The Sublime World Of Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway Productions

"Next to the great George Gershwin, no other American composer can claim to have worked across as many musical genres, except for Leonard Bernstein. A musical genius who enlightened our lives, Leonard Bernstein (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) seemed equally at ease in classical, theatre, jazz and, in at least one instance (Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront) film scores; across them all, his work was consistently compelling, singular and sublime. Here’s a look at how one of America’s greatest composers conquered the Broadway stage and beyond. ..."
udiscover (Video/Audio)
Vanity Fair: Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, and the Road to West Side Story
W - West Side Story
W - Leonard Bernstein, W - Jerome Robbins
Discogs, amazon: Bernstein On Broadway

Left, Jerome Robbins, photographed in his apartment in N.Y.C. by Philippe Halsman, 1959; right, director-choreographer Robbins on the set of West Side Story with Chakiris and Verso.

2017 October: How Bernstein shook up the status quo with ‘On the Waterfront’

The True Cost of Lionel Messi’s Declaration of Independence

"... This is what Messi was giving up on Tuesday when he and his representatives sent Barcelona official confirmation of his intention to leave the club. He is not just ending a relationship with the club that spans two decades, that has seen him transformed from a 13-year-old kid signed on a contract written on the back of a napkin into, arguably, the finest player soccer has ever seen. He is not just breaking a bond between player and team that has come to seem symbiotic. Barcelona is not Barcelona without Messi. But would Messi be Messi without Barcelona? He lifted this team to greatness, this club to unmatched prominence, but the converse was also true for a long time: Barcelona was not just his platform, his stage, it was a character in his story. ..."
NY Times

The Algiers Motel Incident - John Hersey (1968)

"The Algiers Motel incident occurred in Detroit, Michigan, United States, throughout the night of July 25–26, 1967 during the racially charged 12th Street Riot. At the Algiers Motel, approximately one mile east of where the riot began, three civilians were killed and nine others abused by a riot task force composed of the Detroit Police Department, the Michigan State Police, and the Michigan Army National Guard. Among the casualties were three black teenage boys killed, and two white women and seven black men wounded as a result. ... Charges of felonious assault, conspiracy, murder, and conspiracy to commit civil rights abuse were filed against three officers. Charges of assault and conspiracy were also filed on a private security guard. All were found not guilty. ..."
Wikipedia
LA Review - Against Active Forgetting: On John Hersey’s “The Algiers Motel Incident”
The Crimson - The Algiers Motel By Charles M. Hagen (July 12, 1968)
amazon

Charlie Parker at 100: What to Read, Watch and Dig

"Charlie Parker’s brief swing through this world kicked off a century ago on Saturday with his birth in Kansas City, Kan. Eleven years later, he would take up the saxophone. A couple of years after that, inspired by the hot bands tearing up K.C. in the ’30s, the man who was later known as Bird dedicated himself to his instrument, the alto, woodshedding for 11 to 15 hours a day, he would later say. A decade later, the complexity, beauty and 'tommy-gun velocity' (as Stanley Crouch once put it) of his improvisations would hasten jazz’s departure from the dance hall. With his bebop cohort of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and others, Bird declared 'Now’s the Time,' thrilling audiences and scarifying critics, who mostly took a while to catch up to the advanced harmonics and polyrhythms. His brash modernism jolted New York and then the world. And then, just 34 years into a life of epochal consequence, Parker died, his body ravaged by appetites as outsized as his genius. ..."
NY Times (Video)
Discogs: 100 Reasons We Love Charlie Parker For His 100th Birthday (Video)
PBS - Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (Video)
Charlie Parker - The 1949 Downbeat Interview
A Bird’s Life: How Charlie Parker Changed The Course Of Jazz History (Video/Audio)

Charlie Parker at Jimbo’s Bop City, 1950s.

