In the wake of the COVID pandemic, tourism is again booming in Japan. July 2024 saw the highest inflow of visitors ever recorded—more than 3 million entries in the month alone. For many, if not most, tourists, the city of Kyoto will rate a very high priority. The spring and autumn are usually regarded as the best times to visit, because of the pleasant temperatures and the cherry blossom or autumn colors, respectively. By contrast, the summer is very hot and humid. However, those July visitors will have had the chance to see one of the highlights of the Kyoto calendar: the Gion festival.
Cultural history
The history of Iran’s rich musical culture presents a paradox. On the one hand, there is a distinctive Persian style of music, different from its Arab, Turkish, Central and South Asian neighbors. It has its own modes, its own vocal styles, its favorite instruments, its own performance genres. On the other hand, for many centuries the frontiers of Iran were fluid; a series of wars and revolutions transported its cultural centers from east to west and back again. At times the royal court existed only in camps, and indeed the musicians, dancers and singers lived in tents as well. Foreign invasions and conquest of adjacent countries brought a steady supply of musicians from exogenous traditions: Indians, Georgians, Armenians. And from time to time, Islamic rigorism banned music altogether. So what is Iranian music and how did it survive over the centuries?
Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.
Yunte Huang writes in his new book of a meeting between Anna May Wong and Sir Robert Ho Tung in Hong Kong. What started with a gathering at Ho Tung’s estate on the Peak quickly turned into a miniature biography of Ho Tung himself, the son of a Dutch Jewish father and Chinese mother. In this account, Huang writes of Ho Tung’s half-brother, a man with twelve wives and more than thirty children. One of these children was a woman named Grace Ho. This account appears to be a little slice of Hong Kong history, fascinating and not atypical of the mixing of families in the earlier years of the British colony. But then Huang writes that Grace Ho was the mother of Bruce Lee, an actor who, like Ho Tung’s guest, Anna May Wong, was slighted by Hollywood.
Josef Wirsching (1903-1967) was a German cinematographer credited with changing “the future of Indian filmmaking” to quote his grandson Georg Wirsching. His filmography starts with The Light of Asia (1926) and includes many superhits including Pakeezah (1972), one of Hindi cinema’s most loved films. With his graceful filming of Indian heroines and his ability to adapt German Expressionism to Indian melodrama, he was a part of the Indian movement in film making that sought to blend regional aesthetics with the European avant-garde and let nationalism find an expression in modernism. With the publication of Bombay Talkies: An Unseen History of Indian Cinema, edited by Debashree Mukherjee, film buffs and historians of Indian cinema find another reason to hold him in awe. He was not just a cinematographer but also an archivist, someone with a sense of history in the making.
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