Common Ground vol.1 (2021)

 

“... Common Ground vol.1 is a digital compilation of ambient music and field recordings, gathering together a roster of artists who’ve put their sonic imprint firmly on 2021, and who add up to a collective ‘who’s who’ of ambient and experimental contemporary music. The release features exclusive tracks from electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel, Room40 imprint founder Lawrence English, composer and filmmaker Christina Vantzou, Texan ‘bandcamp superstars’ and friends Claire Rousay and more eaze, the prolific and currently ubiquitous Kenyan producer KMRU, ambient and spoken-word artist Wayne Phoenix, Iranian duo Saint Abdullah, Korean-American experimental artist Lucy Liyou, French DJ/producer/trainer Flore as well as Safe Ground’s founder, LB Marszalek fka Juanita. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

​Tour 15 of the Brightest Stars on New Year's Eve

 

The brightest star in the night sky is Sirius, in Canis Major. The open cluster M41 is nearby.

“Tour 15 of the sky’s brightest stars all in one night on this New Year’s Eve! This interactive Worldwide Telescope video will show you the way. Every year around the winter solstice, all 15 of the northern night sky’s brightest stars – those first-magnitude and brighter – are above the horizon and visible sometime between sunset and sunrise. Get the New Year off to a good start by coming along with Scott Levine and the Worldwide Telescope on our interactive video tour! ...”

Sky & Telescope (Video)

Black Print

“Printing arrived in the Americas in 1539, in Mexico City. A hundred years later, the first press, owned by Elizabeth Glover, was established in Cambridge Massachusetts shortly after the first slaves arrived in August 1619, in the then English colony of Virginia. Over the next 200 years print grew rapidly to cater for a burgeoning and increasingly literate population. The birth of African American printing and publishing coincides with a new momentum, a rising tide of anti-slavery and immediatist abolitionist movements weary of ‘indefinite deferral’. Their voices were disseminated and amplified through millions of printed pages of broadsides, pamphlets and books. ...”

ILT

 

Frontispiece and title-page to Phillis Wheatley’s  Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Published in London, 1773. Photo from the British Library

​Photos Of BSA 2021

 

John Fekner for Welling Court Mural Project NYC. Queens, NY 

“An earliest New York street artist – socio/political commentator, John Fekner has battled through many wars and storms in this city over the last four decades. Despite the hardships we’re enduring with Covid and economic near-collapse, we trust Fekner when he reassures us simply in his forthright unadorned stencil style. ...”

Brooklyn Street Art

​The Same Old Song: A Guide to Neonoir

 

Night Moves

”When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously mythic and fatalistic about the American crime fiction tradition: the idea of cautionary tales being told at street level. ... The same anxious malaise inflecting detective stories of Depression-era novelists like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—whose twisty plots doubled as picaresque guided tours through a newfangled urban wilderness—would manifest in the flow of postwar thrillers that either literally adapted their contents or else reconfigured their themes for a visual medium. Stories set in moral grey zones and gritty environments were transformed into cinematic shadow plays by filmmakers who recognized and exploited the material’s expressionist potential. ...”

Criterion

2018 September: Neo-noir

 

Chinatown

Art Ensemble of Chicago - Certain Blacks (1970; 2004)

 

“... The Art Ensemble of Chicago is an avant-garde jazz ensemble that grew out of Chicago's AACM in the late 1960s. The Art Ensemble is notable for its integration of musical styles spanning jazz's entire history and for their multi-instrumentalism, especially the use of what they termed “little instruments” in addition to the traditional jazz lineup; 'little instruments' can include bicycle horns, bells, birthday party noisemakers, wind chimes, and a vast array of percussion instruments (including found objects). The group also uses costumes and face paint in performance. These characteristics combine to make the ensemble's performances as much a visual spectacle as an aural one, with each musician playing from behind a large array of drums, bells, gongs, and other instruments. When playing in Europe in 1969, the group were using more than 500 instruments. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Tracing the Roots: Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Great Black Music, Ancient To The Future (Video/Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Certain Blacks

