Week 9: 'Why do you keep your door open?' 'Why not? It’s my home.'

Wonderdate: 2012

Wondered into being by: Anthony Pisano and Mark Cersosimo

Wonderspan: 6 min

To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

Hello wonder-lovers

Last week we were in Tiananmen Square with the extraordinary footage of a solitary person facing down the the Chinese army armed with nothing but passion.  In his way he was proclaiming, 'This is my home.'

This week we are on the other side of the world - in more ways than one - with other stories about loving home.  We begin in New York, where old-timer Anthony Pisano talks about his place to filmmaker Mark Cerosimo, who introduces his beautifully made piece like this: 

'On an unseasonably warm November night in Manhattan on our way to get ice cream, we stumbled upon what appeared to be a vintage shop, brightly lit display window and all.  As we began to walk in, a man sitting out front warned us that we were welcome to explore, but nothing inside was for sale. Our interests piqued, we began to browse through the collections the man out front had built throughout his life. This is a story of a man and his home.'

Anthony Pisano's place is not just a home but also his own way of loving life:

'A lot of people say, "Why do you keep your door open?" Why not?  It’s my home. … And I’ve made so many friends. ...  A life is [that] you talk with people, you touch them in a sense.'

And so here he is:

• http://vimeo.com/37093042

Extra...

Meanwhile in the Phillipines, 'Solar Demi' is letting the light into the shanty using old Coke bottles and a bucket of bleach:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Fpsw_yYPg  (2 min)

(Thanks to Sarah G for suggesting that one)

And in London, Stan Middleton and his family head down the Thames on their live-aboard puppet barge in this photo-portrait.

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/interactive/2011/nov/02/london-floating-theatre-thames-audio-slideshow (4 min)

How many ways of loving there are for a Monday morning!  And if you like this then do share the love by telling your friends, whether they be present, absent, estranged, entirely long-lost or even virtual, such as those found on Fbook and the like.

Week 8: 'This man just went out and he said, Stop.'

Wonderdate: 2007

Wondered into being by: No-one is sure whom

Wonderspan: 6 min

To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

Here is a wonder of a completely different kind.

In June 1989 Chinese activists flooded Tiananmen Square in Peking (now Beijing) in a pro-democracy protest which had snowballed over several days.  The Chinese government sent in the troops, who fired into the crowd, according to Kate Adie who was right on the spot at the time.  They killed 'hundreds, possibly thousands of people', reports the BBC.  By the next day a curfew had been imposed and the Chinese army rolled down the city's main street in a column of tanks to show that its ignominious loss of control had come to an end.  People were left full of anger and despair, says Kate Adie.

Then something extraordinary happened...  We've all seen this on telly but usually only very briefly - here's the longer footage:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnmnq5nFcZw

Although there are plenty of claims about who he was, and a few about who the driver was, I can’t find any reliable information about either or what happened to them afterwards.  Does anyone know?

Week 7: ‘Under the mango tree … everything did start from here, it’s a great place to be.’

Wonder spawned in: 2010
Wondered into being by: Baaba Maal and friends; Playing for Change
Wonderspan: 9 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound

For this week's way of loving we're travelling to Kirina in Mali, where we ask Baaba Maal and his musician friends to suffuse our north European February with a little warmth.

The setting for this musical wonder is the shade of the local mango tree.   Thanks to its hardiness and dense canopy, a large mango tree forms a natural space for important meetings in many an African village.  Baaba Maal begins by giving thanks to the village elders for inviting the musicians to join them under the tree, before beginning his song, Dreams of Kirina.

Femi H suggested this clip.  She wrote:

'Jan 2010.  I had been depressed.  Not feeling able to live creatively... and the message that my African ancestors (i.e all of our ancestors) had no vision, no creativity before Europeans came, was troubling me.  Miraculously, I  picked up Ben Okri's book, A Tale of Regeneration and Love, that had been lying in my room for years unopened.

'He wrote in a magical way — of a 'fabled' West African forest village, of an enchantment and beauty that inspired the thing that destroyed it and the creative regeneration that would take place.  Extraordinarily, the forest people in the village he wrote of were all gifted and devoted artists.  Astoundingly magnificent sculptures would be found in different parts of the forest. These were left overnight anonymously.   Each sculpture would resound and carry a deep meaning for the whole village and thus would guide the people — personally, social or spiritually.

'Reading this inspired my sense of possibility. Then just as I finished the book, a friend sent me this YouTube, which would show that Okri's fabled place was alive in the village of Kirina in Mali.  We see the famous Malian singer, Baaba Maal, who himself had assumed that the village of Artists he'd heard of as a boy was a myth, until he was brought there to sing (by Playing for Change) and meet the people.  Here he is in the village wearing the most beautiful  flowing gold robe and performing this wonderful song, surrounded by the village elders and all.'

So here they are: Baaba Maal and friends...

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxItKLvyCWE

Extra...

Street musicians around the world sing and play Ben E King's Stand By Me for Playing for Change.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM

In this audio clip, Ben Okri talks about the 'Ife Head', an ancient artwork whose rarefied beauty and subtlety of form proved to Europeans that cultures in pre-colonial Africa had been at least as complex and sophisticated as those of Europe.

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00st9zb

Week 6: ‘For an hour or so they continue to wind themselves around one another.’

Wonder spawned in: 2009
Wondered into being by: David Attenborough with the BBC Natural History Unit, from Life in the Undergrowth
Wonderspan: 4 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.

In one of the most remarkable and beautiful mating rituals in the animal world, two leopard slugs do what they must do, unaware that the humankind's favourite naturalist voyeur, David Attenborough, is watching from behind a hedge somewhere and whispering sensuously into his microphone the deeper meaning of every wriggle.  Here are ‘two danglers on a snot trapeze’, as one YouTube commentator put it, but for these four short minutes, you might yet wish you'd been born a slug.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoGn9bRWuHQ (and I'm sorry if there's an advert first)

Extra...

Microcosmos: The grass people (1996) was the first film to use a revolutionary macroscopic camera technique to bring the viewer closer to the world of invertebrates than ever before.  David Attenborough has familiarised us all with this now but at that time, these little lives had never been seen so big.  For an hour the big screen at Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, where I saw the film in 1997, showed massive ladybirds dodging humungous raindrops in slow motion, a jumbo jet of a bee with the audience flying right behind it, and this clip of two snails glancing across a crowded forest and falling for each other.  As they got down to it, the crowded cinema released a quiet, involuntary moan of pleasure.  You'll soon see why.... slightly embarrassing though it was for all concerned.  The film is by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou and here is the two-minute clip:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA4uWR64Du4