​Why Getty Keeps Some Photographs in the Fridge

 

Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2, 1986, David Hockney.

“Photography has undergone a dramatic evolution over the last 200 years. What was once a laborious process requiring metal plates and special chemicals is now just a button you push on a smartphone. Getty’s vast collection of photographs spans the entirety of that history. So, we invited our social media followers to ask the curators in the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs—Paul Martineau, Carolyn Peter, and Karen Hellman—their burning questions about Getty’s vast collection of photographs. Have more questions about art? Join us on Facebook or Instagram to catch the next Q&A with Getty’s curators. ...”

Getty

​Lee Scratch Perry & The Upsetters - Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle

 

“Black Board Jungle, often called Blackboard Jungle Dub, is a studio album by The Upsetters. The album, originally released in 1973 under artist name ‘Upsetters 14 Dub’, was pressed in only 300 copies and issued only in Jamaica. According to Pauline Morrison, this was the first ever dub album that came out, although there is a lot of speculation on the subject. Nevertheless, this was the first stereo dub album, as well as the first to include reverb. Later pressings released as Blackboard Jungle Dub have a different track listing. The album was re-issued as a 3x 10" colored vinyl box set as part of Record Store Day in April, 2012. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Lee Scratch Perry & The Upsetters - Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle 1:00:58

Flashback: Good Humor delighted generations with its curbside delivery of ice cream bars — and not even the mob could stop it

 

Al Cooney loads ice cream into his Good Humor truck at the start of the season at the Good Humor offices at 4825 W. Arthington St. on April 1, 1965, in Chicago.

“For Chicagoans of a certain age, the sound of bells on a hot summer evening is a hallowed childhood memory. It called a timeout to schoolyard softball games. Ball players would scramble to line up at one of the Good Humor trucks or three-wheelers, 150 in all, that roamed city and suburban streets in the 1960s. Their ting-a-ling-a-ling may have woken up older folks dozing on front porches, but their arrival solved a dilemma for kids with a few coins to spend on a treat. ...”

Chicago Tribune (Audio)

W - Good Humor

YouTube: Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks - Life in America

 

A group of boys crowds around a Good Humor ice cream truck in the 1940s.

2021 Tour de France

 

“The 2021 Tour de France is the 108th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's three grand tours. Originally planned for the Danish capital of Copenhagen, the start of the 2021 Tour (known as the Grand Départ) was transferred to Brest due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Copenhagen hosting four matches in the UEFA Euro 2020 and that event also being rescheduled to 2021 due to the pandemic. Originally scheduled for 2 to 25 July 2021, the Tour was moved to 26 June to 18 July 2021 to avoid the rescheduled 2020 Summer Olympics. ... In the lead up to the 2021 Tour de France, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Primož Roglič (Team Jumbo–Visma) were seen by many pundits as the top pre-race favourites for the general classification. Their closest rivals were considered to be Ineos Grenadiers trio Geraint Thomas, Richard Carapaz and Richie Porte. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: A Spectator’s Sign Felled Dozens of Tour de France Racers (Video)

Guardian (Video), steephill (Video), Le Tour (Video)

W - List of teams and cyclists in the 2021 Tour de France

2008 July: Tour de France 2008, 2009 July: Tour de France 2009, 2010 July: Tour de France 2010,  2011 July: Tour de France 2011, 2012 July: 2012 Tour de France, 2015 July: 2015 Tour de France, 2015 July: Tour de France 2015: Team Time Trial Win Bolsters American’s Shot at Podium, 2015 July: Tour de France: Chris Froome completes historic British win, 2016 July: 2016 Tour de France, 2017 July: 2017 Tour de France, 2018 May: 2018 Giro d'Italia, 2019 July: 2018 Tour de France, 2019 July: Tour de France 2019

JUNO-60

 

“The Roland Juno-60 is a programmable 6-voice polyphonic analog synthesizer manufactured by Roland Corporation from 1982 to 1984. It followed the Juno-6, an almost identical synthesizer received months earlier. The synthesizers introduced Roland's digitally controlled oscillators, allowing for greatly improved tuning stability. It was widely used in 1980s pop, house, and 1990s techno music. The late 1970s and 1980s saw the introduction of the first digital synthesizers, such as the Fairlight CMI and Synclavier. Roland president Ikutaro Kakehashi recognized that the synthesizer market was moving away from analog synthesis, but Roland had no commercially viable digital technology. ...”