​Siren (mythology)

 

Odysseus and the Sirens, Roman mosaic, second century AD

“In Greek mythology, the sirens (Ancient Greek: singular: Σειρήν, Seirḗn; plural: Σειρῆνες, Seirênes) were dangerous creatures, who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. It is also said that they can even charm the winds. Roman poets placed them on some small islands called Sirenum scopuli. In some later, rationalized traditions, the literal geography of the ‘flowery’ island of Anthemoessa, or Anthemusa, is fixed: sometimes on Cape Pelorum and at others in the islands known as the Sirenuse, near Paestum, or in Capreae. All such locations were surrounded by cliffs and rocks. ...”

Wikipedia

 

Ulysses and the Sirens (1891) by John William Waterhouse

Various Artists – Cryo Chamber Collaboration – Dagon (2021)

 

“Every year for the last eight, the Cryo Chamber label has worked with a slew of dark ambient artists on an extensive collaboration inspired by the horror works of H.P. Lovecraft. The difference between such a collaboration and a compilation is that this album consists of two very long tracks that were co-authored by all participants, whereas a collaboration is a grouping of individually composed and recorded material. As a result, Dagon offers up a sonically consistent set of drones, melodies, and effects that slowly explore a multi-dimensional musical space. ...”

AMN Reviews (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

Street Views | Kim Beil

 

A bootblack and his customer. Louis Daguerre’s 1838 photograph of Boulevard du Temple, Paris, was the first in history to capture the human form. 

“City streets seemed eerily empty in the early years of photography. During minutes-long exposures, carriage traffic and even ambling pedestrians blurred into nonexistence. The only subjects that remained were those that stood still: buildings, trees, the road itself. In one famous image, a bootblack and his customer appear to be the lone survivors on a Parisian boulevard. When shorter exposure times were finally possible in the late 1850s, a British photographer marveled: ‘Views in distant and picturesque cities will not seem plague-stricken, by the deserted aspect of their streets and squares, but will appear alive with the busy throng of their motley populations.’ ...”

Cabinet Magazine

 

Eadweard Muybridge’s panorama of San Francisco, 1877.

​James White And The Blacks - Off White (1979)

 

"For Off White, James Chance, a veteran of New York's avant-garde no wave scene, recast his seminal band the Contortions as a parody of a soul band, albeit one incorporating the rhythms of disco and funk rather than R&B. Thus, Chance became James White (as a nod to James Brown), the Contortions became the Blacks, and his music, previously a twisted, experimental brand of avant-jazz, became a disco/funk/free jazz hybrid. As bizarre as the fusion of Albert Ayler and Giorgio Moroder might sound, Off White works primarily because Chance commits to both sides of the music. ... By carefully constructing his music with such polar opposites, Chance manages to highlight how both of them have more similarities, especially in rhythm, than would appear at first listen. ...”

allmusic

W - Off White

BOMB: James White a.k.a. James Chance

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: James White and the Blacks-Off White 40:39

2009 December: James Chance, 2011 December: No New York, 2014 July: No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980, 2014 July: Bush Tetras, 2015 January: Buy - James Chance and the Contortions (1979), 2015 October: Pat Place, 2016 January: Lost Chance (1981), 2017 January: Twist Your Soul: The Definitive Collection (2010), 2017 April: Contort Yourself / (Tropical) Heatwave full 12” (1979), 2017 May: Filmed by Libin+Cameron: James White & The Blacks (1980 Live Performance Hurrah NightClub), 2017 August: Live Aux Bains Douches - Paris 1980, 2017 September: Soul Exorcism Redux - James Chance & The Contortions (2007)

An Impressionist artist captures the rural feel of early 1900s Upper Manhattan

 

