The Reads of Winter

      . . . . The books I've read or tried to read, or listened to, or read aloud in the last 2 1/2 months begins with The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger (2015) by Greg Steinmetz.

 Jakob Fugger der Reiche (1459-1525) in der Kunst

This man, born before the fateful 1492 voyage of Christof Colón, active throughout most of the 16th century, was Europe’s first millionaire, who was not a royal. Silver and land were the pillars of his wealth, made by lending to European monarchs, particularly Philip II, funding their wars and their rivalries.  They almost always lost; he almost always won, gaining control of what had been their silver mines and cities, making him all that much richer.  Much if not most of the hot flow of gold and silver coming into Seville via Philip II’s flotas from the New World, ended up in Fugger’s accounts as well.  This is how men who worked with money could become millionaires w/o being a monarch.  Fugger’s story is the birth story of capitalism, allowed by the vast rapine of the unbelievably vast rich riches of the New World, and the equally unbelievable stupid behaviors of monarchs.  It is a fascinating tale, even as it is a tragic one, particularly for African and Native Americans, as both the new worlds and old were transformed by floods of gold and silver. his book filled in a big missing space in the transformation of finance that allowed for the coming European era of industrialization and the finale of the medieval eras.

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgewood and the Transformation of Britain (2021) by Tristram Hunt couldn't have existed without the Age of Fugger. Wedgewood well represents the changes to Europeans’ culture of the material life, the birth of mass production and industrialism, financed by what happened in the 16th Century, providing for the first time ornamental, decorative and often plainly useless, non-functional objects even to the lower middle classes as markers of status.  Not only did this brilliant fellow with quite poor health beginning with childhood tuberculosis of the bone in one of his legs get the whole world desiring English -- his! -- pottery, including the French, but received accolades for the quality and beauty of his works from Chinese porcelain connoisseurs. To more easily and far less expensively to receive the quality of clay his works needed he was instrumental in his region developing the canal system -- which also allowed his products and himself to get to London much more easily, quickly and safely. The Grand Trunk Canal system cost a billion dollars to build, in today’s money.  Not only pack pony breeders, owners and suppliers, objected to the project, but so did many ‘conservative’ lords and others, as being a waste of money. But if potters of luxury porcelain products weren’t important enough to get it built, the surge in coal mining in the region was. Josiah himself, who played an important role getting their route and connection to Liverpool approved and funded by the local lordships, was concerned it would put his potteries too much on the map, easy to visit (which is true), and thus catch the eyes of those who imposed taxes on large businesses.  The canal would make his business grow ever larger.

Currently I'm  reading The Story of Russia (2022) by Orlando Figes. A less large book than many who attempt these matters, less than half the size of Simon Montifiore's really wonderful Romanovs -- and Figes starts at the start -- long before the Mongolian incursions and conquest, and gets Putin and Ukraine in it as well at the end.  It explains so much about Putin, Russia and the Ukraine war.

Before the Figes I did get to read The Lion And The Fox: Two Rival Spies and the Secret Plot to Build a Confederate Navy (2022), by Alexander Rose. This is the same author who wrote Turn: Washington's Spies, from which the AMC 4-season scripted drama was adapted. If one wonders how the rebels came up with the idea of building a navy in Liverpool -- recall that Liverpool was Britain's greatest center of the African slave trade and everything that went with it, from shipbuilding to insurance to the forging of manacles and shackles.  It was no coincidence then, that Liverpool was also Britain's primary port for Southern cotton, and where the British Cotton Exchange was located.  These Brits provided so much money and assistance, not to mention encouragement, to confederate James Bulloch, the honcho from Georgia.

While reading Lion and Fox, I was listening to Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) -- I've read the second and third volumes of Morris's award-winning biography, but hadn't read this one as I'd read other biographies of TR's earlier years prior to becoming POTUS). In this first volume of his biography of the (then future) POTUS, is included TR's uncle, who is one of the two central figure in The Lion and the Fox. SSo all through, as in the past, when I evaluate anything regarding Teddy, I take into account first that TR's beloved mother, Mittie Bulloch was a confederate, who would, if she could, do anything for the Rebels. As it was she did send lots of supplies and money, not only to her family on the plantation in Georgia, some of which went without doubt to her brother's efforts in Liverpool. She kept it up until public opinion forced her husband -- an ardent Northern unionist, instrumental in many ways to the Union war effort -- to stop her. Upon which, Mittie took to her room as a permanent invalid. Such an affecting scene when she was finally reunited with her brothers in Liverpool 2-3 years after Appomattox.  Her indulgent, adoring husband was taking her -- and thus the family- on a European tour for the sake of his wife's 'nerves.'  There, Mittie regained her nerves,and Teddy met his 'bully uncle James' for the first time.  Teddy hero worshipped his uncles -- the other one was working in Paris with Slidell.

For much of January my workout book (this is when I listen to audio versions of books) which I've nearly come to the end of, is In Search of a Kingdom: Francis Drake, Elizabeth I, and the Perilous Birth of the British Empire (2021) by Laurence Bergreen.  So much I never dreamed of I've been learning about the run-up to the Spanish invasion and what 'the Battle of the Armada" actually was.

Sir Francis Drake, (born c. 1540–43 circumnavigated the globe. Unlike Magellan, his global circumnavigator predecessor, Drake survived to continue fighting and plundering, pushing Spain to declare war on England, sending the ill-fated, infamous Armada.

By no means was it a single battle of a single day or even of a day and night and another day.  It went on for weeks. Elizabeth and her Lord Burley treated the navvies who save England from the Armada's invasion like shyte, just starting with refusing to pay them, then leaving them often literally naked and penniless, to try to get home.  Cynically, Burley figured the fewer of the men who survived the fewer the Queen needed to pay somewhere down the line when she might get around to it.

Prior to the Drake biography I listened to the audio version of Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan's Great Pirate Army, the Epic Battle for the Americas, and the Catastrophe that Ended the Outlaws' Bloody Reign  (2007) by Stephan Talty. 

Sir Henry Morgan (c. 1635-1688), Welsh privateer

Morgan was almost two centuries post Drake, but the Spanish were still the Catholic bane of England and fair game, most fair game, nay the game to which the Brits were entitled, if only for the sake of religion.  Drake's trajectory continued almost up to the age of Bourbon Spain -- which had so many of the same problems and errors as did Phillip II's Spain when it came to a navy.