2011 July: Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, et al 1950, 2012 July: The Charlie Parker Story, 2014 May: Afro-Cuban jazz, 2014 December: The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Recordings 1944-1948, 2017 February: Bird in Boston · Live at the Hi-Hat 1953-1954, 2018 February: Bop City, 2019 November: What Is Bebop? Deconstructing Jazz Music’s Most Influential Development

Jackson Heights, Global Town Square

"With a population of around 180,000 people speaking some 167 languages, or so locals like to point out, Jackson Heights in north-central Queens, though barely half the size of Central Park, is the most culturally diverse neighborhood in New York, if not on the planet. The brainchild of commercial real estate developers in the early years of the last century who hoped to entice white, middle-class Manhattanites seeking a suburban lifestyle a short subway ride away, Jackson Heights has become a magnet for Latinos, those who identify as L.G.B.T.Q., South Asians and just about everybody else seeking a foothold in the city and a slice of the American pie. Suketu Mehta is a New York University professor and the author of 'Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found' and 'This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto.' What follows is the latest in a series of (edited, condensed) walks around the city. ..."
NY Times (Interactive)

2018 April: The Many Languages (and Foods) of Jackson Heights, 2019 November: How to pick a New York City neighborhood

Imaginary Landscapes: The turntable as instrument

"Exploring radical turntablism in experimental music with Shiva Feshareki, Haroon Mirza, Philip Jeck and more. From Daphne Oram’s unrealised electronic manipulations to Grand Wizard Theodore pulling back records in ’70s New York city, artists and musicians have constantly found new frontiers for turntables and the playback of recorded music. Spanning movements at the interface of art and music from surrealism, Bauhaus, and Fluxus, to hip-hop, house, and techno, the use of the turntable as an instrument has enabled artists to explore dialogues between past and present, found and original sounds, and live and recorded performance. Taking its name from John Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes series, which envisions the surface of a record as topography, the film follows eight contemporary sound artists and musicians who are pushing the boundaries of the instrument today. ..."
The Vinyl Factory (Video)

The Origins of Sprawl

Aerial view of Levittown, Pennsylvania.
"'The property they [developers] built on had been farmland, overlooked by a big rickety-looking wood frame house,' the science fiction writer William Gibson tells me of his time living in a Charlotte, North Carolina, suburb ('on Blackberry Circle, where all the homes seem to have been built in 1954') that today is called Collingwood. 'I once referred to it [the farmer’s home] as a poor people’s house, and my father corrected me, saying that they [the farmer who owned the land] had lots more money than we did, because they’d sold the rest of their land to the company he worked for, which had built the development,' he recalls of the property the homes were built on. Gibson once described living in that suburb as 'like living on Mars,' with no grass and orange clay all around. I remember reading that and thinking about how much his suburban experience sounded like an old sci-fi story. ..."
The Paris Review

2010 September: Cyberpunk, 2010 October: Bruce Sterling, 2011 July: William Gibson, 2015 May: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology - edited by Bruce Sterling (1986), 2015 July: A Global Neuromancer, 2016 May: The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990), 2017 August: Sprawl trilogy, 2019 February: Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science - Edited by Larry McCaffery (1992), 2019 December: How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real, 2020 May: We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk

Duke Ellington’s Legacy - Nat Hentoff, Ellington Uptown (1952)

"Next year will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of the most original and wide-ranging composer in American history. (Charles Ives was second). Duke Ellington’s life and works should be explored and enjoyed in classrooms and concerts at middle schools, high schools, and colleges all around the nation. That may already happen in a few places; but by and large, most younger Americans remain culturally disadvantaged in their ignorance of Edward Kennedy Ellington. Recently, I called a mail-order house that specializes in hard-to-get recordings of various kinds. I was looking for a set of V-discs that the Ellington orchestra had recorded during the Second World War. The first person I talked to had never heard of Ellington. ..."
Voice
W - Ellington Uptown
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Ellington Uptown (Full Album) 6 videos

Tracking the Suspect in the Fatal Kenosha Shootings

"A teenager who walked among protesters in Kenosha, Wis., carrying a military-style semi-automatic rifle was arrested and faces a charge of first-degree intentional homicide in connection with shootings that left two people dead on Tuesday night. Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old Illinois resident, appeared on multiple videos taken throughout the night by protesters and bystanders who chronicled the events as peaceful protests gave way to chaos, with demonstrators, armed civilians and others facing off against one another and the police in the darkened streets. ..."
NY Times (Video)
NY Times - Live Updates: Justice Department to Investigate Jacob Blake Shooting
NY Times - Justice Dept. to Open Investigation Into Kenosha Shooting (Video)
NY Times - Led by N.B.A., Boycotts Disrupt Pro Sports in Wake of Blake Shooting