High Bridge at Night, New York City

“Throughout his life, painter Ernest Lawson lived in many places. Born in Halifax in 1873, Lawson moved to New York at 18 to take classes at the Art Students League. Over the years he studied and worked in Connecticut, Paris, Colorado, Spain, New Mexico, and finally Florida, where his body was found on Miami Beach in 1939—possibly a homicide or suicide. But if there was one location that seemed to intrigue him, it was Upper Manhattan—the bridges and houses, the woods, rugged terrain, and of course, the rivers. From 1898 to about 1908, while fellow Ashcan School artists focused their attention on crowded sidewalks and gritty tenements, Lawson lived in sparsely populated Washington Heights, drawing out the rural beauty and charm of the last part of Manhattan to be subsumed into the cityscape. ...”

Ephemeral New York

 

Ice in the RIver

The 10 Worst Americans of 2021

 

From top left, clockwise: Rupert Murdoch, Sen. Joe Manchin, President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, former President Donald Trump, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.

“At this time of year we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. But we’ve been trying that for millennia, and the results have been unsatisfactory. So let’s discard the accumulated wisdom of all humanity’s spiritual traditions and focus our mental energy instead on how much we dislike various awful people around us. Merry Christmas. ...”

The_Intercept

​Edward Said’s Orientalism and Its Afterlives

 

A painting by Henry Martens portraying the battle of Ferozeshah in the First Anglo-Sikh War, which resulted in defeat and partial subjugation of the Sikh empire to the British.

“Few works have had a greater influence on the current left than Edward Said’s Orientalism. In the first instance, it has become the lodestone for critical scholarship around the colonial experience and imperialism. But more expansively, in its status as a founding text of postcolonial studies, its imprint can be discerned across the moral sciences — in race studies, history, cultural theory, and even political economy. Indeed, it is hard to think of many books that have had a greater influence on critical scholarship over the past half century. There are some respects in which Said’s placement of colonialism at the center of the modern era has had a salutary effect, not just on scholarship, but also on politics. ...”

Jacobin

What does ‘postcolonial’ mean?

2018 April: Orientalism - Edward W. Said (1978), 2019 January: Orientalism’s Equestrian Eye, 2020 April: A Journey into the World of the Ottomans

Space Is the Place - John Coney (1974)

 

“Space Is the Place is an 85-minute Afrofuturist science fiction film made in 1972 and released in 1974. It was directed by John Coney, written by Sun Ra and Joshua Smith, and features Sun Ra and his Arkestra. A soundtrack was released on Evidence Records. ... Sun Ra, who has been reported lost since his European tour in June 1969, lands on a new planet in outer space with his crew, known as ‘the Arkestra’, and decides to settle African Americans on this planet. The medium of transportation he chooses for this resettlement is music. He travels back in time and returns to the Chicago strip club where he used to play piano with the name ‘Sonny Ray’ in 1943, where he confronts the Overseer (Ray Johnson), a pimp-overlord, and they agree on a game of cards for the fate of the Black race. In present time (the early 1970s), Ra disembarks from his spaceship in Oakland and tries to spread word of his plans. ...”

Wikipedia, Criterion

Bandcamp - Space is the Place: Music for the Film (Audio)

YouTube: Sun Ra- Space is the Place (1974) trailer, Space is the Place (1974)

Bump & Hustle Music - Various (2021)

 

“... Collated from the Prestige & Fantasy catalogues, this includes Jazz, Soul, Funk, Latin-Jazz rarities & masterpieces... including the incredible and often overlooked 'All The Way Down' by Etta James...as well as 83 stunning hand picked tracks from label creator Jason Lee Lazell. by legends such as Terry Callier, Latin Jazz Quintet, Walt Dickerson, Roy Haynes, Hampton Hawes, Andy Bey, Gary Bartz, Harold Mabern, Rusty Bryant, Yusef Lateef, Wally Richardson, Freddie Hubbard, Sonny Red and Esther Marrow and Charles Earland... Working as a buyer, in what was the greatest record shop in Europe, Tower Records, No 1 Piccadilly, opened my ears to some of the coolest Souls & Jazz music ever... including lesser known gems that appear on this collection... “

moochin’ about / Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

Snowball Fights in Art (1400–1946)

