SOUNDTRACK: MALAWI MOUSE BOYS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #42 (July 1, 2020).
This Tiny Desk (Home) Concert is from Malawi in Southeastern Africa. The performer is Nelson Mulligo of the Malawi Mouse Boys.
He only plays one song, but it’s really cool. Bob Boilen tells us some very important details about the song, the singer and the band.
We see his two-room home in the opening shot where he and his family live without plumbing or electricity. Then we see Nelson, standing below the power lines, holding his homemade guitar singing, “I’m So Tired of You.” It’s a song that sings out the evils of poverty, a life of hard physical work, of making money scavenging for mice amongst boars and snakes so they can sell them as roasted mice shish kabobs along the roadside. We only get one song, and even that cuts off abruptly, but I was deeply moved when producer Ian Brennan (Tinariwen, The Good Ones) sent it my way. He and his wife Marilena Umuhoza Delli met and recorded the Malawi Mouse Boys in 2011. You can hear Ian Brennan tell his story on NPR’s Weekend Edition. If you fall in love with what you hear, give a listen to the entire band harmonize. You can find their music on Bandcamp here. Even though the group played Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival in 2015, they still live in poverty. Support what you love.
The song is simple and very catchy with Mulligo’s voice sounding strong and really lovely and his homemade guitar sounding great.
[READ: July 2, 2020] Nichijou 1
This book was recommended to me based on some other manga that I had read. I didn’t know Keiichi Arawi [あらゐけいいち] or anything about Nichijou, but the cover picture of a classroom full of kids with a deer on one of the desks looked promisingly funny. As did the comments about the series being delightfully surreal.
It is very surreal. So much so that I finished the book with a massive question mark hanging over my head. I literally had no idea what was going on.
When I looked up some information about the series (there are dozens of books and a TV show), I learned some details about what I was reading. When I re-read it, it made a lot more sense, but was still really bizarre and not easy to follow.
The story starts with literally no explanation whatsoever–it just jumps right in with four color pages (the rest are in black and white).
We meet Nano Shinonome (robot, high schooler) and the person who created the robot, Professor (details unknown). One of the details that I didn’t know until after I finished the book is that Professor is supposed to be like 8 years old and super smart. This explains some of the really weird things she does to the robot–like making her have cake come out of her arms.
So Nano is a robot and everyone knows it. She has a giant wind-up key in her back. The key doesn’t do anything, but the Professor thinks it’s funny. The other girls seem to want her to admit she is a robot but she doesn’t want to.
In the opening scene, Nano is late for school. She runs down the street and crashes into a boy. Things (a toy cow, a piece of salmon) go flying and inadvertently fall on Yuuko Aloi (sophomore, cheerful) and Mio Naganohara (sophomore, normal). Yuuko tries to make the best out of random things falling out of the sky onto her head.
Meanwhile, Nano finds herself on the roof of a building (the crash was so big she was hurled into the air) and her arm has fallen off.
There is also Mai Minakami (sophomore, honor student, quiet) whom Yuuko is always trying to befriend.
I thought that this book was geared towards younger kids. The jokes are weird and silly and the reactions are so over the top. But there are comments like “shut up dumb ass” and a whole sequence where one of the girls pulls a (fantasy? / imaginary?) gun on someone. Plus, one of Nano’s arms has a gun in it, but it seems to shoot beans. Definitely for high schoolers.
Perhaps a lot of the visuals are standard manga tropes that I just don’t know. For instance, sometimes the girls have an expression that I can’t decipher. Their mouths are in a slight frown or a straight line and one corner of their mouth is a small triangle. What does that mean?
There’s also a boy, Sasahara who is apparently very poor (a goatherd) but who acts very posh–he has a servant in class and sthings like wine tasting for classroom activities. I found him to be very funny.
I also really enjoyed the principal who told really bad, dad jokes. I was really impressed that the translation worked so well for these puns. “I thought a Buddhist statue would be a good birthday present…Buddhit looks like I was wrong.”
There’s even a joke that one of the girls says that I can’t believe works in translation:
Is this the cold shoulder greeting technique? And on such a grand scale? Like a mountain! Like a mountain! Would you say that the tension is mountin’? How could that possibly work in Japanese? think much kudos goes to translator Jenny McKeon.
The end of the book has a whole sequence with a fair and one of the girls wearing daifuku head as a costume. For some reason the owner of the daifuku stand is taken away by the police. I have no idea why.
Indeed, i have no idea why a lot of the things happened. I’m glad I read up on the series and re-read the book. But I don’t think I’ll be reading any more. I would like to watch one episode of the show, however, just to see what it’s like.
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