Wikipedia

Juno-60: The Whole Story (Video)

One summer night on a New York tenement roof

 

“Saul Kovner was a Russia-born artist who came to New York City in the 1920s. After attending the National Academy of Design and setting up a studio on Central Park West, he worked for the WPA in the 1930s and 1940s. Kovner captured gentle yet honest scenes in all seasons of urban life, particularly of working class and poor New Yorkers. In 1946, he completed ‘One Summer Night,’ a richly detailed depiction of tenement dwellers seeking refuge from the heat in a pre- air conditioned city. ... Here’s how John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and some wonderful unidentified illustrators captured the ‘fiery furnace’ of a New York heat wave. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Cinema of Cuba

 

Cine Praga in Pinar del Rio, Cuba

“Cinema arrived in Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century. Before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, about 80 full-length films were produced in Cuba. Most of these films were melodramas. Following the revolution, Cuba entered what is considered the ‘Golden age’ of Cuban cinema. … Before the Cuban Revolution of 1959 the total film production was around 80 full-length movies. Some films are worth mentioning, such as La Virgen de la Caridad starring Miguel Santos and Romance del Palmar by Ramón Peón. ...”

Wikipedia

WALKER: How Are Revolutionary Cuban Films Still Revolutionary Today?

Guardian: The reality behind the revolution

Art, revolution and the ‘Golden Age of the Cuban Poster’

Guardian: The island of cinemas: Cuba's faded movie theatres – in pictures

amazon: The Cinema of Cuba: Contemporary Film and the Legacy of Revolution, Cines de Cuba

The Case for a 32-Team Euros

 

Portugal found a way through to the round of 16.

“Thomas Vermaelen’s header hit the ground first and then rose before colliding with the post near the corner where it meets the crossbar. As the ball spun out, sideways toward the middle of the goal, Lukas Hradecky, the Finland goalkeeper, was still turning around. It was all happening in the blink of an eye. Instinctively, Hradecky reached out a hand to try to swat the ball away. In that instant, on his fingertips, a substantial portion of Euro 2020 hung. Had Hradecky been able to claw the ball away from his goal, away from danger, Finland might have been able to hang on, to keep a vaguely interested Belgium at bay, to qualify for the knockout stages of the first major tournament it has ever reached. Denmark, playing simultaneously in Copenhagen, might have been sent home. …”

NY Times

Radio Territories

 

“Radio Territories is an ambitious collection of essays, writings, and audio files—probing histories, cultures, geographies, economies, communities, logics, ontologies, technologies, aesthetics, and politics—that examines  the performative potential of radio to create, erase, dislodge, and remake spaces. Yet its ambition is steadfastly grounded: each contributor is firmly located in concrete practices, i.e., sonic territories. The contributors are a mix of sound artists, journalists, theorists, and teachers. The contributions range from multimodal essays to performance scripts to radio/sound artists examining implications of their practices to historical examinations of key moments of radio culture. Through all of this seemingly discordant work, the theme of radio art as public praxis emerges as a zero-point of orientation, highlighting both performance and place, and delivering on the promise of the title. ...”

Liminalities (Audio)

Continuo

[PDF] Radio Territories

Discogs

​The Port of Missing Women

“For some time, I’ve imagined writing a novel titled The Port of Missing Women, a term I came across while doing research for my biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace. It refers to the many young women in Los Angeles who were suddenly going missing—and often turning up murdered in grisly ways. Coincidentally or not, many of these murders occurred in the years right after World War II, when a large number of servicemen were returning from overseas through the port of Los Angeles and finding, no doubt, that in many cases the women they had left behind were not the same as those they encountered when they returned. The war years had given women new freedoms in the way they acted and dressed and socialized, in part through jobs outside the home in the defense industry and other sectors of the labor force. ...”