 

Detail from a fresco depicting the month of January at Buonconsiglio Castle in Trento, Italy, ca. 1400 — Source

“Few seasonal activities are as universal — across time, place, or culture — as the snowball fight. As many of us head into the cold, winter months, hoping for a holiday season with frosted trees or icicles dripping like stalactites from the eaves of homes, we might also long for that slightly slushy grade of powder that makes for perfect packing. Snowmen and angels can be created later. And perhaps there will be sledding: on toboggans (for connoisseurs) or cafeteria trays (for the crafty). Yet nothing signals the year’s first snowfall quite like an apple-sized projectile cutting a parabolic path — through crisp evening air, the haloed light of streetlamps, and exhalations of foggy, illuminated breath — to make direct contact with an unsuspecting hat or coat. ...”

The Public Domain Review

 

Detail from Winterlandschaft, 1586, by the Flemish painter Lucas van Valckenborch (ca. 1535–1597) — Source

Fear and Falsehoods Fill the Premier League’s Vaccination Gap

 

For athletes sensitive about anything they put into their bodies, even the debunked claims can still seem persuasive. 

"The report spread like wildfire. Premier League players shared the link among their peers. Some passed it to their family members and closest confidantes. A handful were sufficiently troubled by what it seemed to suggest that they presented it to their clubs’ in-house medical teams, seeking advice. It had been produced by a website that says it tracks the number of 'young athletes who had major medical issues in 2021 after receiving one or more Covid vaccines.' The report claimed to list 19 'athletes' — mostly in the United States — who it said had experienced heart attacks after being inoculated. Some of the attacks, the site noted ominously, had been fatal. ..."

NY Times

​Pogo's 'Deck Us All With Boston Charlie:' A Walt Kelly Christmas Carol

“Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip stopped publishing in 1975, but the spoof Christmas carol ‘Deck Us All With Boston Charlie’ deserves to live on. Kelly's version of the song, mixes winks towards Shakespeare with malapropisms and just straight up gibberish to make one of the weirdest Christmas tunes of the Groovy era. The song became a tradition in Pogo, with Kelly always working some version of it into the comic strip during the lead-up to Christmas. ‘Deck Us All With Boston Charlie’ has six verses, and has been published in several songbooks featuring music from Pogo. ...”

Groovy History

YouTube: "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie" -  Walt Kelly

Okay Cupid: Reopening Vermeer’s love letter to contradiction

 

Johannes Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, pre-restoration

“In Dresden, a city renowned for the picture-perfect restoration by which it looks the same and yet entirely strange, an old tale of love and deception is playing out. Since Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, c. 1657–59, arrived in the Saxon capital from Paris in 1742, a girl in a green dress has been intently studying a letter by pale daylight against a white wall. As other of the Dutch master’s pictures, and indeed many of those made by his contemporaries, tend to do, the unadorned interior offers no clue as to what she might be thinking. Instead, what long impressed viewers about this particular girl was her apparent modernity. She was free, it seemed, of mythology and religion, exemplifying a unity of form and substance, a kind of pure presence. ...”

ARTFORUM

W - Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window

2009 September: Vermeer's Masterpiece, The Milkmaid, 2011 February: Vermeer: Master of Light, 2013 October: Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, 2015 December: This Is Not a Vermeer ™, 2017 January: The Art of Painting (1665–1668), 2021 December: Museum rivalry ‘could make Dutch Vermeer show last of its kind’

​Charles Mingus’s Secret Eggnog Recipe Will Knock You on Your Ass

 

“As a world-class jazz double bassist, composer and band leader, Charles Mingus is one of the most celebrated figures in American music. He was well-known as a bon vivant and his larger than life physical stature towered over the bandstand and fellow musicians alike. His zeal for parties and drink were just as legendary as his sometimes caustic temperament that led him to occasionally punch fellow musicians and sometimes even lay into patrons. He was the Ron Artest of the jazz world—a brilliant artist that sometimes had trouble at the seams of life. ...”

