‘Fite Dem Back’: How Linton Kwesi Johnson used poetry as a “cultural weapon”


"For as long as the written word has existed, poetry and prose have been used by various writers to challenge authority and injustice. Racism and prejudice permeated virtually every aspect of society during the 1970s in Britain, reflecting a rise in far-right hate groups and political parties around the same time. Hence, it was only a matter of time before a generation of radical new writers and musicians emerged to challenge these prejudices, with poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson pioneering styles of anti-fascist poetry. Having relocated from his birthplace in Jamaica to Brixton as a young man in the 1960s, Johnson was able to witness the horrors of fascism and widespread racist attitudes in the UK firsthand. The nostalgic image of 1960s London suggests that the entire city was some kind of utopia, populated by modernists, Mini Coopers and exciting new art movements. ..."


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An Ode to Luby's and the Southern Cafeteria

"Luby’s Cafeteria holds a special place in the hearts of Texans, including my own. When I was a child in the 1990s, the cafeteria option was always open when my Chinese American family  went out to eat. Everybody could choose what they wanted. Prices were reasonable. Wheeled high chairs enabled parents to roll their babies along the serving line. Cafeterias – where workers put food on customers’ plates for them – took off  in the United States soon after Henry Ford invented the assembly line. The two are kin, but instead of a car rolling past stationary workers, the diners slide their trays down the line to receive a slice of prime rib, chicken fried steak or even trout almondine. A diner can watch as somebody on the other side scoops up green beans or squash casserole at one station and another tongs cornbread muffins or yeast rolls onto your plate. It’s an assembly line at its finest, a monument to the idea of early-20th-century progress. The cafeteria made dining more efficient while maintaining the quality and variety of foods that paying customers expected. ..."

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How is Uefa trying to make Euro 2024 more sustainable?


“‘The most sustainable European Championship of all time.’ It is a big statement, but that is Uefa’s aim for this summer’s tournament in Germany. To be the ‘most sustainable’ is, of course, difficult to quantify, with many factors involved. It is also hard to make comparisons because of the historical growth of the tournament. But, however Uefa defines it, European football’s governing body and German football are making big strides to reduce the impact of Euro 2024. What is being done? Sustainability has been an integral part of Euro 2024 since the 2018 bidding process, with its strategy focusing on environmental, social and governance pillars. …”

BBC
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How Q Became Everything


"You can track QAnon’s arc, like most things in America, through its relationship with corporate brands. Although the conspiracy movement emerged out of fringe imageboards in 2017, its first viral successes came on Facebook and YouTube, where its lore envisioning Donald Trump fighting an elite cabal of liberal pedophiles was honed and refined. When Covid came in 2020, QAnon ballooned under lockdowns, putting it in the mainstream, but leaving it short of actually being mainstream. Call it the Wayfair era. In July 2020, followers of QAnon began spreading a particular pedophilic panic: the absurd notion that the online furniture retailer was selling children for sexual abuse via armoire orders. Non-Q masses took the bait: 'Mentions of Wayfair and trafficking have exploded on Facebook and Instagram over the past week,' the Associated Press wrote at the time, noting that related TikTok hashtags 'together amassed nearly 4.5 million views.' A national human trafficking hotline issued a press release warning that a flood of calls about the conspiracy had distracted them from genuine work. ..."



A QAnon conspiracy theory button sits affixed to the purse of an attendee of the Nebraska Election Integrity Forum on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2022, in Omaha, Neb. Former President Donald Trump is increasingly embracing and endorsing the QAnon conspiracy theory, even as the number of frightening real-world incidents linked to the movement increase. On Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022, using his Truth Social platform, Trump reposted an image of himself — wearing a Q lapel pin — overlaid with the words “The Storm is Coming."
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Supreme Court Upholds Access to Abortion Pill

The decision will most likely fuel efforts to restrict access to abortion pills in other ways.

"The Supreme Court on Thursday maintained access to a widely available abortion pill, rejecting a bid from a group of anti-abortion organizations and doctors to unravel the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pill. In a unanimous decision, written by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the F.D.A.’s actions. Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the groups could instead seek greater regulatory or legislative restrictions on the drug, mifepristone, and noted that doctors who oppose abortion are shielded by so-called conscience protections in federal law, which mean they are not required to provide treatment that would 'violate the doctors’ religious beliefs or moral convictions.' ..."