Down Through the Faulkner Bloodline, Pride and Racial Guilt Commingled

"William Clark Falkner was a tall man—the order for his coffin specified 6’2”—and a talented one, good with a pen or a pistol, and with a balance sheet too. Even after the Civil War he had cash in his pockets, at a time when nobody else in Mississippi seemed to have any at all. He had grown up poor in Tennessee and then drifted south, learning just enough law to become a creditable attorney, while also finding more sensational ways to make money. In 1845, when he was 20, he took down a murderer’s jailhouse confession, had it printed, and sold it beneath the gallows. He was silver-tongued, and he needed to be, for he was also quarrelsome, killing two men in arguments and then talking his way out of the consequences. ..."
LitHub

2011 September: Southern Gothic, 2014 February: William Faulkner, 2015 October: William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels, 2015 November: Interviews William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12, 2016 April: Absalom, Absalom!! (1936), 2016 May: The Sound and the Fury (1929), 2016 October: The Snopes Trilogy (1940, 1957, 1959), 2016 December: Light in August (1932), 2017 February: As I Lay Dying (1930), 2017 June: The Wild Palms (1939), 2017 August: Sanctuary (1931). 2017 September: The Unvanquished (1938), 2017 October: 20 Pieces of Writing Advice from William Faulkner, 2017 November: Yoknapatawpha County, 2018 February: Go Down, Moses (1942), 2018 June: Flags in the Dust (1973), 2019 May: Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950), 2019 October: Sartoris (1929)

Aksak Maboul ‎– Figures (2020)

"The legendary experimental pop outfit returns with a brand-new record entitled Figures, written, conceived and produced over the last couple of years by Marc Hollander (founder of Aksak Maboul and of the Crammed label) and Véronique Vincent (former singer with The Honeymoon Killers). Figures is a double album containing 22 tracks and interludes, resulting from the flow of creative ideas which arose after a gap of over thirty years (see the Aksak story overleaf). Drawing again from the multiple sources which have always inspired the band (from electronic music and pop to experimentation, jazz, minimalism, contemporary classical etc), Aksak Maboul transcends and reconfigures them with its inimitable style, to create an impressive, rich and unclassifiable piece of work. ..."
Bandcamp (Audio)
Crammed Discs
The Quietus - Everything Has An End: Aksak Maboul Sum Up With Figures
Discogs (Video)
amazon

2014 November: Aksak Maboul, 2017 July: Made to Measure, Vol. 1 (1984), 2018 February: Before And After Bandits: Marc Hollander Of Aksak Maboul & Crammed Discs, 2020 March: Tout a une fin / Blaue Bleistift (2020)

Wild Dub: Dread Meets Punk Rocker Downtown

"It's a well-known fact that the early punks found their impulse for social rebellion in Jamaican culture, but how this influence translated into musical terms is usually undermined in our cultural histories. Wild Dub fills in the lack with 13 tracks by punk rock bands doing their versions of the 'version'. Mikey Dread's dub of the Clash's 'Bankrobber' is the most legendary of the selections here, but as Vivien Goldman points out in her liner notes, it wasn't the first to attempt this kind of crossover. ... The energy on the 'brink style dub' of the Slits 'Typical Girls' and Red Beat's 11-minute 'Red Beat' fare better and even show riddim-ic strains of what would eventually materialise into drum & bass more than a decade later. ... The inclusion of Grace Jones and the black punk outfit Basement 5 recall to the multi-racial character of this scene just as the unnamed 'rock against racism' track at the end reiterates the politics of the time."
exclaim
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Wild Dub: Dread Meets Punk Rocker 13 videos

2020 UEFA Champions League Final

"The 2020 UEFA Champions League Final was the final match of the 2019–20 UEFA Champions League, the 65th season of Europe's premier club football tournament organised by UEFA, and the 28th season since it was renamed from the European Champion Clubs' Cup to the UEFA Champions League. It was played on 23 August 2020 at the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon, Portugal, between French club Paris Saint-Germain, in their first European Cup final, and German club Bayern Munich. The match was held behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. ... Bayern Munich won the final 1–0 thanks to a 59th-minute goal scored by former Paris Saint-Germain player Kingsley Coman, later selected as man of the match. ..."
Wikipedia
UEFA Champions League Finals schedule (Video)
YouTube: PSG vs Bayern Munich | UEFA Champions League Final 18:41