Voice (December 2012)

Difference and Repetition / A Musical Evocation Of Gilles Deleuze - Palo Alto

 

“This new album (the tenth in their discography) was born from two ambitions: to pay tribute to Soft Machine's Third on form (4 sides / 4 titles) and to philosopher Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition is the title of his thesis) on the contents. ... Literature, and particularly science fiction, is a leitmotiv in the band's work. Antoine Volodine, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Lewis Carroll or J. G. Ballard have been invoked many times. In recent years, Palo Alto has multiplied musical collaborations with, among others, The Residents, Ptôse, Klimperei, Tuxedomoon... From industrial music to inextricable electronic ramifications, by making a detour through improvisation, the musical universe of Palo Alto is multifaceted. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

W - Difference_and_Repetition, W - Gilles_Deleuze

Theory Reader [PDF]

amazon

A Grim, Long-Hidden Truth Emerges in Art: Native American Enslavement Image

 

“On a bitter, windy day, a long-overdue reckoning took place in the commandant’s quarters at Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center, a former military outpost. For most of its history, the museum has celebrated the frontiersman Christopher (Kit) Carson, who briefly commanded this far-flung garrison built during American westward expansion to protect settlers from raids by tribes. But now the museum was telling a far different story in an exhibition titled ’Unsilenced: Indigenous Enslavement in Southern Colorado’ — one of the first dedicated to highlighting details of the little-known and centuries-old system of Indigenous bondage that the historian Andrés Reséndez called ‘the other slavery’ in his landmark 2016 book. ...”

NY Times

Unsilenced: Indigenous Enslavement in Southern Colorado

Run-D.M.C. - Christmas In Hollis (1987)

 

“It was December 24th on Hollis Ave in the dark 

When I see a man chilling with his dog in the park 

I approached very slowly with my heart full of fear 

Looked at his dog, oh my God, an ill reindeer ...”

W - Christmas in Hollis

Genius (Audio)

YouTube: Christmas In Hollis (Official HD Video)

A Memorial in the Stars

 

Ursa Major

“A wise friend recently reminded me that ‘goodbye’ is the price we pay for every ‘hello.’ This painful inevitability feels as old as the stars themselves.Our ancestors told their stories of joy and sorrow in the sky. Great heroes and legends are enshrined in the constellations we recognize today. And while the International Astronomical Union has decreed 88 constellations with set names, there’s no rule that says you can’t create your own star patterns or asterisms for significant and poignant events. It’s something I did to memorialize a significant death. ...”

Sky & Telescope

 

The Big Dipper is a well-known asterism, but any pattern of stars can make up a star pattern.

Marine Eyes - Idyll (2021)

“idyll is the debut record from Los Angeles-based Cynthia Bernard, aka marine eyes. Cynthia is also half of the electronic ambient duo awakened souls. She worked on this album while her children were sleeping or attending virtual school to create this collection of songs that signify the coming of the spring. idyll is a collection of organic materials coming together  – field recordings, synthesizers, guitars, and vocals emulating the sounds of ocean waves, wind through grass, soft rain, dew on budding flowers – intended to create a peaceful, gentle place, much like their namesake hills. ...”

Petal Motel (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

YouTube: Idyll  39:06

Alex Katz: The Brooklyn Rail

 

Yellow House, 2020

“Alex Katz continues his foray into the lyric appreciation of the world outside us. Leaves and trees abound in this show, and are as technically accomplished as ever. The works, begun either in Pennsylvania or Maine during the quarantine, were completed at the artist’s studio on West Broadway. Katz’s sense of color remains highly original and highly effective, as does his understanding of what takes place in the span of a composition. Now in his mid-’90s, the artist shows no sign of slowing down; the paintings are as energetic and as vibrant as ever. ...”