Alta

2009 September: The Maltese Falcon, 2013 July: Raymond Chandler, 2014 November: Finding Marlowe, 2019 August: Raymond Chandler: The Art of Beginning a Crime Story

​50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’

 

"Just before embarking on the pivotal intercontinental voyage that would inspire much of her peerless 1971 album, 'Blue' — released 50 years ago this week — Joni Mitchell considered her grandmothers. One 'was a frustrated poet and musician, she kicked the kitchen door off of the hinges on the farm,' Mitchell recalled in a 2003 documentary. The other 'wept for the last time in her life at 14 behind some barn because she wanted a piano and said, Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you’ll never have a piano. And I thought maybe I am the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women.' If she stayed put, she might end up kicking the door off the hinges, too. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

Open Culture: Hear Demos & Outtakes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniversary of the Classic Album (Video)

W - Blue

Discogs (Video)

vimeo: Blue (1971) 38:07

2015 July: Blue (1970), 2015 Novemer: 40 Years On: Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Revisited, 2016 August: On For the Roses (1972), 2016 November: Court and Spark (1974), 2017 February: Hejira (1976), 2017 August: Miles of Aisles (1974), 2017 October: Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius, 2018 March: Joni Mitchell: We look back over her extraordinary 50 year career, 2018 November: Free Man In Paris (1974), 2019 April: Mingus (1979), 2019 July: The Guide to Getting Into Joni Mitchell, the Blueprint for Human Experience

Strawberry Moon - Nina MacLaughlin

 

Watercolor illustration from Aurora consurgens, a fifteenth-century alchemical text.

“Summer now, and the petals are wet in the morning. The moon was born four and a half billion years ago. It’s been goddess, god, sister, bridge, vessel, mother, lover, other. ‘Civilisations still fight / Over your gender,’ writes Priya Sarukkai Chabria. Dew is one of its daughters—or so the Spartan lyric poet Alcman had it in the mid-seventh-century B.C.: ‘Dew, a child of moon and air / causes the deergrass to grow.’ Cyrano de Bergerac, twenty-three hundred years later, imagined a dew-fueled way of getting to the moon. ‘I planted myself in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast above me,’ he writes in his satirical A Voyage to the Moon, published in 1657. If dew rises to the sky, evaporating into the atmosphere, he reasons, enough ought to take him, too. ...”

The Paris Review

​The Most Detailed Map of New York City Mayoral Primary Results

 

“New York City voters cast their ballots for mayor on Tuesday, and it became clear that the competitive Democratic race would be decided by the city’s new ranked-choice system. It is likely to be weeks before a winner is known. The map below shows the latest unofficial results for the first round of votes, which do not include absentee ballots. ...”

NY Times

NY Times - N.Y.C. Mayoral Race: Ranked-Choice Could Give Wiley and Garcia a Win, But It Is an Uphill Battle (Video)

​Ethiopian Soul And Groove - Ethiopian Urban Modern Music Vol. 1

 

“... Urban Ethiopian music stands out within the African continent thanks to its creativity and originality. Whatever the shade — pop, blues, jazz or soul — it comes from a fusion of local musical traditions mixed with an echo of Western music. It bewitched Ethiopia during the ‘Swinging Addis’ decade before recently winning the favors of a well-informed audience all over the world. This first vinyl volume of Ethiopian Urban Modern Music presents some of the Ethiopian ‘groove jewels’ drawn from the essential series. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

ITINERARIES OF MODERN ETHIOPIAN INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

Discogs (Video)

​Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986

 “Anticipating the completion of David Hammons’s Day’s End, a major public artwork located in Hudson River Park, the Whitney will present a selection of works from the Museum’s collection that explore downtown New York as site, history, and memory. Central to this presentation is Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End, the innovative project that inspired Hammons’s sculpture. In 1975, Matta-Clark cut several massive openings into the dilapidated building that existed on Pier 52 where Gansevoort Street meets the Hudson River. He described it as a ‘temple to sun and water.’ ...”