Which brings me to our current read-aloud to each other before lights out, an old one history, Bourbon Spain 1700 - 1808 (1989) by John Lynch, part of a many-volume academic series of the history of Spain, for which series Lynch is the general editor.

Among the works waiting for me are The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East (2022) by Nicolas Morton that tells me all sorts of things I've wanted to know about the region and the period, told from the perspective of the then established medieval kingdoms in the near East, from Europe and from that of the Mongols.  It's wonderful, but I haven't had time to read it yet.  Also there's Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Iran (2011) by Dilip Hiro, which will help in my doomed desire before I die to get some geographic, cultural and historical sense of this vast region about which, alas I know nothing. ]

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I read two novels in January!  Two! This after having read no fiction at all for a long time -- nothing appeals or keeps my attention. 

I do admit alternate, historical sf/fnal Babel: An Arcane History (2022) by R.F. Kuang, though it enthralled me for at least 300 pp. as no sf/f novel has been able to do for in decades, didn't quite carry me all the way to the end. I skimmed the final fifth (it's a long novel). Everything about Babel, from the issues of translations, which is part and parcel of our own household, to having one of the primary four characters as young Haitian woman speaking of the issues of her native Kreyol -- which in our own history has only in the last decade been recognized as a language, and which el V has learned -- language is a primary tool, like religion, for imperialists, is My Stuff. In other words, Babel is about something that authentically matters, historically and presently. However, the novel as a novel would have been better reading if about 100 pp. had been cut out. The plotting and characterization was good, but, and I know this sounds odd -- there was too much of both.  Or more accurately, the book repeated the points already made about the characters and their relationships, how hard they have to study, how overwhelming the amount of work, several times in every chapter, which wasn't necessary, and that felt rather amateurish.  But Babel certainly lived up to its title, and I gave the novel enormous credit for that. In the end all the figures we meet in this alternate history sf/fnal novel, wherever they are from or go, or what they do, are as incomprehensible to each other as the Old Testament humanity are to each other with the failure of their tower planned to allow them to conquer heaven.  No matter how much and deeply language was studied, whether to fuel exploitation of others as well as the planet, it dd not provide a solution to this, which brings violence always.  One understands this so well, living with pre-lingual children, their outrage and frustration that no matter how they try we don't understand what their issues are (so much of the time). In the end too, no matter how well planned the resistance to the colonial metropole's power is, in the end, centuries later, we are still waiting for the day of reckoning, Likely the ends of such empires and colonialisms only arrive with full out global calamities such as what happened in the 6th century, and then the consequent Dark Age births the nascent new colonialisms and slaveries. I am the one who said that, not Kuang. She's very young, and thus barely able to raise the fortitude to face squarely in her own novel her characters' specific failure to reverse the plundering of their language, culture and worlds to which they'd been born, before being plucked for Oxford's imperial translation college of Babel. The exception to being ripped out of one's own world and thrown into another is, of course, the white English gentry-small aristocrat girl, who, extremely gifted with language deploys her gifts to have a life different from that decreed for young women of her social status and wealth. 

Deepti Kapoor, author of Age of Vice

The second novel is Age of Vice (2023) by Deepti Kapoor, a great big gangster-thriller set in Northern India, and particularly, New Delhi. It's the first novel in years I have read to the very final word in order to find out who did what and why -- I'm not quite sure even so I have it figured out.  This too is a long novel, but I managed to gallop through it during four nights of reading (there's a lot of white space in a lot of sections, which helps).  This novel has received enthusiastic reviews for the most part, though some have said it is 1) too long; 2) melodramatic for the sake of melodrama, and implausible -- but the pace is so fast and the text goes downs so easily one hardly notices. Lee Child is among the pros who have enthusiastically endorsed it, and so has Marlon James. I do not know if Age of Vice is published in India.  The author lives in Portugal.

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Now, of for mid-season Mardi Gras Postmambo-"For the Funk of It" style, and much, much, MUCH else. Hope the weather cooperates despite much rain expected,  Back next month, to get ready for Spain.

What I Saw This Weekend

     . . . . I am again a partnered person.

Vaquero returned, his Jet Blue flight took off just 20 minutes ahead of the Jamaican-Cuban-Miami earthquake. We made a date, then, for Friday night, to celebrate reunion. We both were enthusiastically looking forward to viewing two exhibits that had just concurrently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

. . . The Arte del mar: Artistic Exchange in the Caribbean exhibit was one of those, immediately upon entering the exhibit space, the area right behind one's eyebrows enlarges, engorges with a sense of wonder, surprise, and expectation.

So many of the figures in this exhibit presented to our, NYC 2020, eyes as prominently hermaphroditic -- whether that was intentional was unknown to us, however.

The Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara exhibit was also spectacular, but we're fairly familiar with these sorts of objects and the history -- not to mention the music.  Also, for me the relationship and history of the horse within these cultures, is an element I've been looking at for decades.

Whereas, in the Caribbean Exchange, the surviving artifacts are few and, apart from Carib and Taino, peoples we've never heard of before. Some of these may well have disappeared even prior to the Colombian Exchange's diseases, enslavement and genocides.  These items presented as mysterious and strange in a way the Malian, Dogan, Niger, Fulani, etc. cultures of the Sahell and West Africa are not.  Due to the literacy of Islam, these are 'historic' cultures. Whereas the items from the Caribbean Exchange cultures are forever unknown to literate history.

     . . . . Yesterday afternoon’s errands took me around my neighborhood, east and west. Approaching to the place on Bleecker Street where I've been buying our loose tea and coffee, since the branch on my block got rent priced out, I passed one of those tourist souvenir-smoke shops. Just there, a man burst out the shop door, throwing the stand of NYC post cards across the threshold. At first I thought it was an accident, and an asshole who didn't have the social grace to even say he was sorry, to the counter person who was at the other side of the door.  Then I saw the man's  face and the rest of his body. This was someone who was violently out of control, lashing out.  He yelled, “He threatened me! he said he was going to attack me!" he screamed into the faces of the rest of we pedestrians there, our faces and body language registering censure of what he'd done.  He raced down the block, where he met up two others like him, in appearance. If they weren’t exactly homeless, they lived rough lives focused on over consumption of booze and drugs. The took protective formation and ran back to the store, while the first guy continued to shout, “He said he was going to attack me, dirty m-word.”  I didn’t believe him the first time I heard him yell the store person threatened him.  Now I certainly didn’t.  I don’t known how it turned out, for all was quiet ten minutes later. The revolving post card stand was upright in its place, where I've seen it standing, for years and years of walking this block.

