The Big Dipper: Hop to Spring's Sky Sights

"The Big Dipper is one of the most familiar sights in the Northern Hemisphere’s night skies. It’s a prominent asterism — a recognizable pattern of stars that isn’t an officially named constellation — in Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Ursa Major is a circumpolar constellation: Its stars never set for most observers at northern latitudes. In fact, the Dipper is visible year-round to observers north of latitude 41°, which makes it an invaluable key to unlocking the night sky. Let’s look at seven sights that you can find with the naked eye on these spring evenings using the Dipper to guide you. ..."
Sky and Telescope

Henry David Thoreau - I

"Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay 'Civil Disobedience' (originally published as 'Resistance to Civil Government'), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. ... Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist. ..."
Wikipedia


Walden
"Walden (first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is an American book written by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self reliance. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts."
Wikipedia
NY Times: At Walden, Thoreau Wasn’t Really Alone With Nature
New Republic: Everybody Hates Henry
[PDF] Walden
Ken Burns: Walden Film
YouTube: Walden (FULL Audiobook)

Walden, a Game

"... Henry David Thoreau’s classic 'Walden' is the inspiration for what Smithsonian Magazine is calling 'the world’s most improbable video game': Walden, a Game. Instead of offering the thrills of stealing, violence and copious cursing, the new video game, based on Thoreau’s 19th-century retreat in Massachusetts, will urge players to collect arrowheads, cast their fishing poles into a tranquil pond, buy penny candies and perhaps even jot notes in a journal — all while listening to music, nature sounds and excerpts from the author’s meditations. ..."
NY Times: In ‘Walden’ Video Game, the Challenge Is Stillness (Video)
Walden has been adapted into a video game, and you can play it right now (Video)
Walden, a Game
Walden: A downloadable game for Windows and macOS - $ (Video)


Civil Disobedience (1849)
"Resistance to Civil Government (Civil Disobedience) is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. ... The word civil has several definitions. The one that is intended in this case is 'relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with the state', and so civil disobedience means 'disobedience to the state'. ..."
Wikipedia
Open Culture: Henry David Thoreau on When Civil Disobedience and Resistance Are Justified (1849)
NY Times: It’s Tax Day. Don’t Forget to Read Thoreau.
[PDF] Civil Disobedience
YouTube: Thoreau and Civil Disobedience 5:25
YouTube: Civil Disobedience Part 1, Part 2


The Maine Woods (1864)
"... Thoreau’s 'The Maine Woods,' first published in 1864 (composed partly of articles he had written earlier for periodicals) and still in print, is an insightful reporter’s picture of a rugged wilderness the moment before being irrevocably altered by armies of loggers. Today the virgin forest seen by Thoreau is gone; trees have been cut, regrown and harvested again. 'It’s a working forest,' [Karen] Woodsum said. But modern travelers hikers, campers, hunters, fishers, canoeists or back road wanderers will still find, as Thoreau did, a land 'more grim and wild than you had anticipated.' It’s also pin-drop tranquil, teeming with wildlife and, in places, challenging to reach. ..."
NY Times: Tracking Thoreau Through Maine’s ‘Grim and Wild’ Land
On Thoreau’s Trail in the Maine Woods, a review by Ron Hoag
The Maine Woods
YouTube: The Maine Woods (FULL Audiobook)


A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River
"A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) is a book by Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). It is ostensibly the narrative of a boat trip from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire, and back, that Thoreau took with his brother John in 1839. John died of tetanus in 1842 and Thoreau wrote the book, in part, as a tribute to his memory. ...."
Wikipedia
[PDF] A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
amazon (Audible Audio Edition)


Walking (1862)
"Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) was a man of extraordinary wisdom on everything from optimism to the true meaning of 'success' to the creative benefits of keeping a diary to the greatest gift of growing old. In his 1861 treatise Walking (free ebook | public library), penned seven years after Walden, he sets out to remind us of how that primal act of mobility connects us with our essential wildness, that spring of spiritual vitality methodically dried up by our sedentary civilization. ..."
The Spirit of Sauntering: Thoreau on the Art of Walking and the Perils of a Sedentary Lifestyle
W - Walking
[PDF] Walking