Whitney (Video)

2011 October: Gordon Matta-Clark, 2018 January: Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier, 2019 October: The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop, 2019 October: How Gordon Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to 70s New York

Environmental Industrial Music - Italian Marco Mascia

 

“Industrial music is generally all klang, and it is truly industrial more by association than by audio hallmarks. The sounds are sourced from what might very well be an active factory floor, but the dance floor is where they are intended to reside, and where they are most at home. Another kind of industrial music is more akin to environmental industrial music: the sound of an inactive factory floor, when the motors are humming but activity is on pause. Such is ‘Grave doubts – Decisioni difficili’ by the Italian musician Marco Mascia, who lives in Cagliari. ...”

disquiet (Audio)

Soundcloud (Audio)

Leave This Wondrous Island to the Birds

 

Whimbrel returning to Deveaux Bank for their night roost.

“About 20 miles south of Charleston, S.C., at the mouth of the North Edisto River, a small, horseshoe-shaped sandbar rises above the water. The claim of land is tenuous on Deveaux Bank, about a half-mile offshore. At high tide, it’s three-quarters submerged. Deveaux’s sand is continually shifting as swirling currents build it up and wash it away. In some years, the island disappears altogether. This ephemeral spit of sand, about 250 acres, is a gathering place for tens of thousands of birds. It has been home to the largest population of brown pelicans on the East Coast and to large populations of terns. There are skimmers, gulls, oystercatchers, red knots and more. Of the 57 coastal water bird species that South Carolina has identified as of ‘greatest conservation need,’ virtually all are found on Deveaux. ...”  

NY Times

W - Deveaux Bank, South Carolina 

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, 2020 August: How to Use Binoculars - Jason Ward, 2020 October: Get the Birds To Come To You, 2020 June: BirdNET, 2021 April: Birds by the Billions: A Guide to Spring’s Avian Parade

Supreme Court Backs Payments to Student-Athletes in N.C.A.A. Case

 

“The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that the N.C.A.A. could not bar relatively modest payments to student-athletes, a decision that underscored the growing challenges to a college sports system that generates huge sums for schools but provides little or no compensation to the players.The decision concerned only payments and other benefits related to education. But its logic suggested that the court may be open to a head-on challenge to the ban by the National Collegiate Athletic Association on paying athletes for their participation in sports that bring billions of dollars in revenue to American colleges and universities.In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh seemed to invite such a challenge. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Ruling Dings N.C.A.A., but It Keeps Rule-Making Power

NY Times: How Blowing Up College Sports Became a Rallying Cry for Some in Washington (March 30, 2021)

​Mystical Discipline: Anthony Braxton Interviewed

 

“The lazy cliche about Anthony Braxton is that he's a joyless intellectual, approaching music like a chess master when he should be kicking out the jams. The composer and saxophonist, who recently turned 76, has been combatting such reductive thinking for much of his career. ... There's no doubting the seriousness with which Braxton approaches his art – this is a major composer, who with his Tri-Axium writings, has developed a musico-philosophical system of cosmic complexity – but the sense of adventure and fun he brings to these enterprises is undeniable. Braxton describes himself as "a professional student of music" and his enthusiasm for new ideas and possibilities is inspiring. Never one to follow prescribed notions about music, Braxton has embraced everything from John Coltrane to Arnold Schoenberg, Charlie Parker to Karlheinz Stockhausen, Diana Ross to Wolf Eyes. ...”

