Erykah Badu has spent much of the past few months working on the music for “Legends of Chamberlain Heights,” an animated series scheduled to make its début on Comedy Central this fall. She had a personal reason to take the job: one of the consulting producers of the show is Carl Jones, a former producer of “The Boondocks,” whom Badu is currently dating. “I had to interview alongside all these other composers,” she says. “Talked all kinds of shit. ‘Deadlines? No problem!’ ” But the network had every reason to hire her. Instead of paying exorbitant fees to license old recordings, it could simply hire a Grammy-winning, chart-topping singer to make some new ones.
So it was that Badu showed up, one afternoon, at a low-slung house in Dallas belonging to her friend Richard Escobedo, a producer also known as Picnictyme. She had invited a local keyboard player to come along; together, they were scheduled to record half a dozen snippets of music, each meant to evoke a specific mood—or, in some cases, a specific record that the producers didn’t want to pay for. The session was loose and laid-back, and Badu couldn’t help getting inspired to make each snippet better than it needed to be. As a rough cut of the cartoon played on the computer monitor for reference, Badu grew more interested in the beat, an old-fashioned hip-hop boom-bap, padded with a slouchy bass line. It reminded her of “My Block,” a classic track by the Houston rapper Scarface, so she FaceTimed him. He looked delighted to hear from her. “Get yo’ soup-can ass off my phone,” he exclaimed.
“Get yo’ gator-mouth ass off my phone,” she replied.
Unknown designer, c. 1966
From 216 words expressing well-being, happiness, and pleasure that were collected by Tim Lomas, a lecturer at the University of East London. Lomas’s paper “Towards a Positive Cross-cultural Lexicography” was published in January in The Journal of Positive Psychology.
Cafuné (Portuguese): to tenderly run one’s fingers through a loved one’s hair.
Gigil (Tagalog): the irresistible urge to pinch someone because they are loved.
Queesting (Dutch): to allow a lover access to one’s bed for chitchat.
Mbuki-mvuki (Bantu): to shed clothes and dance uninhibited.
Tyvsmake (Norwegian): to taste small pieces of food when nobody is watching.
Sobremesa (Spanish): when the food has finished but the conversation is still flowing.
Sólarfrí (Icelandic): when workers are granted unexpected time off to enjoy a sunny day.
Peiskos (Norwegian): to sit in front of a crackling fireplace and enjoy the warmth.
Gökotta (Swedish): to wake up early to hear the first birds sing.
Kukelure (Norwegian): to just sit and think about things while doing nothing at all.
P-Levis said: [January 30th, 2016 at 9:07 am]
Jean Dubuffet on Young Thug:
Our culture is based on complete trust in language (particularly written language) and on a belief in its capacity to translate and elaborate thought. Now this strikes me as a mistake. Language, I find, is a gross, extremely gross stenography, a system of highly rudimentary algebraic signs, damaging rather than serving thought. The spoken word, more concrete than writing, animated by the timbre and intonation of the voice, a bit of coughing, some grimaces, a whole range of mimicry, seems a lot more effective.
The ‘at’ sign, @, which fancy typographers refer to by its French name, arobase, is a once unremarked but now central glyph that rewards closer examination. Many claims are made about its genesis, among them that it began circulation in 16th-century Florence as a symbol for the anfora, a unit of commercial measurement then in currency. A few years ago, La Repubblica published a photograph of a curlicue on a 1536 manuscript to prove it. But the French wouldn’t have got their arobase if they hadn’t derived it not from Italy but from the Spanish and Portuguese term, arroba, which was originally also a unit of measurement, in use from the 11th century onwards. And Italian traders wouldn’t have been dealing in @s in 1536 if they weren’t, as it turns out when you look at the Florentine manuscript, interested in arrobas of South American wine arriving in Europe by way of Seville. There’s a theory that the arroba was itself derived from the Arabic for a quart, ar-rub, but predictably this doesn’t get much airtime on the Latinate internet. Popular etymology in France declares that arobase is actually a contraction of the phrase ‘à rond bas’, where ‘bas’ stands for ‘bas-de-casse’, a bit of printing terminology that refers to lower-case letters, and that it’s somehow therefore related to the word ‘arabesque’. This legerdemain is clearly nonsense but it’s no less crazy than the various cutesy attempts by languages across the world to naturalise the sign by making it an animal emblem ...