Cape Cod
"Walking Cape Cod With Thoreau: Early in the morning of Thursday, Oct. 11, 1849, Henry David Thoreau set off to walk the 30 miles of uninterrupted beach facing the Atlantic at the tip of Cape Cod. A heavy rain was falling. Strong winds, the aftermath of a great storm, lashed the narrow strip of land known as the Lower Cape. Thoreau responded to the weather with the rising spirits of one who made it his business to deal forthrightly with nature. He unfurled his umbrella and strode on. Under an adjoining umbrella was his companion, William Eller Channing. An ideal traveling companion, Channing was everything Thoreau was not — impractical, disorganized, amenable. ..."
NY Times
Gutenberg: Cape Cod
YouTube: Thoreau’s Cape Cod

Mythological Jazz Asteroids in the Afro Futurist Space Belt

"Experience by itself, the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl said, is not science. In the hands of London band The Comet is Coming, experience is a strict adherence to improvisation and exploration that filters the scientific process into a musical call and response. It has purified their sound. So perhaps Husserl is only part right. Maybe some experience is scientific. Maybe some music is science. Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery, by The Comet is Coming, is reviewed at Riot Material magazine.Because of this comprehensive reliance on exploratory noises, there’s no true designation for the band, whose album Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery was released in March 2019 on Universal Music’s legendary jazz label, Impulse! Records. Each song on the album is illusory. The firm musical structure of one section burns away to something entirely different a few bars later. And that cycle echoes as the musicians repeatedly crescendo in metamorphosis. ..."
Riot Material (Audio/Video)
W - Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Summon The Fire
YouTube: Trust In The Lifeforce Of The Deep Mystery 1 / 9

Which Woman Should Be Biden’s Vice-Presidential Pick?

"The vice presidency has never been a particularly glamorous job — 'not worth a bucket of warm spit' is how Franklin Roosevelt’s first running mate described it — but as the 2020 election approaches, the stakes of being a heartbeat away from the presidency have rarely seemed higher. At age 78 on Inauguration Day, Joe Biden would be the United States’ oldest president. To round out his ticket, he’ll need not only a 'simpatico' partner but also a potential successor capable of leading the country through its worst national crisis since World War II. Here’s what people are saying about some of the women — and yes, he has pledged to pick a woman — he might be considering. ..."
NY Times

How to Make an Illustrated Map in 8 Steps

"Many of us are in the same situation: homebound, a little restless and a lot distracted. Not only are our future travel plans on hold, but even our local outings and excursions — a quick trip to the market, a stroll in the park, a walk with the dog — are limited. That doesn’t mean we need to curtail our wanderlust or stop exploring the world around us, and within us. Here is an idea that will help fill the void left by travel restrictions and social distancing, redirect our attention to the immediate worlds we know best — either before our eyes or in our minds — while keeping our creative juices flowing: Make an illustrated map! ..."
NY Times

Roger And Brian Eno Invite Fans To Contribute To New ‘Mixing Colours’ Film Project

"Following the recent release by Deutsche Grammophon of Mixing Colours, their first ever duo album, Roger and Brian Eno have invited fans to submit videos of their post-lockdown world to a new website, from which they will select eleven as official accompaniment for music from the album. The idea was inspired by visuals for four tracks – ‘Celeste’, ‘Sand’, ‘Ultramarine’ and ‘Blonde’ – made by Brian Eno in collaboration with musician and software designer Peter Chilvers, then released in the run up to the album. Reflecting the collection’s overall peaceful nature, these married the pieces’ simplicity and contemplative qualities to suitably uncomplicated, mesmerising imagery of slowly changing, dreamlike panoramas. ..."
udiscover (Video)
Mixing Colours (Video)
Interview: On “Mixing Colours,” Composers Brian and Roger Eno Paint a New Sonic Landscape

260,000 Words, Full of Self-Praise, From Trump on the Virus

"Three journalists from The New York Times reviewed more than 260,000 words spoken by President Trump during the pandemic. Here’s what we learned. At his White House news briefing on the coronavirus on March 19, President Trump offered high praise for the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn. “He’s worked, like, probably as hard or harder than anybody,” Mr. Trump said. Then he corrected himself: 'Other than maybe Mike Pence — or me.' On March 27, Mr. Trump boasted about marshaling federal resources to fight the virus, ignoring his early failures and smearing previous administrations. ..."
NY Times

