Frédéric Bruly Bouabré « L’alphabet de l’ouest africain »
MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, has an exhibit of the work of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Côte d’Ivoire, 1923–2014.
MOMA’s introductory text in the gallery
Born in 1923 in Zéprégühé in western Côte d’Ivoire, Bouabré started his career as a clerk and translator in the French colonial administration. On March 11, 1948, he experienced a transcendental vision that prompted him to seek divine truths in nature and to interpret his immediate and wider surroundings-first through writing and eventually through visual art. From the late 1970s until his death in 2014, he created hundreds of colorful drawings on postcard-size pieces of cardboard salvaged from his neighborhood in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire’s economic capital. Distinctive in style, these works feature animated figures and abstracted elements enclosed within hand-drawn frames, which themselves contain text describing the subject or content of the drawings. Bouabré once said that he used writing “to explain what I’ve drawn…. Writing is what immortalizes.”
What bothers me about this is the impression it gives me that the amazing images that fill the first room and some of the second are primarily “colorful drawings” with borders of explanatory writing. In other words they see him as making art.
The exhibit displayed several hundred postcard-sized images consisting of drawings surrounded by writing in the “frame”. For example, this card labeled « BI »
At first, I thought this was simply an image by someone who rather fanatically drew whatever struck his fancy. Then I wandered over to one of the nearby computers and saw this eye-opening image of « BI »
Suddenly, without adequate help from the museum, it became clear that these images are mnemonic devices for learning Bruly’s extremely complex syllabic writing system.
The first section of « l’Alphabet » has a long piece of writing in French with Bruly’s syllabic representation above:
Notice how he even represents the liaison sounds of French by writing « (ZÔ) » and « (ZA) ». These symbols are easy to find in Bruly’s book:
The nice thing about a syllabic writing system is that you can represent so many languages with it. The downside is the large number of symbols needed to represent the many sounds of all the languages in West Africa, including French.
Klein’s two concluding paragraphs should be enough to entice you to read the whole article.
I want to say this as clearly as I can: [Rachel] Carson and Nader and those who followed them were, in important respects, right. The bills they helped pass — from the Clean Air Act to the National Environmental Policy Act — were passed for good reason and have succeeded brilliantly in many of their goals. That it’s easy to breathe the air in Los Angeles [and the Bay Area] today is their legacy, and they should be honored for it.
But as so often happens, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Processes meant to promote citizen involvement have themselves been captured by corporate interests and rich NIMBYs. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. “It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again,” Sabin writes.
I am a little surprised that Klein doesn’t mention how the Vietnam War, which has a lot of liberal fingerprints on it, also contributed to distrust of government.
As everyone knows, we Republicans don’t believe facts.
So I was very happy when I found this beautiful visualization of monthly global temperature anomalies between the years 1880-2021 based on the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP v4).
In other words, the facts show that Earth has been warming, especially in recent years.
One washing machine’s load of water destroyed our kitchen
We saw the water running out and immediately started mopping up the water with all our house’s towels:
Yet another case of poor design that everyone uses
Washing machines drain their water through a rigid plastic hose with a sort of spout at the end. We Americans seem to like to use something called a washer outlet box to hold the water faucets and the drain pipe. Here’s one sold at Lowes:
The problem with this system is that the drain hoses can be very stiff and resist resting snugly in their holes.
When a service person replaced the water hoses to our washing machine, he simply pushed the drain hose into the drain hole. The hose resisted but was in the hole.
It took a weekend for the company which had made the error to send someone to fix the problem. As you can see, the fix is really kind of jury-rigged. In my opinion, this is a sign of very poor design, one of those decisions made long ago that no one bothers to change.
Unfortunately, the washing machine evacuated its water with such force, that it came shooting back up out of the hole, pouring several gallons of water on our kitchen floor, as seen above.
Now the fun begins
I’m going to let the following photos tell you what has happened since we called our insurance company. They are making very sure that we have no possibility of fungus damage in the future. In the process, they discovered asbestos. Our kitchen is gradually disintegrating. On a happier note, we expect it to come back to life better than new. But it will take a long time.
If you’re woke like me, you’ve probably read a lot about the Telegram messaging app. I downloaded it some time ago and then forgot about it until today when the New York Times announced that they have created a Telegram channel where people can get news about the Ukraine war.
I’ve updated my Telegram apps on my Mac and my Android phone:
Here it is on my phone:
It’s so “secure” that it prevents me from taking a screenshot on my Mac, but it can’t stop me from taking a photo with my phone:
Since taking the screenshots above, I’ve joined a couple of chats/channels that supposedly come from Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Of course, I’m not really sure yet. Gotta watch out for fakes.
When Amazon first introduced its Smile feature, I would start each shopping session by changing the URL from www.amazon.com to smile.amazon.com and watch money go to my designated recipient.
Lately I’ve been noticing that nothing goes to the organization that I’ve designated as my Smile recipient. Even if I change www to smile in the Amazon URL, it often changes back to www by the time I review the cart.
I can change the www to smile again, before I push the Buy now button, but I often forget to do so.
Could this be a trick?
Today I decided to see where my change is undone. I went to Amazon, changed www to smile, and started shopping.
I rather randomly navigated to a Storage & Organization page and started looking. Here’s what I found:
As expected, some of the items on the page retain the smile in the URL when I link to them:
But as soon as I went to the Lightning Deals, my smile went away:
If I purchased a Lightening Deal this way, I might very well have not noticed this change, thus shortchanging my designated charity.