Yesterday had been very pleasant. I enjoyed having so many errands to do in the overcast, damp, a little foggy weather.  It felt like April, not February 1. I was shopping again, for food and supplies for two, not just myself, i.e. I was savoring having Vaquero home again.

Then, that.  I chatted with a few others who had witnessed this event.  We began to realize this white guy who caused this ruckus, that not only I reacted so negatively toward, had been trying to get the street on his side, to attack someone, by using a racial slur.  That was depressing as hell, that he thought he could do that.  OTOH, nobody on the street responded the way he wanted.  He only had his two (white) boys at his back.  Nobody else joined in. 

Comfort Colorful TV - Death In Paradise

     . . . . Death in Paradise, season 6 ( 2017 - BBC) became available streaming from Neflix this weekend -- during which, I then, watched all eight episodes over Saturday and Sunday.  

Hey, by late Saturday night it was raining and snowing here, which continued into Sunday. When that weather moved on, it left behind some nasty cold temperatures, which continue today.  So new episodes of Death in Paradise, filled with sun and heat, lush flowers, curved beaches of golden sand lapped by blue Caribbean waters, were just the ticket out of gloomy reality.

Harry the Lizzard, a most important character in Death in Paradise!

     . . . . . Season 6 is different from the previous seasons in some subtle but important ways.  Without any spoilers, it felt a tad darker than the previous seasons.  Oddly, one of the reasons  for this, for me, is that, unlike in previous seasons, one can see the characters sweating -- sometimes one can even see damp spots on shirts. 

Having spent significant time on Guadalupe where the series is shot, I always wondered why on the show, nobody sweated, even after running or other prolonged exertion, or even perspired -- that is one humid island.  There you know mon, in August, the thinnest of Indian cotton, sleeved, shirts were too much to wear.  No sleeves on Guadalupe!

In various media pieces about the series last year, in preparation for season 6, Kris Marshall, the actor who plays principal character, Inspector Humphrey Goodman, went on at length about the deep discomfort of shooting in the heat and humidity.

Detective Sergeant Florence Cassell, investigating a murder at a literary festival.  This was a really fine episode.  It was about time the writers of Death in Paradise recognized the Caribbean produces significant literature after all the episodes featuring chefs, resorts, sailing, volcanoes, etc.  Anyway, who couldn't love a series with such a creature as Florence in most scenes, hmmmmm? :)

The other primary reason it seemed a little darker was that Humphrey seemed on edge, tense, and even thinner than in his previous seasons. These media pieces reveal a reason for this too -- that is, if he really was playing edgier and thinner, and it isn't just my eyes making this up.  But tension and sweating really go together, you know mon?

However, in these media pieces, Marshall mentioned another reason why he may have looked more tired and slim than previously, but I won't mention it here, for fear of spoiling those who haven't already seen last year's season 6 ( this year's season 7 aired back on the BBC January-February).

In any case, I enjoyed season 6 even more than season 5, and this bit of darker tone is probably responsible.  It is still as sunny and brilliantly colorful, and as bright as before though, the real reasons we happily return to this series.  It is like Midsomer Murders in that way, as well as in others (which I won't say now because of spoiling). 

Jason Hughes as Ben Jones, a favorite character from Midsomer Murders.

One of Death In Paradise's 6th season episodes even includes Jason Hughes, who played detective sergeant Ben Jones to Inspector Barnaby in Midsomer Murders.

The Snow! The Wind! Laundry! Ripper Street! Cuban Jazz!

     . . . . The snow began snittering sometime before dawn, and by now is full snart.  

Which was fine, until the wind kicked in.  So this must be why the weather sites for all our bit of New York are red with Winter Storm!  Storm warning in effect until 11 PM.  However, alas this snow front is passing all the rest of the state by, as it hugs the coast.  New England will probably get a lot, but western and upstate New York, probably nothing.  Not good for our drought conditions which are state wide. We've also been receiving a fair amount of rain in our little bit, but other parts not.  Which doesn't help us either, as our water supplies are further north.

So, an enforced snow day here.  Whatever shall we do? Play hot music from hot climates to help feel warm.

Himself?  He's all comfy and happy, back in bed, reading a book by a friend which deals primarily with the Dominican Republic's independence process -- from both Spain and Haiti, and eventually the U.S. too.  At one point, though, during the first administration of Grant, the small power elite did beg the U.S. to take them as its own.  It also at one point declared itself a part of Spain again -- without bothering to inform Spain.  Which really didn't want it.  Nobody wanted the DR.  Except Haiti.  And thereby hang many miserable tales which are ongoing.

Me, I'm a climbing the laundry mountain, which keeps me from spending the entire day sitting down, as I must run up and down the stairs to the basement where the machines are.  Also, Himself can help.  :)

We went out before it got dark to to pick up a few things from Gourmet Garage, which was an adventure between the wind and the restaurants on the block ignoring the City's laws about shoveling and salting the sidewalks, and the ice, ice, ice under the snow. We could have managed dinner without going out, but to be honest, I wanted to go out.

It's been so long since I've experienced a real snow here, it's as though it's all brand new.

     . . . . This time last year we were in Cuba.  Which, if a hurricane and a Russian manipulated election hadn't gotten in the way, is where I was supposed to be today.  

Coffee plantation, southeast Cuba; I visited this one the first time back in -- 2001?

By the way, our March trip to eastern Cuba is filling right up. Some of the Travelers are repeats from the January trip, that's what splendid, intrepid, serious Travelers they are!  The others coming sound equally cool, and some of them we have known for a long time too.  So it's going to be a terrific experience, to which I'm already looking forward.  I'm looking forward particularly today, to being in Oriente's Caribbean climate!

     . . . . Tonight I'll probably watch the second half of the fourth and last season of Ripper Street (2016). This fourth season, after the abrupt cancelation of the show by BBC, after it got rescued by amazilla, is even darker than the previous seasons. I've really liked this series for all kinds of reasons, with the exception that the writers couldn't figure out what to do with primary female characters except to make them duplicitous whores or insane, and preferably both. This is a short season, only 7 episodes.

The time for Ripper Street to go has probably come anyway.  It's good to have it go out on a standard even higher than its previous seasons achieved. The actors are all so good, they've been having other jobs all along.

Ah, here we are in Ripper Street's comfort zone -- no women around!

Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Detective Inspector Edmund Reed, even showed up in the first episode of the first season of The Last Kingdom, while Jerome Flynn, who plays Det. Sgt. Bennet Drake, is everyone's favorite Got character, Bronn . The actors's talent is much of the pleasure of this series. I loved them as ensemble, but the characters' story lines have been diverging from  the ensemble aspect anyway, as with Detective Reid having left the force at the end of last season.  The manipulations to get him back on the force this season were not quite what anyone could call plausible, particularly as the roles are reversed with Drake now being Reid's superior.

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P.S.  Love it -- a report from Havana Jazz Fest by amigo, Larry Blumenfeld:

"Cuba is the Missing Link in Jazz History."  Is it ever!  Read it here.

Perhaps it's time to begin the Saturday night ritual, which has been by-passed in the last holiday weeks -- pasta and jazz!


I have the technology for both (and the ingredients).

Reading Wednesday - C.S. Harris - Who Buries the Dead, A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

This is the tenth title (March, 2015) in C.S. Harris's  Georgian - Regency Sebastian St. Cyr murder mystery series.  Sebastian, the Earl of Devlin,  and his wife, Hero daughter of Lord Jervis, most trusted and ruthless keeper of the reign's secrets and dirty tricks performer to the mad king's and his son, were seen a the very end of the previous installment as brand new parents. Who Buries the Dead picks up soon after that perilous birth, which Hero barely survived.

C.S. Harris is a New Orleans novelist.  She began publishing this series with What Angels Fear in November, 2005. Presumably she was dealing with the end tasks of publishing a book in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Since then, these ten St. Cyr novels have appeared on a yearly schedule. This is particularly admirable considering that surely, though Harris may not suffered as terribly as so many others from New Orleans's Katrina tragedy -- let us say no New Orleanian escaped from the long, on-going experience and aftermath without being seriously affected.

Over the course of these ten years and novels  the reader has learned quite a bit more about Sebastian and his highly fraught past. We're now at the point where we know as much about Sebastian's past as he does. From now on, we readers, like his wife Hero, if more information is revealed that may solve the mysteries of his past, will be learning it with him.

Each novel follows the same structure.  Each novel includes scenes in which Sebastian and members of his family have encounters in which the secrets of Sebastian's birth are either never mentioned, or are addressed obliquely.  Often the encounters are hostile, despite his father, Lord Herndon's, efforts to mend fences. The same with Sebastian's meetings with Lord Jarvis, his most implacable antagonist -- who clearly knows more about Sebastian than most -- and who is the father of his dearly, deeply loved wife, Hero, and, now, also one of his son's grandfathers.

The series isn't entirely even, meaning not all of them are equally engaging, partly because of the formulaic structure.  Which nonengagement then might be just me, because I don't like formula much in my fiction.  Repetition of character and event irritate, do not comfort, me.

That said,  for me, Who Buries the Dead is up to the best of the series.  Both Jane Austen and her brother, Henry, who, in this novel, is still with the bank he joined, are ancillary characters. Austen is visiting her brother, Henry, in London to help care for his wife, Eliza, who is confined to home by the illness which will soon kill her. This is a period in which Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice have been published, and, thanks to the Regent, are the rage of ton reading.  (There are those who will have a knowing smile reading this, as Austen herself used 'ton' only once in her own fiction.)  Names and events encountered by Austen in connection with Sebastian's murder investigation reference those of Austen's later novels, Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, though the author has very wisely chosen not to replicate any of the characters or plots of these books.

Who Buries the Dead is centered around Jamaican slave plantations, and the execution of Charles I. For more fact-checking The American Slave Coast, these last  three weeks I’d done more granular delving into the lead-up, execution and  aftermath of Charles I's execution, in Rebellion: The History of England From James I to the Glorious Revolution (2014) by Peter Ackroyd,  and (Lord) Charles Spencer’s Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I (2015).

However, it was purely by chance I picked up Who Buries the Dead last week, nor did I have any idea that Charles I's remains were the central axis of Harris's novel. The reading of these two works of Stuart history -- "that most hapless of British dynasties", as the historian Robert Tombs declares them to be in his The English and Their History (20014), made the enjoyment of this St. Cyr Mystery greater, not less.

Death In Paradise - BBC1 - season 2

Upon arising this AM the temperature was 8º.  This is why for the last two days I've been watching the second season (2013) of the lighthearted Brit policier series, Death in Paradise.

The action takes place on Saint Marie, a fictional island speck described as "situated in the Eastern Caribbean Sea and one-tenth the size of its north-west neighbor Guadeloupe." Having stayed on Guadeloupe, I can honestly say this means Saint Marie is so tiny it's hard to believe it can support any population at all, much less survive a hurricane. Nevertheless the island is densely populated with tourist resorts, markets, rain forests, sugar plantations, mountains, a volcano, about 100 beaches and a local population equally fluent in English, French and a variety of patois and religions from the Roman Church to Vodún.

Considering the main character, DI Richard Poole, played by comedian, Ben Miller, is a coerced transplant from the London police force, one assumes that at least through the last century or so of its existence Saint Marie, like St. Lucia, has been a British possession.

However! the lingering panoramic scenes of beaches and sky at all different times of day and night are luscious -- it's porn for we winter-frozen northern hemispherites.* The characters tend to be as gorgeous as the scenery, particularly the French-Portuguese actress, Sara Martins, who plays Detective Sergeant

Photos of DS Brodey because I adore her. She makes this series.  So does her mother. Catherine Bordey, played by Élizabeth Bourgine. In this still from season 2 Camille is interviewing a possible witness about the murder victim.  There's always a murder.

Camille's mother, Catherine.  From France, she married a Saint Marie native, who subsequent to Camille's birth disappeared.  She owns the de rigueur bar-restaurant  in Honoré that any self-respecting Caribbean policier must have as the center of information.

Camille Bordey. Part of the fun is seeing which color combination of cut-offs, leggings and matching tops she will wear in each episode: coral, mango, aquamarine, turquoise, lemon. There's a succession of male extras and minor characters who are equally easy on the eyes as DS Bordey.

