio silence than is usual for me on a trip overseas. I’ve spent three days in Irvine CA, and am now heading to DC, on a plane four hours delayed. Which brings thoughts of decaying infrastructure. An unsustainably greened Orange County, with the same gargantuan buildings and brobdignanian freeways […]
The Mariupolitans are a distinct group of ethnic Greeks living in the Ukraine, who formerly lived in Crimea. Like I explained in the Other Place, a minority of Mariupolitans speak not Greek, but a variant of Crimean Tatar they call Greek: Urum. They are not the only people who consider themselves Greek but speak a […]