Detroit in the 1940s

"The early part of the 20th century saw the city of Detroit, Michigan, rise to prominence on the huge growth of the auto industry and related manufacturers. The 1940s were boom years of development, but the decade was full of upheaval and change, as factories re-tooled to build war machines, and women started taking on men's roles in the workplace, as men shipped overseas to fight in World War II. The need for workers brought an influx of African-Americans to Detroit, who met stiff resistance from whites who refused to welcome them into their neighborhoods or work beside them on an assembly line. A race riot took place over three days in 1943, leaving 34 dead and hundreds injured. After World War II ended, the demand for workers dried up, and Detroit started plotting its postwar course, an era of big automobiles and bigger highways to accommodate them."
Atlantic

Pink Moon - Nick Drake (1972)

Wikipedia - "Pink Moon is the third and final studio album by the English folk musician Nick Drake, released in the UK by Island Records on 25 February 1972. It was the only one of Drake's studio albums to be released in North America during his lifetime: the only previous release there had been a 1971 compilation simply entitled Nick Drake featuring tracks from both his first two albums, which were not released in North America in their original forms until 1976. Pink Moon differs from Drake's previous albums in that it was recorded without a backing band, featuring just Drake on vocals, acoustic guitar and a brief piano riff overdubbed onto the title track. Released two years before Drake's death in November 1974, at the age of twenty-six, the lyrical content of Pink Moon has often been attributed to Drake's ongoing battle with depression. ..."
Wikipedia
allmusic
Pitchfork
Grooveshark, Spotify
YouTube: Pink Moon (Full Album)

2012 July: Nick Drake, 2013 May: Five Leaves Left, 2014 February: Bryter Layter (1970), 2014 August: A Skin Too Few - The Days of Nick Drake (2002).

Ollie Teeba (Soundsci / The Herbaliser) – London, UK

"Sometime in the 1990s, I walked into Jack’s Records in Red Bank, NJ and bought Blow Your Headphones by The Herbaliser without even hearing it. I had been turned on previously to them from some other music lover that passed it on to me. I dug it. Their brand of funk, soul, and jazz filled with samples and superbly crafted hip-hop beats had me nodding my head before, so I was sure they wouldn’t let me down this time. They didn’t. ...  No one I knew was spinning these guys so, to me, these tracks were put into my signature sound.  As with most of hip-hop and sample-based music I listen to and spin out, it’s the original sample that attracts me. The Herbaliser’s use of classic drum breaks and samples from artists like Eddie Bo and Dennis Coffey, to name a few, drew me into their sound instantly."
Dust and Grooves (Video)

Freedom Journey 1965: Photographs of the Selma to Montgomery March by Stephen Somerstein

Marchers on the way to Montgomery as families watch from their porches
"This exhibit features the stunning and historic photographs of Stephen Somerstein, documenting the Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights March in January 1965. Somerstein was a student in City College of New York’s night school and Picture Editor of his student newspaper when he traveled to Alabama to document the March. He joined the marchers and gained unfettered access to everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, and Bayard Rustin. 'I had five cameras slung around my neck,' he recalled. Over the five-day, 54-mile march, Somerstein took about four hundred photographs including poignant images of hopeful blacks lining the rural roads as they cheered on the marchers walking past their front porches and whites crowded on city sidewalks, some looking on silently-others jeering as the activists walked to the Alabama capital."
New-York Historical Society
NY Times: A Long March Into History
Guardian: Freedom Journey 1965: Selma to Montgomery March in pictures
AOL: Photo exhibit celebrates 50th anniversary of civil rights Selma to Montgomery March

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People, Presented in an Interactive Infographic

"The daily life of great authors, artists and philosophers has long been the subject of fascination among those who look upon their work in awe. After all, life can often feel like, to quote Elbert Hubbard, 'one damned thing after another' — a constant muddle of obligations and responsibilities interspersed with moments of fleeting pleasure, wrapped in gnawing low-level existential panic. (Or, at least, it does to me.) Yet some people manage to transcend this perpetual barrage of office meetings, commuter traffic and the unholy allure of reality TV to create brilliant work. It’s easy to think that the key to their success is how they structure their day."
Open Culture

The Town Hall

Wikipedia - "The Town Hall is a performance space, located at 123 West 43rd Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, in New York City. It opened on January 12, 1921, and seats approximately 1,500 people. ... It has not only become a meeting place for educational programs, gatherings of activists, and host for controversial speakers (such as the American advocate of birth control, Margaret Sanger, who was arrested and carried off The Town Hall stage on November 13, 1921, for attempting to speak to a mixed-sex audience about contraception), but as one of New York City's premiere performance spaces for music, dance, and other performing arts. While the lecture series and courses on political and non-political subjects sponsored by the League continued to be held there, The Town Hall quickly established a reputation as an arts center during the first fifteen years of its existence."
Wikipedia
The Town Hall