Among all these lovely people, the aged-out, poor man's Hugh Grant-mannerism afflicted DI Poole is so out of place. Not only is he socially maladjusted -- the

Harry the lizard, who lived in the beach shack before DI Poole, and presumably will still be inhabiting it when Poole is gone . . . .

recurring character with whom he's most comfortable is a lizard who lives in his beach "shack" --  Poole insists on wearing a BLACK suit and tie and shoes at all times in all circumstances -- even though he's been on the island now for over a year. (When he arrived in season 1, this was to be only a temporary assignment.) That's over the top, even for a Brit, in this day and age where the temperature and humidity are intense. Of course, despite these traits that go far beyond idiosyncrasy, the luscious Bordey falls for him so fast that nobody's fooled by her initial antagonism.  As a viewer this is so implausible that it nearly tips over into being (unintentionally) entertaining.  Well, not very much really, but nevermind.

Death in Paradise is pretty, warm, charming and provides the pure escape that Caribbean resort bubbles that protect the tourist from the real island always promise, and for only pennies instead of thousands of dollars.

The soundtrack is mostly reggae and ska. The location shots are mostly Guadeloupe.

DI Poole is no longer on Saint Marie in seasons 3 and 4.

In Season 3 Kris Marshall is the new guy -- who played that unbearably stupid character in Love Actually (2003) who goes to America and gets shagged without charge by numerous Milwaukee prostitutes -- one of whom is Betty Draper, i.e. played by January Jones.

Season 3 ran in the UK in 2014.  Season 4 is either currently showing or has just concluded.  I'll probably watch them in the next two winters, just as I watched season one last winter, and season two in this one.

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 *  That was the appeal of Glades too -- winter escape watching.

1635 Decima

El V's decided how to open his performance bit tonight at Danny Rivera's concert: with a decima, from La vida es sueño, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, widely regarded as the greatest playwright ofSpain's el siglo de oro.  Decimas are still sung in Puerto Rico. 

He's accompanying his performance by playing his classical Ramírez, the same guitar he bought as a young classical guitar and vihuela student in Spain, with the help of Segovia.

The guitar was already a recognizable instrument in Spain by this time of the 17th century, via the vihuela and the gittern.

Found -- Perhaps -- Columbus's Santa Maria

From the UK Guardian, an announcement that perhaps the wreck of Columbus's flag ship, the Santa Maria, has been discovered in the waters off the coast of Haiti.

Shipwreck found off coast of Haiti thought to be one of the most significant underwater discoveries in history by David Keys:

The Santa Maria was built at some stage in the second half of the 15 century in northern Spain’s Basque Country. In 1492, Columbus hired the ship and sailed in it from southern Spain’s Atlantic coast via the Canary Islands in search of a new western route to Asia.

After 37 days, Columbus reached the Bahamas – but, just over ten weeks later, his flagship, the Santa Maria, with Columbus on board, drifted at night onto a reef off the northern coast of Haiti and had to be abandoned. Then, in a native village nearby, Columbus began building his first fort – and,  a week later, leaving many of his men behind in the fort, he used  his two remaining vessels to sail back to Spain in order to report his discovery of what he perceived as a new westerly route to Asia  to his royal patrons  - King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain.

Tragically, many of the signifying objects, such as the cannon, that would help investigators definitively identify the ship have already been looted since it was first looked at in 2003.

"The investigation into the wreck is being supported by the American TV network, the History channel, which has secured the exclusive rights to produce a major television programme on the subject."

Mansfield Park - The War of 1812 - Louisa Catherine Adams

I had been thinking that while we USians are fascinated with all things Jane Austen, it appears Miss Austen hadn't a particle of interest in the U.S.  The only mentions of the New World, I thought, were in Mansfield Park.

The absentee Baronet Bertram goes, with his heir, Tom, to sort out his plantations in Antigua, which seem to have been badly mismanaged -- which happened with West Indies absentee ownership.

It turns out Mansfield Park also includes a mention of America, meaning the U.S. It occurs after Sir Bertram returns, the amateur theatricals and all its accompanying dramas are put a stop to, and the unwelcome guests prudently depart:

From Chapter XII:

Fanny could listen no farther. Listening and wondering were all suspended for a time, for Mr. Bertram was in the room again; and though feeling it would be a great honour to be asked by him, she thought it must happen. He came towards their little circle; but instead of asking her to dance, drew a chair near her, and gave her an account of the present state of a sick horse, and the opinion of the groom, from whom he had just parted. Fanny found that it was not to be, and in the modesty of her nature immediately felt that she had been unreasonable in expecting it. When he had told of his horse, he took a newspaper from the table, and looking over it, said in a languid way, "If you want to dance, Fanny, I will stand up with you." With more than equal civility the offer was declined; she did not wish to dance. "I am glad of it," said he, in a much brisker tone, and throwing down the newspaper again, "for I am tired to death. I only wonder how the good people can keep it up so long. They had need be all in love, to find any amusement in such folly; and so they are, I fancy. If you look at them you may see they are so many couple of lovers—all but Yates and Mrs. Grant—and, between ourselves, she, poor woman, must want a lover as much as any one of them. A desperate dull life hers must be with the doctor," making a sly face as he spoke towards the chair of the latter, who proving, however, to be close at his elbow, made so instantaneous a change of expression and subject necessary, as Fanny, in spite of everything, could hardly help laughing at. "A strange business this in America, Dr. Grant! What is your opinion? I always come to you to know what I am to think of public matters."

As there are so many Royal Navy figures in Austen's family and her novels this might be thought about a bit. It is generally believed that Mansfield Park was begun in 1811 and completed in the summer of 1813, with a publication in 1814. The U.S. officially declared a state of war with Britain in 1812. *

However, the conditions of war provocation had been place long before 1811, among them the many hostile encounters on the sea between the U.S. and Britain, as part of Britain's high-handed treatment of U.S. merchant ships. The U.S. had no navy, thanks to President Jefferson, who thought without a navy chances for war with Europe were less. Jefferson's administration basically bowed to France -- the U.S. people saw it that way. He embargoes all European trade for the U.S. plunging the U.S. into deep economic depression, particularly outraging the New England mercantile-shipping-banking elite. Ultimately this provoked New England (for the first time, not the last) to attempts organizing secession from the U.S. In the meantime, the west wanted War!  Impressment of sailors from U.S. ships was only a single goad. In most ways the U.S. was in an impossible situation, caught between England and France as both nations demanded the U.S. alliance and support, forbidding U.S. traders to deal with the other or any nation supposedly allied with the other.

The Brits were blockading U.S. ports, as well as those of European nations who wished to trade with the U.S. or France. One consequence as the burning of Copenhagen for trading with the U.S. One of the few nations with whom we could still trade was Russia, where was John Quincy Adams as our minister, who was entrusted to keep that trade open and obtain, hopefully, other assistance as well against England and France. Both France and England felt they needed friendly relations with Russia -- until Napoleon screwed the pooch on that, that is.

