The Mist

Rengma Naga, woman from Tesophenyu, 20x10

A couple of CDs that I ordered from Peter van Ham, from Germany are climbing up the ranks in Top 100 land. The CDs were recorded in the far Northeast of India and a few tracks in Myanmar as well. The CD Naga: Songs from the Mist, features recordings from between 1998 and 2002 of the Naga peoples, while Himalaya: Songs from the Heights, has recordings from Arunachal Pradesh from 2013. Both CDs were recorded by Peter van Ham, the latter on his own label. I was delighted to find a good many photographs, mostly by van Ham as well, in the booklet, even though they are super tiny. The photo illustrating Atekapuka, a welcome song from Tesophenyu in Nagaland, India, doesn't measure more than an inch by an inch-and-a-half, and has six or seven people on it, in black and white.
 

Venus (birth)

Ihuahua, Cheour de femmes Yaulapiti, 20x10

Compared to some other well know renaissance masterworks, the Venus by Botticelli didn't quite live up to my expectations, when I finally saw it in Florence last year. My best memory of the Botticelli's Venus was a little statuette at a souvenir stand just outside the Uffifzi. I had to have it. While the painting doesn't show the back, obviously, a statuette has to, because it's 3-D.

One of my most listened to albums of the year is called: Brésil vol. 1 - Musique Indienne du Brésil (1968), the song Ihuahua is listed highest. The performers of Ihuahua are represented by a photograph on the back sleeve of the album sleeve, which was recorded by Simone Dreyfus in 1957. Really, anyone from this photo (by Dreyfus) would have made a good model for the "Venus" painting.

Simone Dreyfus, Yaulapiti – Ihuahua, photo