Baseball: Part 5: Shadow Ball

1934 Wold Series and “The Gas House Gang
"When the Great Depression struck, many baseball owners feared the worst. They would have trouble drawing fans. The fans they did draw would have a hard time paying for the extra souvenirs or food concessions. Little did they know, people would still come to the ballpark if only to forget about their own troubles for a while. Attendance would be down in the 1930s but none of the sixteen franchises ever folded or moved as a result of the Great Depression and some of the games’ lasting stars said goodbye while others said hello. New ways of playing emerged, lasting vestiges of the game emerged, and a new era of baseball had begun. Coming out of the 1920s, baseball began to boom. Newspapers and radio combined to turn the game into a way to forget about your problems for a couple of days. New stadiums had been built and offense was booming. ...
The Golden Age of Baseball: The 1930s
PBS: Part 5: Shadow Ball (Video)
NY Times: Apples for a Nickel, and Plenty of Empty Seats
Research sheds new light on Lindstrom’s 1930 season
1930 The Big Blastcast of 1930
Hall of Fame opened the day of Lou Gehrig’s final game, W - Lou Gehrig
W - Gashouse Gang, 1931 The Peppering of Philly

Lou Gehrig whacks a double into left center
10 Great 1930s Baseball Cards For Budget-Minded Collectors
W - Major League Baseball on the radio: 1930s, W - Red Barber
W - Josh Gibson, W - Gus Greenlee
W - 1933 Major League Baseball All-Star Game
YouTube: St. Louis Cardinals: Gas House Gang Stories - Branch Rickey, The Fall of the Philadelphia Athletics, Jimmie Foxx - The Beast, Bob Feller Demonstrates Pitching, Dizzy Dean highlight video, When Lou Gehrig Knew Something Was Wrong, Gehrig delivers his famous speech at Yankee Stadium
World Series: 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939

Josh Gibson

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Le Passeur, c.1870
"Corot is a pivotal figure in landscape painting. His work simultaneously references the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipates the plein-air innovations of Impressionism. Of him Claude Monet exclaimed in 1897, 'There is only one master here—Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing.' His contributions to figure painting are hardly less important; Degas preferred his figures to his landscapes, and the classical figures of Picasso pay overt homage to Corot’s influence. Historians have divided his work into periods, but the points of division are often vague, as he often completed a picture years after he began it. ..."
Atlas of Places
W - Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
YouTube: Camille Corot: A collection of 710 paintings

Paysage d'été avec sentier et lac, c.1870

During ‘The Last Dance,’ I’ll remember how Michael Jordan brought me closer to the most important man in my life

"Shortly before midnight on June 14, 1998, my Uncle John and I knew it was over. Only the light from a dim floor lamp, the fish tank and his TV — and our joint euphoria — illuminated his studio apartment. We high-fived. We hugged. And we yelled. Moments earlier, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls won their sixth title in eight seasons, and did so in the absolutely most Jordan way possible. On fumes, Jordan drilled a clutch jumper over Bryon Russell of the Utah Jazz. The shot proved to be the game winner and life, as Uncle John and I knew it then, would be different moving forward. We just didn’t realize how different. The Bulls’ 1997-98 season is the subject of ESPN’s The Last Dance, which premieres Sunday in five weekly installments. ..."
theundefeated (Video)
W - The Last Dance (TV series)

Land of the Rising Sound | A Roland Retrospective

"Roland isn’t just a synthesizer company. Its products are tied to the  development of electronic music as a genre and cultural movement. It’s impossible think of dance music’s trajectory from 1980 onwards without the TR-808 or TR-909—not to mention the TB-303 or the SH-101. In a new documentary called Land of the Rising Sound, Alex Ball sets out to explore this history. It tells the story of Roland through the machines themselves, revealing how minute technical innovations and inventions could come to revolutionize how we view and create sound."
Watch A New 70-Minute Documentary On Legendary Synth Company Roland (Video)
YouTube: Land of the Rising Sound | A Roland Retrospective 1:12:00

Dame's Rocket

"Hesperis matronalis is an herbaceous plant species in the family Brassicaceae. It has numerous common names, including dame's rocket, damask-violet, dame's-violet, dames-wort, dame's gilliflower, night-scented gilliflower, queen's gilliflower, rogue's gilliflower, summer lilac, sweet rocket, mother-of-the-evening, and winter gilliflower. These plants are biennials or short-lived perennials, native to Eurasia and cultivated in many other areas of the world for their attractive, spring-blooming flowers. In some of those areas, it has escaped from cultivation and become a weed species. The genus name Hesperis was probably given because the scent of the flowers becomes more conspicuous towards evening. ..."
W - Hesperis matronalis
YouTube: Dame's Rocket: Edible & Other Uses

