Another Strook with something I drew, read, and listened to.

Drawing

I made this A6-sized birth announcement card for the daughter of good friends. The back is ochre yellow to create a nice contrast with the black and white of my drawing style.

Reading

During his lifetime, Carl Lumholtz was placed in the same category as other Norwegian explorers such as Amundsen (see Strook #7), but nowadays few people will know his name. I learned about him through Morten A. Strøksnes' "The Man Who Wanted to See the World."

In 1880, Lumholtz traveled to Queensland, Australia, to spend months living with the Aboriginals. As on his other travels, he collected mammals for natural history collections, but his focus was on anthropology. He left for Mexico to spend 20 years getting to know the many indigenous peoples there on several expeditions. At the age of 60, as if that were not enough, he also traversed the jungles of Borneo in search of 'headhunters'.

Lumholtz sees the consequences of colonialism for the indigenous peoples and for nature, but also contributes to this himself by collecting human skulls, among other things. In this way, he gets to know the indigenous peoples well and writes about them with some respect, but publishes his books under titles such as 'Among Cannibals'.

Strøksnes manages to capture this rich life in a book, but because he also adds his own travel adventures to Australia, Mexico, and Borneo, the book is almost 1,000 pages long, without these personal travel stories and anecdotes being particularly fascinating. The author does try to tell a great deal.

Listen

Would you like to see my Spotify Wrapped? No, of course not. Regular readers just expect another new artist who makes great songs. Like the folk pop of Way Dynamic.

His album Massive Shoe is sometimes reminiscent of Paul McCartney and also has something in common with my other 60s-70s folk pop favorite, Cut Worms.

See you next week!