The Quietus (Video/Audio)

2020 February: Anthony Braxton: Ghost Trance Music

​An eccentric loner paints New York at dusk and in moonlight

 

New York Street at Dusk

“Louis Michel Eilshemius had the right background to become an establishment painter. Born to a wealthy family in New Jersey in 1864, he was educated in Europe and then Cornell University. After persuading his father to let him enroll in the Art Students League and pursue painting, he returned to live at his family’s Manhattan brownstone at 118 East 57th Street.His early work earned notoriety and was selected for exhibition at the National Academy of Design in the 1880s. ‘Eilshemius’s early artistic style was rooted in lessons he gleaned from his studies abroad, specifically the landscape aesthetics of the Barbizon School and French impressionism,’ states the National Gallery of Art. ...”

Ephemeral New York

A House of One’s Own - Janet Malcolm

 

“The legend of Bloomsbury—the tale of how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen emerged from a grim, patriarchal Victorian background to become the pivotal figures in a luminous group of advanced and free-spirited writers and artists—takes its plot from the myth of modernism. Legend and myth alike trace a movement from darkness to light, turgid ugliness to plain beauty, tired realism to vital abstraction, social backwardness to social progress. Virginia Woolf chronicled her own and her sister’s coming of age in the early years of this century much as Nikolaus Pevsner celebrated the liberating simplifications of modern design in his once influential but now perhaps somewhat outdated classic Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936). ...”

New Yorker

2019 April: Bloomsbury Group, 2020 August:  How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters, 2021 January: Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution

History As End - Matthew Karp

 

"Anti-Slavery Picnic at Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts" by Susan Torrey Merritt, circa 1845.

“Last spring, 155 years after the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital surrendered again. In April 1865, the capitulation was swift and almost outlandishly theatrical: after learning that Robert E. Lee’s army had withdrawn from nearby Petersburg, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and his military guard escaped south under cover of darkness, setting half the city on fire as they fled. Early the next morning, the first Union troops arrived. As Richmond’s black residents celebrated in the streets—joined by more than a few poor whites—the black soldiers at the head of the Union column worked to put out the flames. The embers of a regime dedicated to preserving African slavery were extinguished by hundreds of former slaves. The occupying forces then marched to Davis’s executive mansion and commandeered it as their headquarters. ...”

Harpers

Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp

Jacobin: How the Antislavery Movement Ignited a Political Revolution

amazon: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy

​At Euro 2020, a Reminder That Good Can Be Great

 

Italy: unbeaten, but not unbeatable.

“Let’s start with a little intellectual exercise. A purely hypothetical, entirely subjective, ultimately inconclusive one, admittedly, but still: Now that each of the presumed contenders to win the European Championship has shown at least some of its hand, how competitive would any of them be if they were to be parachuted, as they are, into the Champions League? Instinctively, it feels as if France, at least, would do pretty well. A front line of Antoine Griezmann, Karim Benzema and Kylian Mbappé bears comparison to any attacking trident in the club game. ...”

NY Times

​Pieter Pourbus: An Allegory of True Love, c1547

 

“A rehang at the exquisite Wallace Collection means this eccentric Renaissance work is now displayed near Fragonard’s saucy frolic The Swing. The comparison is instructive. Both are provocative and funny. This painting’s moralising title and the symbolism attributed to it – contrasting, we are told, wise chaste love with carnal sin – have almost nothing to do with the experience of looking at it. Either Renaissance courtiers were incredibly hypocritical, enjoying this scene of an unbuttoned picnic while pretending to tut, or they were in on a game in which the real meat was, and is, a Rabelaisian delight in the sensual.“

Wallace Collection

Wikipedia

​Terry Riley / Don Cherry ‎– Köln – February 23, 1975

“Another incredible treasure from the vaults of Cologne radio, recorded in February 22/23rd, 1975. Unreleased sessions, carefully remastered, in this duo improvisation Riley's organ intersections just define the geometry of the hyper-dimensional space where Don Cherry's outwordly trumpet lives. Mantric and evocative, we could go on and on listening to the very same track all day long, it could last forever... In 1975, pioneering minimalist composer Terry Riley and jazz trumpet cosmonaut Don Cherry joined forces for a magnetic performance in Köln, Germany. But they also recorded these incredible radio sessions: Riley’s swirling synth, droning and clairvoyant and prescient in its clarity, parades along with a triumphant Cherry, leaving behind trails of mystery and a sense of beauty in a larger, more universal form. ...”