The City Reliquary

"The City Reliquary is a not-for-profit community museum and civic organization located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The museum traces the history of New York City's five boroughs with its exhibitions of cultural ephemera and relics. Besides a permanent display of New York City artifacts, the City Reliquary also hosts rotating exhibits of community collections and annual cultural events. ... Many items in the City Reliquary's permanent collection have some connection to historical events in New York, such as a shrine to Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers, memorabilia from both the 1939–40 and 1964–65 New York World's Fairs; and an interactive display relating the career of Little Egypt, a 19th-century burlesque dancer. Dave Herman’s collection of Statue of Liberty figures, which formed the original core collection, is also on view. ..."
Wikipedia
The City Reliquary
Atlas Obscura
YouTube: Do You Remember This? - City Reliquary Museum

Y Records

Pop Group
"Spanning reverb-heavy punk, disco and dub, in just three years, Y Records helped define a nascent British sound. As the 1980s dawned, two of post punk’s most inventive and closely related groups were without a label. The Pop Group had cut their ties with Jake Riviera’s Radar Records after their 1979 album Y, while The Slits were dropped by Island Records despite the equally pivotal LP, Cut. Enter their manager, Dick O’Dell, who founded Y Records to release a double-sided single, The Pop Group’s ‘Where There’s A Will There’s A Way’ and The Slits ‘In The Beginning There Was Rhythm’. ..."
The rebellious post-punk sound of Y Records (Video)
W - Y Records
Discogs

Y Pants - Water Wing

Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust

Musee d'Orsay
"... The Musée du Louvre in Paris has reported a tenfold increase in web traffic, from 40,000 to 400,000 visitors per day. Visits to the websites of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London are also up by huge multiples. Audiences are seeking out arts material for children — the Metropolitan Museum of Art reports an elevenfold uptick to #MetKids, its youth education initiative. Remember just a decade ago, when the Met raised hackles, within and beyond its walls, for its ambitious digitization initiative, as if it were dangerous to offer more than 400,000 high-resolution, free-to-download images of the collection? No one’s saying that now. ..."
NY Times


Uffizi Gallery

How To Buy John Coltrane: 11 Essential Albums

"In jazz circles, the smallest mention of John Coltrane usually invokes a mood of hushed reverence, and the discovery of a previously unreleased album, Both Directions At Once: The Lost Album, promises a Holy Grail-like revelation for fans. That’s because Trane – as his disciples refer to him – is regarded as a deity whose extraordinary musical powers far exceed those of other mere mortals. Indeed, since his death, on 17 July 1967, Coltrane and his music, aided by its pronounced spiritual and metaphysical dimensions, has inspired a kind of religious devotion that no other jazz musician has experienced (there’s even a church named after him in San Francisco – the St John Coltrane Church). But the sheer amount of his music can be intimidating, so how do newcomers start to buy John Coltrane? ..."
udiscover (Video)

In 3 steps, fold a T-shirt into a balaclava in 30 seconds (no elastic required)

"Do the elastics on your face mask hurt your ears? Would you rather not pay money on Amazon AMZN, -0.08% for a face mask that could take weeks to arrive? Do you need to go to the store in a hurry? Pull up a seat. Ronit Bose Roy, a Mumbai-based Twitter TWTR, +1.00% user whose near-325,000 followers include Salman Rushdie, showed the world how to fold a T-shirt into a face mask in 30 seconds. As of Thursday, his video has received more than 1.8 million views.
Step 1: Pull the T-shirt over your head until the neck opening lines up with your nose.
Step 2: Fold the bottom of the shirt up once, and double-fold it down across your face.
Step 3: Criss-cross the back of the T-shirt once and pull up over the top of your head.
Done and done!
MarketWatch (Video)
The Atlantic: The Real Reason to Wear a Mask

Rolling Stones - Living in a Ghost Town (2020) / The Specials - Ghost Town (1981)