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Glacis ~ Perseverance (2024)


"In December 2015 I moved with my family to the Scottish Borders. Having lived my entire life in cities this was my first time living in the countryside. It was remote, living in a cottage on a farm up a single track road. Out the front window was an old farmhouse, looking down on these quaint workers' cottages. Out the back window were endless fields along with the sound of silence. And yet the countryside is never silent. We simply cannot hear the incredible noise made by animals and plants that exist all around us. One of the first things I did when we moved to the Borders was source and purchase an upright piano. I’d not had access to one since I lived at my parents house in Dundee. Overstrung. The only choice. It took time to source one and to ensure that it was capable of being tuned. It was a beautiful creature too. Simple on the outside but when the front was removed the inner detailing was like a snakeskin - something that my piano tuner commented he had never seen before. ..."

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Madge Gill: The artist whose brush was guided by a ghost


"Any decent artist will be all too aware that inspiration can strike at the most unexpected moments. Throughout history, artists have drawn inspiration from countless unexpected avenues, from the childhood hallucinations of Yayoi Kusama to L.S. Lowry’s penchant for factory towers and smog. Even the mysterious supernatural plane has acted as inspiration for the world of painting, but none more so than Madge Gill, the celebrated outsider artist who was helped along by the spirit world. The realm of outsider art is as broad and varied as the artistic medium itself. Generally, the term can be applied to any artist who was not classically trained in the art world, meaning that a lot of outsider art is made by self-taught visionaries willing to push the boundaries of what can be considered profound art. Madge Gill’s work is particularly beloved within the realm of outsider art, managing to capture a complex range of emotions and themes through various different mediums. ..."

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Read Your Way Through New Orleans


"New Orleans is a tourist destination frequented as much for its local dishes (gumbo, jambalaya, among others) as for the spectacle that is Mardi Gras — where you may run into drunk college students on spring break, but could also bump into the Grammy Award-winning artist Jon Batiste. By some counts, it’s one of the most festive cities in America, with a party or two happening almost every week. Behind all the festivities, though, is a rich and dark history. The city is an eclectic mix of Caribbean, French, Spanish and Native American cultures, and, depending on which neighborhood you encounter, you may feel a sense of disorientation. ... The literature of New Orleans is an important supplement to your experience of the city. These books are both a compass to guide you through its many different influences and a celebration of the free spirit that has made the city a haven for itinerant artists, writers and travelers in search of a new perspective. ..."

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Crosshatching the City: ‘Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies’ Overheard the Voices of New York


"In 1974, illustrator and cartoonist Stan Mack found himself asking the graphic arts virtuoso Milton Glaser, who had just taken over as design director of the Village Voice, if he could do a piece in which he would essentially 'wander the city, listening to people and sketching them.' Glaser upped the ante, telling Mack to 'do it as a weekly comic strip. They’re circulation builders: people turn to them first before going on to the serious stuff.' Mack rose to the challenge, and for more than 30 years he took pencils, pens, and sketchbooks to bars, restaurants, art galleries, movie queues, sex clubs, parks, and anywhere else New York’s denizens gathered. Now, 50 years later, hundreds of Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies have been transmuted from yellowed newsprint into big glossy pages between hardcovers. ..."




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Teddy's Bar & Grill


"The most distinctive feature of Teddy’s Bar at 96 Berry Street is the projecting wood and sheet-copper corner storefront with a beautiful decorative-glass transom reading 'Peter Doelger’s Extra Beer'. Portions of the storefront were rebuilt after a car crashed into it about 10 years ago, but most of it – and all of the decorative glass - dates to at least 1907. That stained-glass transom is the source of much of the mythology that surrounds 96 Berry, tying it to a 19th-century beer baron and a 20th-century Hollywood icon. The odds that either ever set eyes on the building are practically nil. What actually happened at 96 Berry Street is far less glamorous than movie stars and beer barons, but it tells the story of Williamsburg and Brooklyn in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century, one of shifting populations and changing capitalist landscapes. And at the very least, this story is true. ..."




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Cut UP. Deconstructing W. S. Burroughs - Various Artists


"... Between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the literary and stylistic technique of William S. Burroughs (Saint Louis 1917-Lawrence 1997) influenced an entire generation that was, in those years, in direct collision with the social system. A somewhat controversial and brilliant figure, a man on the fringes of civilization. From his mind emerged the creative writing technique that burst onto the scene under the name of Cut-Up. This procedure was previously introduced by the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, involving cutting words from an existing text to generate a new meaning by mixing the various words in a different order. Burroughs took this technique to the extreme, making it very popular and influencing every artistic realm, particularly the field of rock and experimental music. The list of his disciples in the musical domain is extensive, including names like David Bowie, Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Bob Dylan, and Throbbing Gristle, to name just a few. It is from this devotion to the technique and the persona of this legendary writer that the homage by the Unexplained Sounds Group and the musicians involved in the project is born, paying tribute to the great American writer. ..."