Sound Ohm

YouTube: Terry Riley & Don Cherry – Köln, Germany, February 1975 (Live Recording) 1:05:53

December 2007: Terry Riley, March 2010: In C, December 2010: Terry Riley & Gyan Riley, April 2011: Terry Riley - Shri Camel: Morning Corona, Terry Riley rare footage, live in the 70s, 2014 March: Kronos Quartet Plays Terry Riley: Salome Dances for Peace (1989), 2014 June: Solo piano works, Moscow Conservatory. April 18th, 2000, A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), 2017 August: “A Particular Glow” – On Loving Terry Riley, 2017 September: Terry Riley On Tape Loops,  2019 March: Assassin Reverie (2005)

​The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962

 

“Who in February 1963 could have predicted, when a 30-year-old American poet named Sylvia Plath committed suicide in London, distraught over the breakup of her marriage to the Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes, that Plath would quickly emerge as one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English; and this in a golden era of poetry distinguished by such figures as Theodore Roethke, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, May Swenson, Adrienne Rich, as well as W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot? ...”

NY Times: Raising Lady Lazarus by Joyce Carol Oates (Audio Sylvia Plath Reads)

Reviving the Journals of Sylvia Plath

New Yorker: The Silent Woman By Janet Malcolm

The Creative Tension Between Vitality and Fatality: Illuminating the Mystery of Sylvia Plath Through Her Striking Never-Before-Revealed Visual Art

[PDF] The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

amazon

 

Collage (Includes images of Eisenhower, Nixon, bomber, etc.) by Sylvia Plath, 1960

2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956, 2019 January: Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story

Wake Up the City

 

A scene from the Toxteth Riots in Liverpool, England, July 8, 1981.

“During racial and social turmoil in England—an unrest that exploded in the ’81 riots—a burgeoning music scene began bubbling over, displacing the white scene of Northern soul with a Black British movement of jazz-funk and creating in the process tiny islands within the Isles where racial unity and Black empowerment could thrive. DJ and music historian Greg Wilson details this layered story that begins as specialists took to fresh U.S. imports like Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, ultimately leading to homegrown U.K. acts like Light of the World and Incognito creating their own spin on the sound. The scene made an impact far afield of London Town, stretching to all corners of the U.K., with its influence lasting well into the late-’80s and early ’90s with the birth of acid jazz and the rebirth of Incognito. With the recent release of Gilles Peterson and Jean-Paul ‘Bluey’ Maunick’s masterstroke, STR4TA’s Aspects, coupled with the importance of social justice concerns in the new decade, the time is now to document this misunderstood and crucial era of England’s homegrown music history. ...”

WaxPoetics (Video)

 

In the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton Riots, residents walk past a burnt-out pub after the second night of unrest, April 13, 1981.

​Bringing Antonio Gramsci Back to Turin

 

Angelo D'Orsi, a well-known biographer of Antonio Gramsci, is running for mayor in Turin.

“Turin is one of the historic fortresses of Italian labor. The industrial city on the edge of the Alps was the center of totemic struggles like the factory occupations of 1919–20, the workers’ first strikes against Fascism in 1943 and the new wave of shopfloor militancy in the 1960s. The city is also deeply connected to the history of the Left: it was the birthplace of Antonio Gramsci’s l’Ordine Nuovo newspaper and was a red heartland throughout postwar history, with a Communist-controlled city hall through much of the 1970s and ’80s. ...”

Jacobin

2013 July: Gramsci Monument, 2018 January: The Fate of the Party, 2020 December: Gramsci in the postcolony

Color field

 

W - Mark Rothko, Untitled Canvas (1964)

"Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. ... Mark Rothko was one of the painters that Greenberg referred to as a Color Field painter exemplified by Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any label. ...”