"... ‘Living In A Ghost Town’, despite being The Stones’ first original song since 2012, is a similarly rushed and half-baked comment on our current predicament. Aiming at The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ and ending up like a deep bluesy take on Hard-Fi’s ‘Cash Machine’, it finds Jagger tremulous, forlorn and a little angry that humanity is no longer free to amass at his electrified gates. 'Feel like a ghost / Living in a ghost town,' he complains, strutting along palatial hallways to make his own bloody sandwich, 'I’m going nowhere, shut up all alone / So much time to lose just staring at my phone'. As songs about doing nothing go, he certainly doesn’t seem to have spent his spare time thinking too hard. ..."
NME
YouTube: Rolling Stones - Living in a Ghost Town
YouTube: The Specials - Ghost Town

2015 August: Exile on Main Street (1972), 2015 October: "Let's Spend the Night Together" / "Ruby Tuesday" (1967), 2015 December: Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971), 2016 January: Some Girls (1978), 2016 January: The Rolling Stones (EP), 2016 March: Five by Five (EP - 1964), 2016 May: "The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling — Ireland 1965", 2016 December: Singles Collection: The London Years (1989), 2017 June: Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), 2017 September: "Sister Morphine" - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Marianne Faithfull (1969), 2018 March: "Miss You" (1978) , 2019 February: Which Rolling Stones Records Should I Buy?
2009 October: The Specials, 2912 September: Ghost Town, 2013 November: Too Much Too Young - The Special AKA (1980), 2015 April: The Specials (1979)

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Revising

"There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—'Song of Myself,' 'The Sleepers,' 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,' and 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed'—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. ..."
The Paris Review

2012 August: Walt Whitman

Willem Dafoe Breaks Down His Career

"Vanity Fair: Willem Dafoe discusses the roles that make up his film career, including 'The Wooster Group,' 'Heaven's Gate,' 'The Loveless,' 'Platoon,' 'The Last Temptation of Christ,' 'Wild at Heart,' 'The Boondock Saints,' 'Shadow of the Vampire,' 'Spider-Man,' 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,' 'Antichrist,' 'The Florida Project,' 'At Eternity's Gate,' 'The Lighthouse' and 'Motherless Brooklyn.' You can see Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse and Motherless Brooklyn in theaters now!"
YouTube: Willem Dafoe Breaks Down His Career, from 'The Boondock Saints' to 'Spider-Man' 17:12

Buppies, B-Boys, Baps & Bohos

"March 17, 1992. It might have been when mobile DJs began rocking Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express in 1977 or when WBLS’s slogan shifted from 'the total black experience in sound' to 'the total experience in sound' to 'the world’s best-looking sound.' Or when dressing down to dress up be­came the new Saturday-night aesthetic of high school teens. Another clue was when Richard Pry­or’s blues-based life experience humor gave way to Eddie Murphy’s telegenic, pop-culture-oriented joking. Neither you nor I knows exactly when it happened. But we know what happened. Over the last 20 or so years, the tenor of African American culture has changed. I came up on the we-shall-overcome tradition of noble struggle, soul and gospel music, positive images. and the conven­tional wisdom that civil rights would translate into racial salvation. ..."
Voice
amazon: Buppies, B-boys, Baps, And Bohos: Notes On Post-soul Black Culture - Nelson George

Hound Dog Taylor and Little Walter

Little Walter
"... For years after his departure from Muddy's band in 1952, Little Walter continued to be brought in to play on his recording sessions, and as a result his harmonica is featured on most of Muddy's classic recordings from the 1950s. How can you go wrong with two of the best talents of the time. Here is a feature of Hound Dog with Little Walter playing an old Elmore James Song. Wild About You Baby."
Bman's Blues Report (Video)
YouTube: Hound Dog Taylor & Little Walter - Wild About you baby

Hound Dog Taylor

Overlay - Lucy R. Lippard (1983)

"... As the art world's most outspoken feminist/socialist critic, Lucy R. Lippard has always gone against the tide, insisting emphatically on art with a message. She is deeply troubled by the fact that we live in an era that produces increasing numbers of artists who are without any sense of purpose beyond their own professional aims and that, as a culture, we seem to have lost any notion of what our art is for. If this situation raises a question most art critics try to avoid, it is one that gives special resonance to Miss Lippard's writing, since what is at stake for her is nothing less than the reestablishing of connections among art, nature and society. ..."
NY Times: ART SHOULD MEAN AS WELL AS BE
W - Lucy R. Lippard
LUCY LIPPARD with Jarrett Earnest
[PDF] Overlay: Contemporary Art and the_Art of Prehistory
amazon