The Brooklyn Rail

Alex Katz: Gladstone Gallery

2008 February: Alex Katz, 2010 December: Life Imitates Art, 2012 June: Alex Katz Prints, 2013 April: On Painting: Alex Katz & Felix Vallotton, May 2016: Alex Katz at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

 

From the Bridge 5, 2021

​Tina Brooks Quintet – The Complete Recordings (Master Takes)

 

“The splendid tenor saxophonist Tina Brooks was one of many ill-fated jazzmen. He made his first recordings with rhythm & blues bands in 1951-52, but his recording career didn't really start until 1958, when he participated on Jimmy Smith's album ‘The Sermon’. ... This release presents all of the quintet studio albums he made under his own name, in chronological order. Due to personal problems, Brooks would stop recording in early 1961 and wouldn't be heard from again prior to his death in 1974, at the age of 42. Included on this set are the complete classic original albums: Minor Move, True Blue, Back to the Tracks, and The Waiting Game. Featured with Tina Brooks are such stars as Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Johnny Coles, Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, Duke Jordan, Paul Chambers, Art Blakey, and Philly Joe Jones, among others. ...”

Jazz Messengers

On the tracks of Tina Brooks

amazon

Discogs (Video)

W - Tina Brooks

​In Which a Direct Line is Drawn From Flaubert’s Unfinished Novel to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

 

“On December 9, 1978, Roland Barthes delivered a lecture in his series about the fantasy of writing a novel. Or rather, he spoke about ‘Wanting-to-Write,’ because he denied he was actually writing one. No, instructed Barthes, it ‘isn’t true; if I were, I clearly wouldn’t be in a position to propose a lecture course on its preparations: writing requires secrecy.’ Secrecy, up to a point. For the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, born 200 years ago this month, the process of writing necessitated complaining about it, loudly. Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, in which he served as a drill sergeant, and the death of his cherished mother in April 1872, perhaps he felt he had much to complain about. ...”

LitHub

2012 August: On Cataloguing Flaubert, 2013 March: Sentimental Education - 1(1869), 2016 December: Three Tales (1877), 2017 August: The Sentimental Education (1869), 2018 May: In Which Our Tragic Effects Remain Purely Professional, 2019 March: The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1911), 2021 November: Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading - Anjali Joseph

Semi-automated offsides: FIFA’s new baby and a bold step in the development of VAR

 

"A show of hands please from those who watched Tunisia hammer Mauritania 5-1 on Tuesday. Really? The opening game of the FIFA Arab Cup passed you by? More fool you. It had plenty going for it, honestly. Some classy finishes from Tunisia, particularly the cheeky backheel from Seifeddine Jaziri to break Mauritania’s resolve for 3-0. No way back from there when you are ranked 103rd in the world, that’s for sure. Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the match, though, was the 17 (seventeen) minutes of stoppage time played at the Ahmed bin Ali Stadium in Qatar. Even more remarkable was that none of it was down to offside VAR checks. ..."

The Athletic

FIFA: Semi-automated offside technology explained ahead of FIFA Arab Cup (Video) 24:21

W - Video assistant referee

The Athletic: Thicker VAR offside lines, new referees and away fans – what’s different for the 2021-22 Premier League season

​August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14

 

“August Wilson has been referred to (by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) as ‘the most celebrated American playwright now writing, and . . . certainly the most accomplished black playwright in this nation’s history.’ Earlier this fall the beneficiary of Mr. Gates’s praise was in Atlanta to oversee the production of one of his plays. He took time off to meet for lunch at the Sheraton Hotel’s Fourteenth Street Bar, arriving in a black turtleneck sweater under a tweed coat. The tables in the bar are set up on a balcony overlooking the yellowgold emporium that is the hotel lobby. ...”