In 1812, Madison's administration was pushed by the South and the newer western states into declaring war on Britain: with an empty treasury, thanks to Jefferson's Embargo, no navy, thanks again to Jefferson, no army, thanks to the states' determination to finance their individual militias only and refusal of a draft to make a national army.

So, even before the War began, the U.S. turned to privateering. -- smuggling, of course, went on as it always had.

To the chagrin and shocked disbelief of the Brits, U.S. privateers took numbers of Brit vessels -- even at the entry roads of the Thames and in the English Channel!  (The exact, astonishing large number is enumerated Henry Adams's history of Madison's administrations.)

The U.S. ship yards began re-building a navy at a pace the Brits didn't suspect was possible. With the news that the USS Constitution had defeated the His Majesty's Guerriere, there was disbelieving wailing and gnashing of teeth throughout England.

On the shores of the Chesapeake, things were generally better for the Brits (until the Star Spangled Fort McHenry engagement). In August 1814, the Brits fired the government buildings when they took Washington, D.C. (thereby turning the President's Palace into the White House, as the thick white paint of repairs concealed the soot-covered walls) and the destruction of a whole Brit invading army at New Orleans -- which invasion arrives from Jamaica via the navy.

As did France, thus United States filled the English papers while Jane Austen wrote Mansfield Park. a novel that glancingly mentions the War to illustrate another characteristic about Tom Bertram.

In the meantime, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams was in St. Petersburg, bearing and losing a child, a favorite of both the czar and czarina, while her husband negotiated fishing and trading treaties with Russia. Then in the winter of 1815 she traveled by coach from Russia to Paris, and Napoleon escaped from Elba.

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* For a timeline of novel's chronology and that of its composition, go here.

A History of Slavery and Genocide Is Hidden in Modern DNA

Caption for this Smithsonian website article is:

Genetic testing of people with Caribbean ancestry reveals evidence of indigenous population collapse and specific waves of slave trade

Modeling their DNA data with these assumptions built in, the researchers created a portrait of Caribbean migration and population change that stretches back to before the arrival of Columbus. One of their most interesting findings was just how few Native Americans survived the arrival of Europeans, based on the DNA data. “There was an initial Native American genetic component on the islands,” Martin says, “but after colonization by the Europeans, they were almost decimated.”

This decimation was the result of European attacks and enslavement, as well as the disease and starvation that came in their wake. The DNA analysis showed that the native population collapse of Caribbean islands happened almost immediately after the arrival of Columbus, within one generation of his first visits and the appearance of other Europeans. The gene pool on the mainland, by contrast, shows a more significant Native American influence, indicating that they didn’t die off at the same rates.

What replaced the missing Native American genes in island populations? The answer reflects the conquering Europeans’ solution to diminishing populations available for labor: slaves kidnapped and imported from Africa. The DNA analysis showed a heavy influence from characteristically African SNPs, but notably, it revealed two separate phases in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “There were two distinct pulses of African immigration,” Martin says. “The first pulse came from one part of West Africa—the Senegal region—and the second, larger pulse came from another part of it, near the Congo.”
This corresponds to written records and other historical sources, which show an initial phase of slave trade starting around 1550, in which slaves were mostly kidnapped from the Senegambia area of the Mali Empire, covering modern-day Senegal, Gambia and Mali (the orange area in the map at right). This first push accounted for somewhere between 3 and 16 percent of the total Atlantic slave trade. It was followed by a second, much heavier period that made up more than half of the trade and peaked during the late 1700s, in which slaves were largely taken from what is now Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and the Congo (the red and green areas). [colors reference map at the above-linked site]

Anyone who has read my blog regularly has been seeing me beat this African diaspora patterns forever, of course, so this may not be news.  But again, we now have statistical forensic evidence as well as oral, linguistic, and business and other text documents for these assertions.

After the Quake: Music, Politics, and Spirituality in Haiti

The final program in el V's HipDeep series that investigates the historical, political, cultural and spiritual elements in Angola - old Kongo, and the diaspora into the New World has been created.

This program focues on San Domingue in the past, and Haiti, as it was called, after the slave revolution.  Though program is centered after the terrible earthquake, it is not about the quake or rebuilding, particularly.  It's a wild, high velocity, high energy, fast moving show dealing with vodou and the music and culture, and how these both bleed into the political situation and are repressed by it. Among other things you will learn what a real zombie is, what it signifies. You can hear it here.

For this exclusive Afropop Worldwide Hip Deep report, producer Ned Sublette travels to Port-au-Prince, where he checks in with bandleader Richard Morse of RAM, and with Lolo and Manzé Beaubrun of Boukman Eksperyans, both of whom produced hotly controversial carnival songs this year. In a country where the president, Michel Martelly, was formerly the Tags – 1 dance-music singer, the complexities of politics are felt in music. We'll look at how vodou and carnival interact to provide a vocabulary for political expression in the tense post-quake atmosphere. We’ll meet 95-year-old Emerante de Pradines Morse, who was the first singer to perform the songs of vodou as entertainment in Port-au-Prince; we’ll hear from historian Laurent Dubois, author of Haiti: The Aftershocks of History; and we’ll go crowd-surfing in the crush of carnival at Jakmel, the southern Haitian port city that was once a colonial cousin to New Orleans. Produced with support from a Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion, a program of the University of Southern California's Knight Chair in Media and Religion.

This is long series in every way: long dreamed of;  long envisioned, long struggled to make possible; long in creation.  And here it is, fulled realized, created, and concluded!

Congratulations Mr. Sublette!

War of 1812 -- Andrew Jackson's Intelligence Network

Jackson had a highly effective intelligence network, particularly considering how little he had to work with, in terms of funds and man-power, and how far away he was from even small towns from 1813 until going to New Orleans at the end of 1815. He must have had a lot of messengers, and very effective ones.  I'm sitting here with the volumes of his correspondence from these years, so I can see Jackson wrote  constantly, despite being so ill for so much of the time. He also seems to have had access to large numbers of newspapers from the Caribbean.  When he gets to Mobile and the Gulf in 1814, there is that route of information, which he combs assiduously to his and the nation's profit.