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Tintin inspired away kit homage to cartoonist Hergé


"... adidas and the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) proudly present the new home and away kits for Belgium’s national teams. The new home kit features a luxurious dark shade of red, stand-out gold details and a fashion inspired graphic pattern that has been embossed in the jersey. The away kit is a homage to Belgian cartoonist Hergé and the comic character he is most known for: Tintin. Fitting the outfit Tintin was most featured in, the away kit for the Belgian Red Devils features a blue jersey with characteristic white collar, brown shorts, and white socks. The home and away jersey share a fashion inspired graphic pattern that has been embossed in the jersey, giving it a luxurious look, and making the jerseys’ appearance slightly different as light hits it. ..."

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Patti Smith Reads Her Final Letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, Calling Him “the Most Beautiful Work of All”


"If you go to hear Patti Smith in concert, you expect her to sing 'Beneath the Southern Cross,' 'Because the Night,' and almost certainly 'People Have the Power,' the hit single from Dream of Life. Like her 1975 debut Horses, that album had a cover photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, whom Smith describes as 'the artist of my life' in Just Kids, her memoir of their long and complex relationship. A highly personal work, that book also includes the text of the brief but powerful goodbye letter she wrote to Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989. If you go to hear Smith read a letter aloud, there’s a decent chance it’ll be that one. ..."

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During Impassioned Defense of Trump, Congressman’s 6-Year-Old Steals the Spotlight


"Fresh back from a weeklong recess, Representative John W. Rose, Republican of Tennessee, was fired up and among the first to speak on the House floor on Monday, when he used his five minutes of floor time to castigate the criminal conviction of former President Donald J. Trump. ... As Mr. Rose intoned the familiar lines of attack that rank-and-file Republicans have recited during television appearances and social media posts in the days since Mr. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, entering them into the Congressional Record, his son Guy, age 6, was putting on a performance of his own. ..."

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Ancient Moroccan mountain music entrances festival crowd


"A hypnotic drum beat blends with ancient Sufi-inspired tunes in a tent in a Moroccan mountain village where local musicians regroup once a year when they don't play the world's top stages. The Master Musicians of Joujouka draw on centuries of local tradition with a hypnotic sound that captivated the 1950s Beatniks, the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones and fans everywhere since. The Joujouka collective has performed at top global venues from Paris's Pompidou Centre to Britain's Glastonbury Festival. But every spring, they like to play to a more intimate audience of only about 50 devotees in their village located 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Tangier. Rolling Stone magazine once dubbed the tribal trance festival 'the oldest, most exclusive dance party in the world'. ..."




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Yuri Rozhkov’s photomontages for the Mayakovsky poem “To the Workers of Kursk” (1924)


"In 1924, the self-taught artist Iurii Nikolaevich Rozhkov created a series of photomontages inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii’s poem 'To the Workers of Kursk' and the geological discovery of the Kursk Magnetic Anamoly (KMA). Rozhkov’s series for Maiakovskii’s ode to labor is both an example of the political propaganda of the reconstruction period of the NEP era and a polemical answer to all those who relentlessly attacked Maiakovskii and criticized avant-garde art as alien to the masses. The article introduces Rozhkov’s less-known photomontage series as a new model of the avant-garde photopoetry book, which offers a sequential reading of Maiakovskii’s poem and functions as a cinematic dispositive of the early Soviet agitprop apparatus (dispositif). Aleksandar BoÅ¡ković argues that the photopoem itself converts into an idiosyncratic avant-garde de-mountable memorial to the working class: a dynamic cine-dispositive through which the the early agitprop apparatus is realized in lived experience, reproduced, and transformed, thus delineating its shift towards the new dispositif of the late 1920s — socialist realism. ..."

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Dirk Serries


"Dirk Serries is an established sound artist. This Belgian-based artist has experimented with music on the border between avant-garde, industrial, experimental, and ambient for more than 30 years. He released his earliest work (1984) behind the pseudonym vidnaObmana up to 2007, with which he gained worldwide praise when he closed the book on this project (realizing an extensive discography). Other projects like Fear Falls Burning and his Microphonics series made him collaborate with several key players like Steven Wilson, Justin K. Broadrick, Cult Of Luna, Steve Roach, and toured extensively on the sides of Jesu, MONO, Low, My Bloody Valentine, and Cult Of Luna. ..."




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