The Aardvark Speaks

The Parisian passages, or galleries, are in many ways the precursors of today's shopping malls. Housing numerous shops inside a roof-covered lane or passageway, they rightly prompted the German philosopher Walter Benjamin to write a body of essays about them, in which he cited tham as the prime example for the transformation of the world's cities into urban spaces in the 19th century.

Of the numerous Parisian passages that have survived to the present day (many of them restored to their former glory), perhaps the quirkiest is the Passage Brady in the 10th arrondissement (district) of Paris, linking the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis with the boulevard de Strasbourg. Opened in 1828 and originally the home of numerous tailor shops, it underwent several changes in this slightly less than affluent area of Paris, never being truly "chic". The one that probably had the greatest impact occurred from 1973 onwards, when numerous immigrants from India and Pakistan opened shops here.

For the past decades, the passage has been host to countless Indian restaurants, food shops and barbers. It is a veritable enclave of the Indian subcontinent close to the heart of Paris, and a fairly inexpensive area to get a good Indian meal.

Indeed, restaurants as the Pooja and the Jardin des Indes are rightly recommended as being among the better Indian restaurants in Paris.

Further reading: Jean-Claude Delorme, Passages couverts parisiens. Paris: Parigramme, 2002. Available from Amazon.fr.

The Market, a prizewinning film by the Croatian filmmaker Ana Hušman, shows one day at the Dolac market of Zagreb, Croatia, with commentary by greengrocers and customers.

The film is currently shown as part of the exhibition "Aspects of Collecting" at Sammlung Essl.

Even though almost everyone has probably heard him play at some point, Emil Richards is still one of the more obscure musicians in jazz history. In fact, Richards contributed to some of the best-known TV soundtracks. The xylophone in The Simpsons theme, the finger snaps in the Addams Family theme, the bongos on the original Mission Impossible theme -- all of them were played by Richards, who, incidentally, is also the person who played the bells on Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair". Despite his extensive involvement in over 2000 movie and TV soundtracks, Richards' career as a jazz musicians never really took off. After a stint in Don Ellis' Hindustani Jazz Sextet, Ed Michel, then both a record producer and A&R man at Impulse! Records signed Richards for a 2-record deal. Both albums flopped.

The story goes that massive amounts of marijuana were consumed at Impulse! sessions at the time, both by the musicians and the staff, and that the surprisingly large number of psychedelic jazz records released by the label and signing of obscure artists in the late 1960s is largely due to everybody's drug intake. That would, however, be an unfair judgement.

Even though Richards was one of these obscure artists, his catalogue of recorded work qualified him well enough as a session leader, and even though side B of Journey to Bliss, his first Impulse! release, is full of weird sounds and esoteric chanting, side A is bona fide marimba madness in the best jazz tradition.

His second album for Impulse!, Spirit of 1976 (released in 1969) is a recording of a live performance consisting of original compositions as well as jazz standards, and there is nothing remotely psychedelic or esoteric about them. Quite on the contrary, it's a record full of infectious music with an incredible groove. A version of Miles Davis' "All Blues" also shows remarkable atmospheric density.

Emil Richards recorded with Frank Sinatra, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, The Beach Boys, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Marvin Gaye, George Harrison and many others and owns a collection of more than 770 percussion instruments.

Richards' two Impulse! albums were never reissued on CD.

Da gibt es einen Autor, der über Unsitten des deutschen Sprach(fehl)gebrauchs schreibt und, weil seine Bücher sogar recht unterhaltsam sind, einigermaßen gut daran verdienen dürfte. All die sprachlichen Irrwitze in seinen Büchern sind in der Tat sehr witzig, nur eine Kleinigkeit hat der gute Mann übersehen:

Der Titel seines Buches, Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod, ist falsch herum. Es hat nämlich im Laufe der Zeit der Genitiv den Dativ ersetzt, und nicht umgekehrt, und das ist auch der Grund, warum sich der Dativ in vielen regionalen Umgangssprachen so hartnäckig hält.

In anderen germanischen Sprachen hält sich diese Syntax sogar sehr beständig. Der so genannte "Saxon Genitive" im Englischen ist historisch gesehen und sehr streng genommen nämlich gar keiner.

Nehme ich nämlich einen Ausdruck wie

the baker's wife

und bedenke, dass ein Apostroph ein Auslassungszeichen für zwei oder mehr Buchstaben ist, so stellt sich die Frage, welche Buchstaben da eigentlich ausgelassen wurden. Die Antwort: Das 's ist ein Überbleibsel des Possessivpronomens his, ursprünglich sagte man also:

the baker his wife

Also übersetzt nichts anderes als: "Dem Bäcker seine Frau".

A strange regulation exists in the American state of California, called Proposition 65, which requires apartment complexes, schools, etc., to post warning signs if any chemicals used on the property (e.g. detergents and suchlike) can cause cancer. Some of these, such as the one pictured left, do not sound very reassuring. You'd think that people should stop using such substances rather than warn others that they are being exposed to them. It's a strange world.

I was made aware of this through an interesting comment that Aardvark reader Jann posted here today.

Arrington de Dionyso is an American multi-instrumentalist who plays the guitar and the bass clarinet, does Tuvan throat singing and generally sings with the intensity of a madman. On his latest album Malaikat dan singa his singing sounds particularly demented because for some obscure reason he chose to sing in Indonesian; the lyrics are adapted and translated lines from poems by William Blake. Not that you would understand a single one of them unless you are Indonesian.

Accompanied by the brute drumming of Karl Blau, de Dionyso churns out 11 songs that may be among the rawest and meatiest music released this year. The combination of distorted guitar, bass clarinet and throat singing does have an impact that goes well beyond the obvious novel factor; not only is it direct, intense and full of urgency, some of the songs have surprisingly addictive grooves. Even if you don't know what he's singing (or perhaps precisely because you don't know), you get the impression of a possessed man spewing out the fundamentals of human existence. The last track, 13 minutes in a more meditative mood, comes as something of a relief. This album is quite something.

Vienna Transport is currently celebrating 40 years of construction work for the new metro system. Construction work started on November 3rd, 1969 with the excavations for the station at Karlsplatz (pictured left).

It's something of an ambivalent anniversary. First of all, before the new metro, the old metro had been in service since 1898; in fact two of the "new" metro lines are in fact nothing but converted old metro lines. Second, while there is no doubt that the first two stages of the new metro system brought significant improvements in public transport, the new metro is also responsible for the drastic degradation of the tramway network on the surface.

New Europe has published a review of Mr Singh Has Disappeared on their "Brussels Agenda" site and calls it "a little gem, unique, full of its own atmosphere and [...] very funny indeed." Wow.

The graphic artist Martin Ulrich Kehrer spent three years taking pictures of letters and lettering on Viennese shop fronts, thereby creating a documentation of well over 2500 examples of urban typography from all 23 districts of Vienna. A small selection of these is currently shown in an exhibition at the Wienmuseum Karlsplatz, along with 26 concrete blocks showing individual letters from selected typefaces.

Kehrer describes the purpose of his project as twofold: on the one hand, to document obsolete typefaces, some of which have survived only in traces or fragments, and on the other, to point out changes in formal and material aspects of original typography (i.e. not the cheap, uniform, globalized kind used by multinational chain stores) over several decades.

About 200 of Kehrer's photographs were recently published in a book entitled Stadtalphabet Wien, which largely focuses on examples from the 1950s through the 1970s. The book is available from Amazon.de.

Martin Ulrich Kehrer: Stadtalphabet Wien. Wien: Sonderzahl-Verlag, 2009. ISBN 978-3-85449-300-6. € 18.