I was surprised by Daniel Soar’s inability to see why the Russians call the @ ‘a dog’ (LRB, 28 May). It’s a sleeping dog with its tail curled around itself, isn’t it?
Daniel Soar notes that in modern Spanish email usage the symbol @ is called an arroba. Arroba beyond any reasonable doubt comes from the Arabic rub, but this does not mean a quart, as Soar writes, but a quarter (of a hundredweight, qintar).
Polite Russians will sometimes soften @ to sobachka, ‘little dog’ (Letters, 11 June). So Chekhov’s short story ‘Dama s sobachkoi’, sometimes translated as ‘Lady with a Lapdog’, might now be thought of as ‘lady with email’, or perhaps ‘lady with a laptop’. The lovely and too little known Belarusian language calls @ slimak, or ‘snail’. Thus email is also snail mail in this part of the world.
The ‘little dog’ and ‘snail’ verbalisations of @ in Russian and Belarusian are delightful (Letters, 9 July). In Dutch @ is an apenstaartje or ‘monkey’s tail’. Incidentally, the ‘orphan’ (as in the ‘widow and orphan’ of modern typesetting) is known in Dutch as a hoerenjongetje, or ‘boy prostitute’.
In Greece @ is a papi: ‘a duck’ (Letters, 23 July). And the ubiquitous Honda 50 is a papaki: ‘a little duck’. Real ducks are quite rare in Greece, hence perhaps confusion about what they look like.
The delicious Israeli version of @ is strudel: the rolled-up Viennese apple tart served (with a dollop of vanilla ice cream) in the coffee shops on Tel Aviv’s Ben Yehuda ‘Strasse’, by the descendants of the German and Austrian immigrants who came here in the 1930s (Letters, 9 July and Letters, 23 July, Letters, 6 August).
The Hungarian addition to the menagerie conjured up by the @ symbol is kukac, meaning ‘grub’ or ‘maggot’.
The symbol @ is called snabel-a by Swedish speakers in Sweden and Finland. Snabel is the Swedish word for ‘elephant’s trunk’.
Franco Grignani, 1960
Slim Jimmy and Swae Lee of Rae Sremmurd freestyle for Tim Westwood, December 2015
It was midsummer when I visited and a gardener was weeding among freshly planted lemon trees. Approached from the land, E.1027 is as modest as a brick of Lego, its narrow slit of windows giving little away. And yet, before you even reach the front door, it extends towards you, part of Gray’s deliberate strategy of disrupting the fixed boundary between inside and out. A summer kitchen, a shower and terraces hug the exterior, designed for cooking, washing and loitering en plein air.
To step from the womb-like entrance chamber into the living space is to be dunked in light. Gray thought entering a house should induce ‘the sensation of pleasure when one arrives with a boat in a harbour; the feeling of being enclosed but free to circulate’. Part of the charm of nautical travel is the ingenious, doll’s-house-like use of space and there’s something almost Heath Robinsonish about E.1027’s witty, ship-shape innovations: the mirrored tea tray with a cork surface, to avoid being disturbed by the chink of china on metal; the spiral staircase with insets cut into each step to slot your foot into; the tables that rise, lower, expand and contract; the bathroom mirrors angled precisely so that Badovici could assess his bald spot.
In 1929, the year that E.1027 was completed, Coco Chanel also commissioned a house in the village: La Pausa, named for the rest that Mary Magdalene supposedly took there. The difference between the two is salutary. Chanel, who grew up in poverty, craved luxury, and her house was built and furnished on a lavish scale. For Gray, however, raised in a stately home, luxury was not derived from endless rooms or opulent furnishings, but rather from privacy, discretion, refinement and exactitude. The house, as she imagined it, was a space that could be shared by people who need never be aware of each other’s presence, its contents stripped back to rigorously perfected essentials.
Even now, battered, worn and furnished with replica Bibendum chairs and daybeds, it’s a house explicitly designed for pleasure. Take the bathtub, floating beneath a lightwell and surrounded by exquisitely glazed black tiles; having a bath there must have felt like splashing in moonlight. Most rooms possess dual entrances and screens, testifying to a vision of love as a relationship between independent creatures, who require absolutely separate as well as conjoined space. ‘Even in the smallest house,’ she wrote, ‘each person must feel alone, completely alone.’