The Party of Whatever the Hell Trump Says

A truck with an anti-Trump sign parked outside the Andrew Mellon Auditorium where speakers opened the first night of the 2020 Republican National Convention.
"The betrayal of the Republican Party began long ago, as party leaders compromised away the last of the basic premises on which it was founded. But the final abandonment comes this week, with the gathering of partisans to end the party as anything more than a cult of personality. Heading into the Republican National Convention that began on Monday, President Trump’s praetorian guard decreed that it would not present a fresh platform to voters in the 2020 election. Instead, it greeted the convention with a one-page statement that concluded. ..."
The Nation

Texas Funk: Hard Texas Funk 1968-1975

"... This was the first large-scale project we embarked upon. Deep funk was the thing and nobody was doing proper reissues of it. By proper I mean digging up obscurities, contacting the artists, getting them paid, telling their stories. Malcolm Catto and I spent several weeks driving around Texas finding these guys. It was exhausting work, but we got interviews, pictures, records and – to top it all – the master tapes of a previously unknown and unreleased album by Mickey & the Soul Generation. The album did very well, and we followed it up with some more regional deep funk compilations. ..."
The Vinyl Factory
Bandcamp (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
JAZZMAN RECORDS TOP 10: Texas Funk tracks (Audio)

How to Use Binoculars - Jason Ward

"Jason Ward is a birder, science nerd, and social activist from the Bronx. He currently lives in Georgia, where he leads bird walks and has done science surveys with the Atlanta Audubon Society. As a Fund II Apprentice Ward will assist with a variety of conservation and education programs including bird monitoring and banding, habitat restoration, field trips, and school and community outreach. Throughout the year, Ward will be working closely with the Atlanta Audubon Society and Birmingham Audubon. ..."
Audubon: Jason Ward
From the Bronx to Birding: An Interview with Jason Ward, Host of “Birds of North America”
The Atlantic - Listen: A Guide to Birding (Audio)
YouTube: How to Use Binoculars - Jason Ward
topic: How to Use Binoculars (Video)

2008 September: Birds, 2008 June: Bird Songs, 2017 April: Of a Feather, 2017 June: Bird Sounds, 2017 July: Beautifully Designed Tiny Houses... For Birds, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 March: She Invented a Board Game With Scientific Integrity. It’s Taking Off., 2019 June: Where Birds Meet Art . . . After Dark, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 October: A Quest to Protect the World's Last Silent Places, 2020 June: Making a Garden That Welcomes the Birds, 2020 July: New Bird Song That ‘Went Viral’ Across This Species of Sparrow Was Tracked by Scientists For the First Time

An Impressionist paints Brooklyn by the water

“Afternoon by the Sea, Gravesend Bay”, 1888
"After studying art in Munich, refining his eclectic Impressionist style across Europe, and creating an elegant studio on East 10th Street in Manhattan that reflected his flamboyant persona, painter William Merritt Chase moved to Brooklyn. It was 1887. The 37-year-old had just gotten married, and he and his new bride chose to live with his parents at their comfortable Brooklyn home as they began having kids. It’s no surprise, then, that the booming city of Brooklyn was the subject of many of Chase’s landscape paintings. ..."
Ephemeral New York

“Landscape Near Coney Island,” date unknown

2016 November: William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master

Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano (1947)

"Last year, fighting the anxiety and listlessness that seems to have become the norm of our overstimulated era, I read Under the Volcano for the first time. Since then, I have found myself continually pulling the book off the shelf, returning again and again to its sad, pristinely lyrical pages, as the seasons change and the state of the world remains tumultuous as ever. Under the Volcano is mesmerizing, brokenhearted, almost infinitely discursive, a mescal-sodden, naval-gazing dirge. Though it is resolutely a Modernist work, replete with countless esoteric references and ambiguous plot movements, the implications of the work continue to startle me with their relevance to the Digital Age. Far from the popular notion that Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece is merely 'about alcoholism,' Under the Volcano remains a dead-serious bereavement of the insurmountable space that can separate two people sitting side by side. ..."
Revisiting Malcolm Lowry’s ‘Under the Volcano’ on the Day of the Dead
W - Under the Volcano
amazon
[PDF] Under the Volcano

2018 November: Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry (John Huston - 1984)

Cultural Roots - Drift Away From Evil (1984), Everton Dacres ‎- Jah Jah A Come (1977), The Officials - Babylonians (1974), Etc.

