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Kristina: Why do you do this? They are hardly high art.
Joel: Oh, but some of them come close. They've evolved over hundreds of years many of them. There's the steamed sweet potato chant I particuarly like. [sings] Imo. Mushi yaki imo.
Kristina. Nice. Almost like a lament.
Joel: Everyone knows it. OK, that's a Japanese one but the Chinese have a lot too.
Kristina: You only record their sounds? You don't videotape them?
Joel: Next step. Find the performers, get permission, set up a location, performance.
Kristina: And pay them?
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Voiceover
Joel, on a dockside, is explaining the selling side of street theater to Kristina and the need to record examples of these before they disappear. Historically, outdoor advertising chants, in Japan, China, or anywhere, were and often are brushed aside as being associated with merchants or hawking, yet in comparative hindsight, these might have been often a gentler, more humane and artistic performance art than the amplified jingles of contemporary commercialism. There is a need to separate antecedents from modern progenitors. Or, ancestors may sometimes be worthier than then their descendants.
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2 comments:
I can't remember ever hearing street peddlers' songs growing up in the US so I really was delighted by them when I first heard them in Kyoto in the early 1960s (I'd like to include the tofu seller's horn; can't remember if he said anything.) (In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust describes the peddlers' songs he heard in Paris; although the language and goods are different, the feeling is oddly similar.)
Most of the ones I hear today are on tape: newspaper recyclers, appliance recyclers, kerosene sellers, and the bamboo laundry pole seller.
I lived in Kumamoto during the 1970s and there a tofu seller would ride his small motorcycle up and down the streets in Shimasaki blowing a miniature bugle. The sound had two notes so it sounded like tooo-fuuuu, tooo-fuuuu. Now this tofu seller rode his motorcycle pretty quickly, so quickly that nobody could catch him to buy his tofu. When asked why he didn't ride slowly, he replied, "If you really want to buy my tofu, you'll have to catch me." Obviously not interested in making money!
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