But his letters don't give clues as to who is sending him info.  It has nothing to do with the mission of The American Slave Coast, but my curiosity as to his spy network has been growing.  Finally, appears a book that carries some information on this subject, Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands: The Creek War and The Battle of  New Orleans 1812 - 1815 (1981), by Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr. University of Florida, Gainesville. The info comes from the papers of two of Jackson's correspondents, who, as even in this little book of scholarship, are ignored by history other than as cites and footnotes.

With this warning constantly being brought to the general's attention, he moved his headquarters to Mobile, closer to the source of his espionage reports.  The names and addresses of most of Jackson's informants indicate that they were located either in Pensacola or New Orleans .... Since Pensacola was a neutral Spanish port, it was not under the regular British blockade and received a constant supply of letters and newspapers from the islands of the Gulf and the Caribbean.

One of the best sources were the papers out of Havana, and out of Jamaica.

This is how Jackson, his governor and all the other interested parties came to the consensus that the target was going to be either Mobile or New Orleans.  Jackson decided it would be New Orleans with just barely enough time to leave Mobile and get to New Orleans and organize the defense.

*The Harder They Come*

The Harder They Come was released in 1972.  I watched it several times in a variety of movie theaters, in a variety of cities in my early twenties. But after I moved to the City I didn't see it again until netflix began hitting my mailbox  -- just one of the many enormous changes in the world since The Harder They Come was recorded in a music studio and the film was made. Watching it from this viewpoint I see the many ways this film foretold my future, a future that in my early twenties I'd not the faintest idea about. In those days I’d have needed an atlas’s index to find Jamaica on a map. 

At the end of the 1960's Jamaican reggae was about to take over the world as the music of revolution. At the same time in the Bronx, uptown baby, where the people are fresh baby, what was going to soon be called hiphop was just reaching out to ska and socca and the many techniques the Kingston yardie dj's had recently devised to play music without the big, expensive, heavy equipment that the millionaire white rock bands took for granted.  The pioneer beat makers in the Bronx didn't have it much better than the Yardies in Kingston. The Age of Bling, with diamonds in the ears and grill, gold hanging heavy as lead from the neck had not yet arrived, but it was on the way.

 

In 1972, from this Jamaican music revolution out of the necessity of the poor, came Perry Henzell, producer (and Chris Blackwell as sleeper producer), and Jimmy Cliff, with the first Jamaican movie, The Harder They Come.  Earlier this week by chance I had listened to the album after a very long time, which made me want to see the movie again.  Like the album, this film hasn't aged a minute either.

I, on the other hand, to make this all about me, have changed tremendously, meaning what I know and bring to this film vs what I didn't know the first time I saw it. It's a life rift of before and after that can barely be comprehended.  One way of bridging that chasm is that the, to me, now, short, recording session scenes in The Harder They Come aren't alien as they were then -- if I had a dollar in a savings account for every hour I have witnessed process in the recording studio that would be a respectable savings account. (And now, recording studios per se, for pop music, are just about irrelevant dinosaurs.)

The story of The Harder They Come is set in the music industry and the ganja trade; the theme is the capitalism that screws the little guy.  In the 70's and 80's, and now too, this is is what the hiphop that spawned gangster rap dramatizes and reflects:  the drug trade is a predatory, evil trade; it is capitalism distilled into its purest, unmasked energy.  The oppressed mirror the oppressor.

 

No matter how talented, no matter how hard s/he works, the little guy can't evade the monopoly hold on means, production and distribution kept in a stranglehold by the Big Guys.  All these parts collude to keep it that way: music industry, church, police, media.  Though the recent change in technology has allowed some to escape in terms of music production and distribution -- the Big Guys are spending millions a day figuring out how to put a stop to that.  Even your fun, your resistance, your spiritual nourishment exist to enrich us, the Big Guys.

One clue as the story's connection to capitalism is that Our Protagonist's name is kept on the downlow until about the middle of the movie.  Then we hear it only as "Ivan" (i.e. a common way of referring to the Soviet Union), though in the script he's known as Ivanhoe, i.e. a knight in shining armor, taking on the Bad Big Guys – and incidently, the title of one of the novels by Walter Scott – though the writer would have been appalled -- an author much beloved by the slave power southern United States. 

Underlining this is the rescue plan for Ivan when all parts of the establishment are chasing him. The plan is to smuggle him out to --Cuba.  "That's revolutionary," Ivan says.  "And they can fix my arm."  He's been shot up pretty badly.  It's a reference to the universal free health care that Cuba is already famous for in 1972 throughout the Caribbean and South America.  The hunger of poor Jamaican children, and that they can't afford even the means to get to a doctor, is present throughout the movie.  These facts also help drive the story.

The Harder They Come comments wordlessly on the influence movies have in creating a criminal resistance to the system's stranglehold on productivity and creativity.  Ivan, like his peers throughout the developing world, is enthralled by the violent resistance of the Hero of U.S. westerns and crime films.  They know all the moves of Hollywood's glamorous dance with guns.  Like the criminal primary characters of Hollywood's 'new glamour' hit of 1967, Bonnie and Clyde, Ivan knows the choreography of violence.  He has himself photographed with his guns, in his pretty clothes, by a professional photographer.  He sends the photos to the newspapers.

The movies and television have not only gotten him and his peers desperate to possess all the things that are the markers of the Big Guy life, but also to possess fame -- which then allows them the wealth to acquire those things.  Capitalism creates a need in those it exploits, which can turn and bite capitalists on the ass.  Sometimes.  For a while.

The adulation that Ivan's violent resistance has brought him is the double-edged sword with which the colonized can cut himself even more badly than s/he hurts the oppressor.  Perhaps only Fidel was able to dance that into a successful end-game in our history ....

Cutting down Ivan is handled by the system via divide and conquer.  Mr. Hilton, who lives large on Kingston's music holds back Ivan's hit to punish him for wanting more than $20. Ivan's girlfriend tells her revered minister about Ivan in order to get help for a sick child.  The preacher tells the cops.  The Jamaican police, who live large off the ganja trade punish the little criminal guy, from the growers to the dealers when they want more than the $15 a week so they can feed their children and given them health care, by shutting down the trade.  When the Ras growers and dealers protect Ivan the cops keep the ganja trade shut down until they turn Ivan in.  "Business is business," even the Ras agree.  Their babies are hungry.  The police order Hilton (who also owns the radio stations) to stop playing Ivan's hit, which Hilton''s doing now that Ivan's a folk hero for taking on the system -- the record's selling so well and making him richer -- and Ivan's going down, so he doesn't have to split the money.  "The police tellin' us what music we play now?" asks Hilton's dj.  "When it glorifies crime, yes," says the cop who has gotten filthy rich supplying the ganja to the Super Big Guy distributors in the States.  The police also order the newspapers to stop running the photos and stories about Ivan.