"Cultural Roots founding member Wade Dyce, now living in Salem, Massachusetts, takes his time to ponder when I ask him about the unusual path that led to the life and death of reggae’s most elusive outfit. ... To this day, the singer of the legendary, elusive trio (sometimes quartet) Cultural Roots still has trouble formulating what exactly happened. On paper, the band had everything to become the next Wailing Souls, the future Mighty Diamonds: a beautiful set of complementary voices and a few solid vocal albums, ranging from 1978 to 1984, riding the finest riddims provided by no less than producers Donovan Germain and Junjo Lawes (Revolutionary Sounds, Hell A Go Pop, and the dread and sumptuous Drift Away from Evil). ..."
Cultural Roots could have been the biggest reggae vocal trio of all time, YouTube: Cultural Roots - Drift Away From Evil + Version (1984), Everton Dacres ‎- Jah Jah A Come (1977), The Officials - Babylonians (1974), Dennis Brown - Tribulation (1975), Peter Tosh - Wanted Dread & Alive (1981), Alton Ellis - Tumbling Tears (1969), Hugh Mundell/Augustus Pablo "Little Short Man" (1978), Clarence Parks - Mount Zion (1980), Sylford Walker - Burn Babylon (1975), Sugar Minott - So We Love It (1982)

Hugh Mundell/Augustus Pablo "Little Short Man" (1978)

On Lasts - Jill Talbot

"Summer slips away, like so much else this year. It’s late August, midafternoon, and I’m sitting on a porch in upstate New York. This is the final week my daughter, Indie, and I have together on our cross-country trip to her new college. These days are the last ones before we say goodbye at her dorm, before we begin to unfold the pages of our separate lives. Not long before we left Texas two weeks ago, I asked Indie if she’d like to take me on a tour of her favorite places in high school. She grabbed her keys and drove us to a doughnut store, to the turn she took so many times on Crescent Street, past her school parking space under a tree, to the restaurant where she had worked for over a year, to Sonic Drive-In, space 23, the one she and her best friend pulled into every time, and to the band practice field, telling me stories the whole way. ..."
The Paris Review

The Sopranos - Season 4

"The fourth season of the HBO drama series The Sopranos began airing on September 15, 2002 and concluded on December 8, 2002, consisting of thirteen episodes. The fourth season was released on DVD in region 1 on October 28, 2003. The story of season four focuses on the marriage between Tony and Carmela, as Tony engages in an affair with his uncle's nurse Svetlana and Carmela finds herself infatuated with one of Tony's soldiers, Furio Giunta. The increasing tension between Tony and Ralph Cifaretto comes to a violent head and Uncle Junior is put on trial for his crimes. Adriana is forced into becoming an FBI informant, while Christopher plunges deeper into heroin addiction. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Adriana La Cerva, W - Silvio Dante, W - Paulie Gualtieri, W - Satriale's Pork Store
RecapGuide
The Sopranos: Tony's 10 Best Mistresses, Ranked
Top 5 Episodes: The Sopranos – Season 4 (Video)
The Closing Credits Song For Every Episode of The Sopranos (Season 4) (Video)
YouTube: The Sopranos Season 4, Tony Calls Off Hit, Carmine Jr Speaks To Lupertazzi Management, Ralph Reaches Out To Johnny Sack, Tony And Silvio Talk About Ralph, Tony Plans A Surprise Trip, Carmela And Furio Talk