2012 October: Materializing "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, 2017 October: Interview with Lucy R. Lippard

Afrofuturism show in Berlin criticised over absence of black artists

"The organisers of an exhibition inspired by the unlikely bedfellows of the Afrofuturism movement and the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk have been criticised for not including a single black artist in its lineup. Opening in Berlin on Wednesday evening, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien’s Space is the Place exhibition – which takes its name from a song by the avant-garde free jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra – has fallen into 'old curatorial habits' that favour white men, according to the activist group Soup du Jour. In an open letter, the group – an anonymous collective of curators, cultural activists and museum workers that has previously highlighted the dearth of diverse artists shown in Berlin – said the gallery’s curator, Christoph Tannert, was promoting 'white muskulinity'. ..."
Guardian

Messages in the Maps

The earliest Islamic maps of the Mediterranean were drawn in the late 10th century ce by geographer and cartographer Ibn Hawqal in his Kitab surat al-ard (Book of a picture of the earth).
"Using a gentle two-finger pinch, Emilie Savage-Smith turns a page of an 800-year-old manuscript on display at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. She leans forward and pauses, carefully reviewing each illustration. 'This entire treatise is one of the universe,' says Savage-Smith, professor of the history of Islamic science at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, describing the Book of Curiosities, a 13th-century compendium of Islamic maps. 'It starts from the very outside where the stars are, and works its way down to the Earth. And then, when you get to the Earth, you get the diagrams of the winds, etcetera. This is the only treatise I can think of where the two are combined.' ..."
AramcoWorld

The Book of Curiosities includes this large, detailed map of Sicily. Like other maps of its era, it is schematic rather than mimetic, and it shows ports, cities and more. Maps were produced mostly on the basis of oral accounts.

Beware of Politicians Who Declare “War” on the Coronavirus

"When heads of state start using wartime rhetoric to talk about coronavirus, should that make us feel safer and more secure … or nervous? The above video essay argues that yes, this rhetoric is meant to conjure a sense of solidarity — which we desperately need — but it can also provide cover for eroding our civil liberties. But there could be a silver lining to all this. While we should be careful of ceding control of our rights and liberties, maybe the inequities exposed through tragedy and collective hardship will make us ask: What world do we want to live in when all this has passed?"
NY Times (Video)

Music Revelation Ensemble – Cross Fire (1997)

"Pretty good idea to rotate guest saxophonists as a means to keep James Blood Ulmer's Music Revelation Ensemble concept fresh. Pharoah Sanders and John Zorn are on board for Cross Fire, and a change to Calvin 'Fuzz' Jones' acoustic bass lowers the frenzy level that marked Knights of Power. Sanders, in particular, sounds inspired by the context, playing hard and pushing Ulmer and the music. His tracks all start out peaceful, go totally outside with high harmonic shrieks and thick, woolly tenor tone, and then bring it back to the serenity base. ... Music Revelation Ensemble seems to be the context that Blood Ulmer reserves his strongest melodies for, and he plays with the kind of fire and invention that made him a major figure. Cross Fire probably isn't the best place to plunge in and explore the music, but it's a very worthy addition to the catalog."
allmusic (Audio)
W - Cross Fire (album)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Music Revelation Ensemble (James Blood Ulmer) – Cross Fire (Full Album)

2015 November: Prime Time (1981), 2016 September: Black Rock (1982), 2017 May: Are You Glad to Be in America? (1980), 2017 June: James Blood Ulmer solo live @ Skopje Jazz Festival 2015

African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s (2008)

"... Analog Africa's Samy Ben Redjeb already had loads of cred for the way he handled his two previous releases, which featured Zimbabwe's Hallelujah Chicken Run Band and Green Arrows, respectively. He traveled to Zimbabwe and spent time with the creators, digging deep into their stories and emerging with great-sounding, informative compilations that thoroughly introduced the listener to both the music and the musicians. African Scream Contest moves a few thousand miles northwest to Benin and Togo, two chimney-shaped former French colonies (Togo was a German colony until WWI) squeezed between West Africa's Anglophone giants, Ghana and Nigeria. ..."
Pitchfork
bandcamp (Audio)
amazon
YouTube: African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Afro Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s [full album]