All the parts of oppression lock seamlessly into place to put an end to the Resistance embodied in one emaciated, wounded body.  At the end, in the traditional movie dance of gun death that we all know so well, Ivan's black face is half white from the white sand, as with the Congo kaolin clay white line, signifying the line that divides the underworld, the world of death, from this one.  On the run, Ivan's been half dead for days already, maybe for his whole life in this system that is rigged to keep him from getting ahead.

Along the way we see much of Jamaica that surely hasn't changed in 41 years, the yards of the Kingston’s poor.  We also see much that surely has changed -- pristine, unsullied beaches, which now have been developed for the sake of the tourist trade, or ruined by the mining corporations.  Jamaica's Great Resister, John Maxwell, was writing about this 41 years ago.  He continued writing about this until his death in 2010.

Women and men today can wear an earring or four, and piercings, and tats, and be socially acceptable. White folks of any gender try out the Ras's dreads. Reggae took over the world as the music of Resistance.  It has now been taken into Latin salsa and timba, morphed into the less threatening, non-resistance reggaetón.  But women are still treated as disposable, interchangeable prey, almost less than human by the men of whatever color line. The Anglo-Saxon protestant church created a Black Church in Jamaica and the U.S. unlike anywhere else in the African-Atlantic diaspora, producing a black powerhouse of musical influence found nowhere else in that diaspora. – those churches and unique musical traditions are still alive and vital in Jamaica as in the U.S.

Not much changes. Nor has this film. It is still eye-opening and pulsing with a density of data. It moves fast. And, of course, the music is world-class.

Home for Lunch! Michel-Rolph Trouillot + John Adams + John Randolph

It is a privilege to be in the company of Haitian intellectuals and historians. They are incisive in analysis, precise in expression, and they see the world as it is, and how it was, with even and clear vision. Going back at 4:30 for the keynote and memorial in honor of recently deceased Haitian anthropologist, historian and intellect, Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

Haitian intellectuals and scholars -- and those of the Caribbean in general -- remind me why I like Henry Adams the historian so much.*  He looks at the U.S. through double lenses, that of a member and that of the outsider, when leveling judgment and assessing damage or virtue.

Few historians, if any, particularly in the U.S., have managed to look at our country that way. And he can be so funny!**   As John Randolph-VA remained a significant figure in D.C. politics in the Jacksonian Era, I’m reading through Adam's biography of him right now.

Adams's descriptions of what the milieu was within which Randolph grew up is surprisingly picturesque – something that George Eliot would have written.

That is, George Eliot could have written it, if she'd been capable of seeing or writing of Virginia, past or present at all -- or even the U.S. Nothing of hers about the United States comes to mind. Did she ever comment on the country? She and Harriet Beecher Stowe were good friends, that's about all I can think of as a connection between the U.S. and George Eliot.

The only place Adams fails, as far as I’ve been able to see, is with Ulysses S. Grant and Aaron Burr -- and those were very personal, deliberately falsified portraits and assessments. Yes, Henry, like all the Adamses, could be petty. And then Gore Vidal, who also was unafraid of pettiness, unfortunately followed in those footsteps as he followed in most of Adams’s attitudes.

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*  It is a constant interest how Adams, an historian of the class of the most established of the American establishment, an American aristocrat in fact as well as description, became such an outsider from the list of comfortable establishment historians.

** How John Adams achieved his reputation as a dull and dour writer is difficult to figure out. Perhaps his sly and cunning sense of the comic and wit have become obscure to the average reader at this point? Though to anyone who is an historian acquainted with the matters and figures, how he's being funny couldn't escape them, one would think.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU is hosting a conference from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. tomorrow (March 1) in memory of distinguished Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. (Michel-Rolph Trouillot's words are the sticky at the top of Fox Home.)

It begins with a performance by Gina Athena Ulysse, and the keynote, from 4:30 to 5:30, is by Colin Dayan, author most recently of The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons as well as the memorial piece "Remembering Trouillot."

Among the other benefits attending this benefit is spending quality time with Haitian historians, scholars and intellectuals.  Despite all of terrible tragedies and other obstacles, Haiti's intellectual class is among the most brilliant in the world.  When it comes to history, they have a perspective that is invaluable, particularly for those of us who have been brought up in the tunnel-visioned, myopic view of U.S. history: history is the U.S., and it is exceptional, triumphant -- and always good for everyone everywhere.

The Cuban Intervention in Angola

El V writes:

. . . Hip Deep Angola, Part Four: The Cuban Intervention in Angola is streaming on Soundcloud, right here:

https://soundcloud.com/afropop-worldwide/hip-deep-angola-4

The arc of the show covers from the independence of Ghana in 1957 to the Angolan peace that began in 2002 following the death of Jonas Savimbi. Among its other achievements, it contains a 2:50 excerpt of a powerful March 1977 speech by Fidel Castro in Luanda, at the peak of his oratorical power, that does not appear in the LANIC Castro speech database. It was furnished to me, along with other Angolan radio features and bumpers, by Dr. Marissa Moorman, who is working on a book I am keenly interested in: Tuning in to Nation: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola.

I haven't been mentioning this sufficiently, but each HIP DEEP ANGOLA episode is accompanied by a web feature that features an interview transcript with, like, major-ass scholars.

Hip Deep Angola has interviews I did with Marissa Moorman, Stefanie Alisch, Bárbaro Martínez Ruiz, C. Daniel Dawson, Victor Gama, and Piero Gleijeses, not all of them posted yet. These! Are! The! People!
And more to come. The principal scholar for HDA4 is Piero Gleijeses from Johns Hopkins, whose Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 is a formidable and definitive piece of contemporary scholarship -- he got the Cubans to invent a declassification procedure -- and who will shortly be following it up, 11 years later, with Visions of Freedom. The web feature will include (not up yet) my interview with him, as well as with Angolan composer, instrument builder, and musicologist Victor Gama.

For the record, the other three Hip Deep Angolas are streaming here:

HIP DEEP ANGOLA 1: Music and Nation in Luanda

HIP DEEP ANGOLA 2: Kuduro and Beyond

HIP DEEP ANGOLA 3: A Spiritual Journey to Mbanza-Kongo