The Paris Review

2017 July: Fences (2016), 2017 August: The Ground on Which I Stand, a Speech on Black Theatre and Performance (1992), 2018 July: Pittsburgh Cycle, 2018 August: August Wilson in St. Paul: A MN Original Special, 2020 May: August Wilson's Blues Poetry, 2020 July: On Lessons From August Wilson’s Jitney, 2020 December: August Wilson, American Bard

Of Thread & Mist ~ Static Hymns to No One (2021)

“... Of Thread & Mist is a fitting phrase for ephemeral, loop-based work.  This is the new moniker of Richard Knox, no stranger to these pages under various guises.  Recorded during the pandemic, Static Hymns to No One is both a reflection of and music for quarantine.  The very title is at war with itself, implying that no one is upstairs and that we’re going to ask for help anyway, because we can’t be sure.  ‘Grace and Truth Perish’ is like the lamentation of Job, seeking an explanation for his suffering (spoiler alert: two entities made a bet); or Ecclesiastes, lamenting the unheard cries of the oppressed.  The choral elements, coupled with the sense of yearning, make it a hymn....”

a closer listen (Audio)

YouTube: Grace and Truth Perish, A Face Full of Drunken Ticks

​Submission – Unofficial Map: NYC Ferries by Evelyn Fischer

 

“Hello! I just thought I’d send you my attempt at making the NYC Ferry network a bit less intimidating to navigate. While many of the issues are with the network itself (the stopping patterns are absolutely bizarre), I’ve always thought the official map made the network far harder to navigate than it should be. So here’s my attempt to fix that! Like Evelyn, I’ve never really been a fan of the official NYC Ferries map: it’s sloppily drawn and can’t decide if it’s a Vignelli-style diagram or a geographic map. ...”

Transit Map

NYC Ferry

​The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (2021), The History of Jazz (2021) – Ted Gioia

 

“A few days ago, the revised and expanded edition of my book The Jazz Standards was published by Oxford University Press. I’ve never had more fun writing a book than in creating this guide to the jazz repertoire—which covers 267 essential songs. These were songs that I first learned in my earliest days as a jazz musician, and they’ve remained familiar friends over the decades. The first edition of The Jazz Standards, published in 2011, earned praise from Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, and other jazz luminaries—a tough audience to please, because they know these songs intimately. ...”

Special Bonus: A Look at the Expanded 2021 Edition of The Jazz Standards

NPR: Re-Revising ‘The History Of Jazz’

Ted Gioia

amazon: The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire, The History of Jazz

Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power

 

President Donald J. Trump seemed to believe that a small group of Republican lawmakers would help him stay in office.

“Two days after Christmas last year, Richard P. Donoghue, a top Justice Department official in the waning days of the Trump administration, saw an unknown number appear on his phone. Mr. Donoghue had spent weeks fielding calls, emails and in-person requests from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, all of whom asked the Justice Department to declare, falsely, that the election was corrupt. The lame-duck president had surrounded himself with a crew of unscrupulous lawyers, conspiracy theorists, even the chief executive of MyPillow — and they were stoking his election lies. Mr. Trump had been handing out Mr. Donoghue’s cellphone number so that people could pass on rumors of election fraud. Who could be calling him now? ...”

NY Times

​A Century in Stanislaw Lem’s Cosmos

 

Polish covers for Lem’s books, from left: “Insomnia,” The Invasion from Aldebaran” and “Solaris.”

“In ‘The Eighth Voyage,’ a short story by Stanislaw Lem, aliens from across the universe convene at the General Assembly of the United Planets. Lem’s hero, the space traveler Ijon Tichy, watches as an uninformed but overconfident creature steps forward and makes the case to admit Earth to the organization’s ranks. ... His sentimental appeal is well-received, until a second extraterrestrial stands up and begins to list humanity’s wrongdoings, which include meat-eating, war and genocide. Tichy listens as the aliens belittle us and label us misguided and corrupt, our planet a blip on their intergalactic radar. ...”

NY Times

W - Ijon Tichy

amazon: Stanislaw Lem

2011 June: Stanisław Lem, 2017 March: Pilot Pirx (1979-1982), 2017 April: The Star Diaries (1971), 2018 February: His Master's Voice (1968)