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User ID: 1083
Transnational Media Thread
Any local art, music, film, etc you've been consuming from far-flung parts of the globe? (No, anime doesn't count, that shit has been thoroughly mainstreamed and globalised by now.)
For my part, I've been enjoying quite a lot of Mande music as of late (basically the folk musical tradition of Mali that began with the 13th century Mali empire). They developed a highly polyphonic music style independently from Western traditions, passed down through the centuries by hereditary griot storytellers; their music was modernised in the 1970s, fusing quite a lot with other styles. One of my favourite artists to play in this tradition is Toumani Diabate, a ridiculously prolific musician who specialises in the kora, a 21-stringed instrument that falls somewhere between a lute and a harp. Here is a particularly nice example of traditional kora music from him, and here and here are examples of some of the fusion he has produced. I find there's an exceptionally atmospheric, almost mystical sound to a lot of this music I can't get enough of.
When it comes to art, traditional Song Dynasty handscroll paintings are just incredible. Yes, I am continuing my recent trend of Sinoposting, deal with it. They were painted on these massive pieces of silk meant to be slowly unravelled from right to left, revealing different parts of the painting as it went along. Probably the most famous one in existence is Zhang Zeduan's impossibly detailed 12th century Along The River During The Qingming Festival, depicting the commotion in the Song capital Kaifeng during the Tomb Sweeping Day. Other art in this vein is the extremely fluent 13th century Nine Dragons handscroll by Chen Rong, Composing Poetry on a Spring Outing by Ma Yuan, and Water Map by Ma Yuan, a uniquely liminal painting focusing on the rendition of water textures. (For Water Map, here are all the panels in the handscroll presented individually; I can't find it in the University of Chicago's archive of scrolls, and the one on Wikimedia is so large that it's capable of causing your browser to stall, and zooms in too much).
EDIT: A funny detail in the Nine Dragons scroll is the overabundance of Emperor Qianlong's massive seals and even poems throughout the body of the painting. While it's actually desirable to place seals on paintings - in fact Chinese paintings often leave spaces for stamps for collectors to leave their mark, with seals being a sign of history and provenance, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, and Qianlong was unfortunately a prolific art connoisseur who had no sense of taste himself. I'm pretty sure I've heard him called "Stamp Demon" before in Chinese.
Chinese poetry is absolute crack, though I hear not knowing Chinese kind of takes the teeth out of them. A lot of them are based in the peculiarities of the Chinese language and are thus untranslatable.
The cat poem you quoted is even funnier in context, by the way, because that's a Southern Song poem. Song Chinese were absolute ailurophiles, and they even had cat contracts known as namaoqi (納貓契) specifying the cat's obligations to its owner and vice versa, signed with a paw print. Here is such an example where the cat agrees to patrol tirelessly, catch mice, and leave the numnums alone.
In my experience China to this day is full of cats roaming freely as well, the country is practically covered in them. They prowl sections of the Great Wall, climb over pagodas, and so on: they're just everywhere.
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