Wikipedia

Tate: Colour field painting

Artsy: Color Field Painting

YouTube: Color Field Exhibit, Color Fields at Deutsche Guggenheim

 

W -Helen Frankenthaler, (Bach’s) Sacred Theater (1973)

Jungle Fever - Spike Lee (1991)

 

“Jungle Fever is a 1991 American romantic drama film written, produced and directed by Spike Lee. The film stars Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra, Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Samuel L. Jackson, Lonette McKee, John Turturro, Frank Vincent, Halle Berry (in her film debut), Tim Robbins, and Anthony Quinn, and is Lee's fifth feature-length film. Jungle Fever explores the beginning and end of an extramarital interracial relationship against the urban backdrop of the streets of New York City in the early 1990s. The film received positive reviews, with particular praise for Samuel L. Jackson's performance. ...”

Wikipedia

amazon

YouTube: Jungle Fever Official Trailer #1

2009 January: Spike Lee, 2014 June: Do the Right Thing (1989), 2016 June: Clockers (1995), 2018 December: BlacKkKlansman (2018), May 2020: Spike Lee and the Battlefield of American History

New York, New Music 1980–1986

 

John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards in 1979. Footage of the band is included in a new exhibition tracking the New York music scene from the era.

“During the early 1980s, New York experienced a community-driven musical renaissance. The result was an era of creativity and genre-defying performance that stands as one of the most influential in musical and cultural history. A wide range of music, from punk to pop to hip-hop to salsa to jazz, mixed in a dynamic arts scene that stretched across clubs and bars, theaters, parks, and art spaces. Together, they provided fertile ground for a musical revolution—one that continues to influence pop culture to this day. Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of MTV, New York, New Music: 1980–1986 will highlight diverse musical artists—from Run DMC to the Talking Heads, from Madonna to John Zorn—as a lens to explore the broader music and cultural scene, including the innovative media outlets, venues, record labels, fashion and visual arts centered in New York City in these years. ...”

Museum of the City of New York

NY Times: In the ’80s, Post-Punk Filled New York Clubs. Their Videos Captured It.

​Plan Ahead for the 2023 Annular Solar Eclipse — and a Visit to Dark Sky Parks

 

“This week Canada, Greenland, and Russia viewed a brief ‘ring of fire’ annular solar eclipse, which brought a crescent Sun to the northeast U.S. Occurring at sunrise in North America, the partial solar eclipse was low on the horizon and therefore difficult to see; meanwhile cross-border eclipse-chasing proved all but impossible. Fortunately, we’ll have another shot soon enough.So when is the next such eclipse? On October 14, 2023, an annular solar eclipse will again be visible from the U.S., this time from a roughly 125-mile-wide path of annularity that passes through Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas before it crosses Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil. Everyone in the Americas will see a partial solar eclipse that will last more than 2.5 hours. Remember: Eclipse glasses and solar filters will have to be used everywhere, and throughout the spectacle. ...”

Sky & Telescope

whenisthenexteclipse

W - Solar eclipse of October 14, 2023

October 14, 2023 — Great American Eclipse (Annular Solar Eclipse) (Video)

 

Total Solar Eclipse of April 8, 2024

Chicago '82: A Dip in the Lake (1982)

 

 

“Scattershot performances from the 1982 New Music Festival in Chicago, 1982.  This tape was done as a tribute to John Cage's 70th birthday.  Features cool folks like Glenn Branca ensemble (feat. Thurston Moore & Lee Ranaldo), Charlemagne Palestine, Harold Budd, Meredith Monk, and a long conversation between John Cage and Wim Mertens.  Most, if not all, of this stuff is live, but the liner notes aren't entirely clear. ...”

Rate Your Music

UbuWeb: Chicago 82 (Audio)

A Dip in the Lake—Ten Quick Steps, Sixty-one Waltzes and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity, Peter Gena, 1982

Discogs (Video)

Glenn Branca -  Navy Pier, Chicago (1982)