2020 July: The Sopranos - Season 1, 2020 July: Season 2, 2020 August: Season 3

A Walk Through Harlem, New York’s Most Storied Neighborhood

Langston Hughes on the stoop of his building. The Hughes house today.
"It’s a refuge and magnet, storied crucible and cradle, a cultural capital, shaped by waves of migration, a recent tsunami of gentrification and the ongoing struggles for racial justice. Harlem is the American saga packed into one neighborhood, its architecture a palimpsest of African-American and Latino experience in the city and of much else that has defined New York over the centuries. Lead designer for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, the Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye began to explore the area while working on a mixed-used housing development at 155th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue called Sugar Hill, which opened in 2015. That same year he won the commission to do a new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem and moved to Harlem with his family. ,,,"
NY Times

Muhammad Ali in a crowd outside Hotel Theresa.

2009 February: Harlem Renaissance, 2010 August: A Nightclub Map of Harlem, 2010 October: Apollo Theater, 2014 May: History of Harlem, 2014 November: A Harlem Throwback to the Era of Billie Holiday, 2015 February: A Nightclub Map of Harlem, 2017 June: During Prohibition, Harlem Night Clubs Kept the Party Going, 2018 March: How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement, 2018 March: Rent party, 2018 December: The Sheck Wes story, 2019 January: Apollo Theater Is Celebrated in a New Graphic Novel, 2019 April: Minton's Playhouse, 2019 June: Loïs Mailou Jones, 2019 June: An Artist on Paying Homage to Harlem, and Using Found Fabrics in Paintings, 2019 October: Lenox Lounge, 2020 March: Bebopped and Rebopped: The Births of Bebop and Invisible Man, 2020 July: The Theater Where Ella Fitzgerald Got Her Start

The British Museum is Full of Looted Artifacts

"As critics and fans wrote excitedly upon its release, Marvel’s Black Panther did an excellent job of creating sympathy for its villain. Many found Erik Killmonger’s radicalism more appealing than the hero’s moderation for some specific reasons, beginning with the heist at the 'Museum of Great Britain,' a thinly fictionalized British Museum. 'In one scene,' writes gallerist Lise Ragbir at Hyperallergic, 'the blockbuster superhero movie touches on issues of provenance, repatriation, diversity, representation, and other debates currently shaping institutional practices.' ..."
Open Culture (Video)

How the Criterion Collection Crops Out African-American Directors

"Linda Koulisis sensed an opportunity. It was September 2016, and Koulisis, a talent agent and former film producer based in Los Angeles, was in New York for a special screening of Charles Burnett’s 'To Sleep With Anger,' a critically admired but little-seen film she had worked on in 1990. Burnett, who is African-American, was also in town for the screening. And Koulisis, who is white, joined him for an appointment with the Criterion Collection, the producer of a revered DVD and Blu-ray line of classic and contemporary films that has existed in various forms since 1984. ..."
NY Times
Criterion Collection

Wayne Shorter ‎– Mr. Gone (The Best Of The Early Years)

"... The only way we could be certain that the figure in the photograph was [Wayne] Shorter was if we recognized the piercing eye reflected in the open lid of the compass from the moody photographs on the jackets of the classic Blue Note albums he recorded in the 1960s. Though Shorter and Verve, his label, probably intended no such thing, that cover represented his career since leaving Davis. At least two generations of musicians have followed where that band led. Shorter was the most emulated saxophonist in jazz, and arguably the most influential composer, from the early 1970s straight through the 1990s—but you wouldn't know it from his spotty output over those thirty years, during which his early work only loomed larger the further he strayed from it. ..."
The Atlantic: A Real Gone Guy
W - Wayne Shorter
Discogs - Mr. Gone (The Best Of The Early Years)
amazon: Mr. Gone (The Best Of The Early Years) 10 CD

2015 December: JuJu (1964), 2015 December: Art Blakey - Paris Jam Session (1959), 2019 August: Night Dreamer (1964), 2019 July: Blue Note Records at 80: Can a Symbol of Jazz’s Past Help Shape Its Future?

Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk - Katy Kelleher

Claude Monet, Water Lilies
"On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of fortunes, the stand of gracious Maine trees becomes secondary to the ground cover below. When the periwinkles are blooming, it’s hard to have eyes for anything else. The delicate mist is an impossibly soft color, like clouds descending into twilight, like the snowfall in an Impressionist masterpiece. It’s a color that almost doesn’t belong here—it’s a plant that certainly doesn’t. Periwinkle goes by many names. You might know her by one of her more fabulous monikers, like sorcerer’s violet or fairy’s paintbrush. ..."
The Paris Review

Charlotte Berrington, Vinca Minor

A New Interactive Map Shows All Four Million Buildings That Existed in New York City from 1939 to 1941

"New Yorkers have borne witness to a noticeable uptick in the number of shiny, new buildings going up in the city over the last few years, crowding the waterfront, rising from the ashes of community gardens and older, infinitely more modest structures. Their developers have taken care to top load them with luxury amenities—rooftop cabanas, 24-hour fitness clubs, marble countertops, screening rooms. But one thing they can’t provide is the sense of lived history that imbues every old building with a true sense of character, mystique, and oft-grubby charm. I fear that the occupants of these newer buildings won’t have nearly as much fun as the rest of us searching for our current addresses on the NYC Municipal Archives’ interactive map, above. ..."
Open Culture

8 Takeaways From the Senate Committee Report on Russian Interference

Democrats and Republicans could not agree on whether the facts they uncovered about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election added up to coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
"For more than three years, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee investigated Russia’s operations to influence the 2016 election. The fifth and final volume of its report on the inquiry, released on Tuesday, runs for nearly 1,000 pages and is likely to stand as the definitive bipartisan government examination of Moscow’s interference. The report revealed new details about Russian links to the Trump campaign in 2016 and offered broad warnings for future elections. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: G.O.P.-Led Senate Panel Details Ties Between 2016 Trump Campaign and Russia
***NY Times: Trump Phone Calls Add to Lingering Questions About Russian Interference
*****NY Times: Opinion - The Trump Campaign Accepted Russian Help to Win in 2016. Case Closed.

How to Celebrate a Complicated Win for Women

Suffragists in Greenwich Village in New York, circa 1912.
"There’s a historical haze confounding plans to observe the coming 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. It descends, first, in definitions: 'That’s the one that guaranteed a right to vote to all American women, right?' Not exactly. The 'women’s suffrage' amendment, like the 15th Amendment before it, which sought to protect the political rights of former slaves, guaranteed nothing. It simply told states that being female could no longer be a reason to bar citizens from voting. To African-American women living in states with systems in place to block African-American men from voting, the amendment provided neither clarity nor power. Haze also makes it difficult to see what merits celebration. ..."
NY Times
W - Women's suffrage in the United States
The Atlantic: How Women’s Suffrage Improved Education for a Whole Generation of Children
YouTube: 5 Things You Should Know About the Suffrage Movement

“Bringing Back Bowery: Public Art as Protest” at Howl! Happening and on the Streets on and off the Bowery

"Following the murder of George Floyd, the spirit of resistance that once characterized Lower Manhattan once again permeated its streets, as the boarded-up stores became canvases for politically driven murals. Several of these artworks no longer on the streets are on view in a splendid exhibition — curated by Sono Kuwayama, Bob Holman and Howl! Happening — at Howl! on 6 East 1st Street. Others remain on the streets. The image featured above, Black Trans Lives Matter,  was fashioned with acrylic and house paint on plywood by Maya Edelman, Scooter LaForge, and Sono Kuwayama. Several more images follow — from both the Howl! exhibition and its neighboring blocks. ..."
Street Art NYC

The noted painter Izhar Patkin, as seen on Cooper Square

BeatCaffeine’s 15 Most Essential Sun Ra Records

"Sun Ra was one of the most originally unique and forward-thinking composers and bandleaders of the last century. Claiming that he came to Earth from Saturn to spread the message of peace, the experimental pianist/ keyboardist and his ever-evolving ensemble the Arkestra fused together 40s era big band swing with bebop, the blues, free improvisation, spacey electronics, call-and-response chants, and psyched-out jazz-funk grooves to create a signature sound that always seemed to push the boundaries. Born in Birmingham, Alabama as Herman Poole Blount, the bandleader eventually changed his name (not legally) to Le Sony’r Ra, which led to being called Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian God of the Sun). ..."
beat caffeine (Video/Audio)