Hercules gets the initial credit for discovering purpura. He was strolling along the seashore with a svelte nymph, Tyros, and his dog was trotting along ahead in the sand. When they caught up with the dog, its muzzle was smeared with a brilliant, deep red-purple colour—a colour neither of them had ever seen before. Tyros begged Hercules to make her a garment with that hue (in fact, she told him she wouldn’t be with him unless he produced it), so he began collecting shells from the beach.
Shells? Yes, the famous Tyrian purple dye was made from snail shells: from the murex mollusk (shown above), a type of sea snail. It would take 250,000 murex shellfish to obtain one ounce of Tyrian purple, so the dye was highly valued. Purpura (its latin name) became the colour of royalty. It was produced in the city of Tyre, by the Phoenicians (whose name came from the Greek word phoinos, meaning “blood red”). They had been producing dyes in Tyre, and beyond, since 1000 BC.
“The Tyrian colour is most appreciated when it is the colour of clotted blood,” Pliny wrote, “dark by reflected and brilliant by transmitted light.”
By 400 AD, the murex mollusk was on the brink of extinction—a colour vanished from the world, perhaps.
Can a colour really go extinct? (more…)
“Legend has it if they ever stop playing the world will come to an end…”
These words appear on a flyer for the upcoming Master Musicians of Jajouka concert in Toronto (July 15 at the Phoenix); the flyer shows the Master Musicians in white robes, with their leader, Bachir Attar, front and center. Is he smirking? Pouting? Keeping a mysterious secret?
Legend certainly surrounds this group of Moroccan musicians, layers upon layers of it. To fully understand the legends, one would have to excavate beneath the recent bohemian myths surrounding them—beneath the mystique of the Interzone-Tangier scene in the 1950s, and the iconic writers and musicians like Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, Brian Jones, and William S. Burroughs, who brought the power of Jajouka music to Western ears. The deeper mystique is that of the music itself: it has been taught in early childhood and passed down from father to son, through the Attar family, for centuries. Master Musicians would travel with the sultans of Morocco as official royal musicians; in more recent times, the clan performed as royal musicians for the Moroccan king. Trance-like, hypnotic, this Sufi music is reputed to possess power. [Listen to the track "Memories Of My Father", written by Bachir.]
Listening to this music, I wonder: what is “powerful” music, really? Or: what can music do? Most of us would agree that it can lift the spirit. Some would say that music has the power to transport a person; others credit music with giving strength, or even with healing.
Through a stroke of luck, and the wonders of globalized communication, I was able to interview Bachir Attar via a shaky Skype-to-cell connection two nights ago. It was 1:30 a.m. in the village of Jajouka, Morocco, but he was awake and passionate, ready to discuss the power of his music, his musical heritage, and its possible disappearance. (more…)
SIX MILE BEND, FLORIDA—The crop duster whined overhead, banking hard and swooping for another pass over the field. My impulse was to duck and cover, but it would have been a useless gesture. This was cane country: flat fields, straight canals, uncurving roads, all smothered with an eerie leaden haze. The only human being I’d seen in the area had been sporting a shabby plastic suit.
Cane country stretches for miles and miles, spreading across the Florida peninsula to the south of Lake Okeechobee from east to west, pierced by settlements with sugar factories: Clewiston, Belle Glade, South Bay. Occasionally, the green is broken by a rectangular parcel of a phosphate mine―a lunar landscape of bleached rock forms and strangely-colored pools, where rock dust hangs in the air. Closer to the eastern and western fringes, there are also occasional rectangular parcels of “Signature Collections”―million-dollar homes that boast elaborate fortress-like walls. The luxury homes are pressed up against the rock mines and cane fields in a bizarre patchwork of human intervention, which has blanketed the whole peninsula. You can walk down a road and have a coral pink fortress on your left side; a rock mine or cane field on your right.
This accidental quilt was pieced together only very recently. Much of this cane country was “reclaimed” from the Everglades by the sugar growers and the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s, who built the system of levees and canals that allowed the cane to be planted. Before that, the ecosystem was part of a “river of grass”—a unique bioregion that allowed water to flow between Lake Okeechobee south to the Florida Bay. The Everglades have since been reduced in size by more than half, and the national park that still exists is but a remnant of the actual swamp. (more…)
The Walrus HOOPP Pension Debate
Be It Resolved That Canadians Are Incapable
of Saving for Their Retirement Needs Alone
12 pm, Wednesday, May 30 at
Hart House Debate Room, Toronto
The Walrus Glenbow Debate
Calgary’s Cowboy Culture:
Living Legacy or Just History?
6:30 pm, Thursday, June 7 at
Epcor Centre: Max Bell Theatre, Calgary
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