Haile puts Spanish PM through his paces

Spanish Prime Minster Jose Luis Zapatero warmed up for his speech at the opening session of the AU Summit by going for an early morning run with Haile Gebreselassie and Derartu Tulu in the Entoto Hills last Sunday, Capital reported today.
According to the weekly English paper, Zapatero, who runs three or four times a week, and has a best time of under 50 minutes for 10km, had little difficulty keeping up with Ethiopia’s famous Olympic champions who set an easy pace for the 8 km run-in consideration of the prime minister’s arrival in Ethiopia late the previous evening.
The same could hardly be said for the prime minister’s body guards who are likely to remember the exercise as one of their more grueling high altitude endeavors.
Capital wrote that Haile is well-versed in the art of hosting visiting government ministers. In 2008 he took the then Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen for a run at Entoto.

Father and son display works

THE opening of a unique art exhibition was well received at Alliance Ethio Française on Monday, February 1. The exhibition by Tulu Guya and his son Bisrat Tulu features fifty three works of woodcut, mono and relief prints. It is the first father and son exhibition at the gallery, and the opening day was attended by a good number of art lovers. Senior artist Tulu who has already presented his works at the Alliance thirty eight years ago said on the occasion that it was a pleasure to come back to the gallery with his son.

Elias Sime’s thrones & bones

HE ALWAYS greets people with a hug and is quickly moved to tears or booming laughter, so emotions are never far from the surface for the director Peter Sellars.
Those emotions overflowed when the thrones that are the centrepiece of his staging of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Symphony of Psalms arrived at the rehearsal space in Marrickville. Made by the Ethiopian artist Elias Simes, the intricately carved thrones are adorned with cow skulls, shells, gnarled wood and leather, buttons, nails and the horns of an ibex. Each is redolent with what Sellars calls secret, feminine images, ”what you would call here in Australia secret women’s business”.
Read the rest the Sydney Morning Herald.

Seleda is “back-ish”

Seleda, a true labor of love, is “back-ish”.
The online magazine that has once has enriched our life with humor, intelligence and above all in raising things that matter most is back with its Feb. 2010 “Entin” edition, not missing any of its qualities.
Here is the hilarious e-mail message from the editors.
Ye tekeberachu Seledawiyan,
It’s time to mezeqzeq your neTella… f’rash back on the floor… deret primed for d’leqa… Yes, we’re back–ish. Rumors of our demise have been greatly under-exaggerated. We humbly offer our last issue: The Intin Issue: www.seleda.com And if you knew what it took to bring you this, m’Ts, you’d be sending us your second born.. yes, the molqaqa one. Pass it on.. or pass on it. Ke akbrot selamta gar,
Your Humble Editors

A jazz revival in Ethiopia: The Economist

The jazz revival in Ethiopia is so evident that even the Economist magazine has something to say about it.This article is from the magazine’s Jan 28th 2010 print edition.
AFICIONADOS are hoping for a revival of the golden age of Ethiopian jazz, as players who emigrated westward a generation ago, especially to America, come home amid the global recession.
Tafari Assefa now plays his drums in a band at the bar of the Jupiter Hotel, one of the fancier newer establishments in Addis Ababa, the capital. Born in 1974, he studied music in Poland before emigrating to America. Life as a jazz man there was hard. “You had to beg for gigs,” he says. “Here, they call you.” He earned $70 a gig in America. Now, back home, he gets only $40. But the monthly rent, at $180, is several times less. He can get along. A cup of Ethiopian coffee, he notes, costs only 25 cents.

Journalist sentenced to one year in prison

By Eskinder Nega
Judge Mohammed Omar of the tenth bench of the Federal High Court today sentenced Ezeden Mohammed, editor and publisher of Ethiopia’s
largest Islamic weekly, Hekima, to one year imprisonment.The court convicted Ezeden Mohammed, whose fourteen year span as an independent journalist is rare after the clampdown in 2005, for incitement in connection with a 2005 Guardian newspaper interview with
PM Meles Zenawi.

“Enkuan” a poem by Teddy Afro

Ethiopian music star Tewdros Kasahaun (fondly called Teddy Afro) has recently read number of poems that he has written while he was in Kaliti Prison. The poems were mostly personal observations, reflections and meditations and have some prominent people as their subjects.The following Amharic poem that came out in today’s edition of Kumneger magazine criticizes some people who were trying to make a scandal out of the renowned writer Sebhat Gebregziabher’s marriage to a girl much younger than him.”Enkuan” which literally means “So what?” is a word that Sebhat often makes use of when people confronts him with accusatory remarks.
The selection of the poems will appear in a book coming out soon.

Fusing jazz with Eskista

On January 19, 2010 Tuesday night a French jazz group “Le Bruit du Sign” in pair with Ethiopian traditional Eskista dancers, Melaku Belay and Zinesh Tsegaye gave a performance at Asni Art Village in Ferensay Park. It was a highly entertaining show that captivated the audience, combining traditional Ethiopian dance with uncompromising, highly dissonant European jazz. Tenor saxophonist, Nicolas Stephan, trumpet player Julien Rousseau, electric guitarist, Julien Omé, double bassist Théo Girard and vocalist Jeanne Added, drummer Sébastien Brun and Eskista dancers Melaku and Zinash have entertained the audience with their well-organized and polished performance.

Walaloota Zalaalam Abarra

Review by Solomon Deressa
Zalaalam Abarra’s sizable collection entitled simply Walaloota (Poems) is an uplifting encounter with high order poetry. The poems are in Oromo, a language that over its millennial existence in the Horn of Africa, has produced, and continues to produce, significant epic, heroic, ribald, elegiac, amorous and mystical poetry as well as rowdy limericks, rambunctious erotic couplets, and superbly bawdy quatrains. A re-awakening of the need for cultural and political differentiation has also given rise to verse devoted to promoting Oromo nationalism.

Elias’s art fuses with Oedipus Rex Musical

Works of an Ethiopian artist is going to be put onstage! The visual artist Elias Sime’s works would be featured in a musical production in Australia at the end of this month- a Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex & Symphony of Psalms in Sydney’s Opera House from January 28 to 30. Directed by the American opera and theatre director Peter Sellars, the opera-oratorio would include Elias’s visual images to enrich the musical experience of the production.

An anthropologist and curator, Meskerem Assegued said that seven thrones and masks of materials such as mud, straw, and wood objects all done by Elias would be used to represent the work’s main characters.
Meskerem who has long been the visual art curator of Elias’s art explained that Sellars has taken an interest in the artist’s works since 2006 when she was made to curate the visual art of Green Flame of the New Crowned Hope Festival that Sellars directed in Vienna, Austria.