Post Tagged with "global"

World Music and Culture

Photo: Pipa by Scott Allen Stevens

There’s loads to discover at Soundroots , which is dedicated to music of the world. SA Stevens, aka dj earball, writes about a huge range of world music from Bollywood soundtracks to Japanese percussion to Balkan brass and Brazilian samba. As with La Onda Tropical latin music blog MP3s are available for a limited time, to listen to the music they are talking about.

Affiliated with ‘Spin the Globe’ world music radio show, it’s an interesting and varied blog, from a writer who clearly knows his music and is also passionate about different cultures of the world.

Life stories from around the world

After Pangea Day which brought the world together through films from around the world, the International Day for Sharing Life Stories aims to bring people together through stories. In a mixture of live performances and digitally recorded stories, people from all over the world will talk about their lives.

As well as the official event, the organisers are inviting people to host local community get-togethers to share their stories. The website also has details of other events inspired by the life story day, including a Canadian project to share family traditions.

Photo from British Colombia Literacy Forum’s share a family tradition project

The International Day for Sharing Life Stories is coordinated by the Museu da Pessoa and will take place on May 16th, 2008.

Pangea Day: films to bring the world together

Our purpose here at PocketCultures is to try to bridge differences between people of different nationalities by showing new aspects of different countries and world cultures. It’s an area which in our opinion is not getting enough attention at present, which is why we were delighted to find out about Pangea Day – an innovative event by leading film makers aiming to change the way we think about other countries.

The main screening itself will be held on May 10, at locations all around the world, and also broadcast live on the internet and television. But you can already catch some trailers on YouTube. Among those submitted so far are ‘Japan sings for Turkey’, a traditional Japanese rendition of the Turkish national anthem, ‘France sings for USA’ – elegantly-shot black and white scenes of Paris set to the background of Parisians singing the Star Spangled Banner.

Documentary maker Jehane Noujaim, the inspiration behind the event, explains the reasoning behind the idea of using films to show stories in this article. Learning someone’s story, and coming to see them as a person, rather than a ‘foreigner’ is key to breaking down prejudices.

Update: the films have now been uploaded to the Pangea Day website. Watch them here.

International Mother Language day

Today is International Mother Language day, and also the launch of 2008 as the International Year of Languages, led by UNESCO.

Global Voices online published ‘Are languages free?’ an article from Bangladesh on the importance of mother languages, especially minority languages and those in danger of extinction. According to the article, it has been proven that we learn more easily if we are taught in our mother tongue. Unfortunately many people around the world do not have the opportunity to learn in their own mother tongue.

Read more about the International Year of Languages here.

Putumayo World Music

Putumayo is an amazing collection of special music from all over the world. Many CDs and for all tastes. Enjoy!

http://www.putumayo.com

Faces of Tomorrow

The face of Tomorrow is a fascinating and original art project by Istanbul based photographer Mike Mike, attempting to address the effect of globalisation on identity. I quote below directly from the website because they explain it so much better than I can:

“The large metropolises of the world are magnets for migrants from all parts of the planet resulting in new mixtures of peoples. What might a typical inhabitant of this new metropolis look like in one or two hundred years if they were to become more integrated?

In Turkey and particularly in Istanbul, situated as it is at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, you can see how this process has been at work over the last thousand years as waves of humanity from Central Asia, Arabia, Greece and Rome have been absorbed. The resulting population is fairly uniform suggesting that if you could combine all the faces in a city right now you would be looking at the future face of that city.

The Face of Tomorrow attempts to find this face by taking photographs of the current inhabitants and compositing their faces to create a typical face. What we get is a new person – a mix of all the people in that city. A face that doesn’t exist right now, but a face, it seems, of someone quite real”

http://faceoftomorrow.com/thefaces.asp