Corot to Monet: French Landscape Painting

"The Corot to Monet: French Landscape Painting exhibition catalogue was published to accompany the Corot to Monet exhibition (an exhibition of French nineteenth century paintings) at the National Gallery in 2009. It includes French paintings and oil sketches by Thomas Jones, Richard Bonington, and the Barbizon School painters, as well as early Impressionist landscapes by Claude Monet. ... Fifty years later in France, the Barbizon group, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau and Charles-Francois Daubigny - eagerly escaped the studio to paint landscapes, rivers and beach scenes of their native land. These painters were a crucial influence on a new generation of artists who would eventually become known as the Impressionists."
National Gallery
Telegraph
amazon

Ah, the Good Old Bad Old 70's - A. O. Scott

"One of my clearest memories of adolescence is of a T-shirt, worn by a fellow eighth-grader whose name I don't remember, but on whom I seem to recall having a crush. It was black, with hot-pink French-cut sleeves, and across the front was a precis of recent American history: '50's were grease/60's were grass/70's are gross.' At the time, this account seemed irrefutable. By nearly universal agreement, there had never been a worse time to be alive, and to be young was especially miserable. We were growing up in the aftermath of a vaguely heroic, splendidly tumultuous age -- 'the Sixties, man' -- whose life-changing intensity we could never hope to know. The landscape around us was dull, ugly and decadent, and we seemed condemned to drag into adulthood the crippling sense of having been born too late."
NY Times

Henri Michaux

"Born in Belgium in 1899, Henri Michaux was educated at a Jesuit school in Brussels. He contemplated entering the priesthood then enrolled in medical school before abandoning his studies and becoming a merchant seaman. His voyages inspired two travelogues on Ecuador and Asia. He settled in Paris, where he began to write and paint. His work drew praise from several writers, including André Gide. In 1948, Michaux's wife died after accidentally setting fire to her nightgown: devastated, he began to take mescaline, painstakingly recording his experiences in text accompanied by distinctive calligraphic line drawings. Henri Michaux published three books between 1956 and 1959 dealing with his experiences with mescaline - Miserable Miracle, L'infini turbulent and Paix dans les brisements. He also confronted us with a disturbing series of sketches - most of them in black and white, and a few in colour - executed shortly after each of his experiences. ..."
Guardian: Journeys into the abyss
W - Henri Michaux
Poetry Foundation
Poetry Foundation: Poerty
book and writers
artnet
amazon: Henri Michaux
vimeo: Image du monde visionnaire 1964 (FULL)

Henry Cow's - Leg End (1973)

"Political astuteness aside, Henry Cow's Leg End is simply a busy musical trip, comprised of snaking rhythms, unorthodox time signatures, and incongruous waves of multiple instruments that actually culminate in some appealing yet complex progressive rock. Here, on the band's debut, both Fred Frith and woodwind man Geoff Leigh hold nothing back, creating eclectic, avant garde-styled jazz movements without any sense of direction, or so it may seem at first, but paying close attention to Henry Cow's musical wallowing results in some first-rate instrumental fusion, albeit a little too abstract at times. ..."
allmusic
W - Leg End
YouTube: LegEnd (1973)

Art Expanded 1958-1978

"The Walker Art Center’s new exhibition features work from the 'expanded arts' scene of the 1960s and 1970s. Just as the 60s and 70s were a time of experimentation, the Walker has selected pieces from their collection that showcase the experimental power of Fluxus. The 'flow' from the Latin fluxus was adopted as the name of a movement concerned with ideas exemplified through art. The exhibition features artwork, primarily from American, European, and Japanese artists, who created everything from found objects, such as Daniel Spoerri’s preserved dinner plate (31 Variations on a Meal: Eaten by Bruce Conner), to screen printing and lithographs, to film."
Walker Art Center
YouTube: Art Expanded 1958-1978
The Walker's "Art Expanded, 1958-1978": When avant-garde becomes archeology

‘Downton Abbey’ and History: A Look Back

"As a chronicle of the ups and downs of fictional British aristocrats and servants, 'Downton Abbey' weaves a surprising amount of authentic historical context into its plots. Here is an episode-by-episode look at some of the show’s period details, and how those events have been covered in The New York Times. 'Downton Abbey' returns for its fifth season on PBS on Sunday — check back each week during the new season for updates."
NY Times
WETA
amazon: Downton Abbey Season 5

2012 March: Downton Abbey, 2013 February: Downton Abbey 3

Robert Stone (August 21, 1937 – January 10, 2015)

Wikipedia - "Robert Stone (August 21, 1937 – January 10, 2015) was an American novelist. He won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and once for the PEN/Faulkner Awards. Dog Soldiers was adapted as a film, Who'll Stop the Rain in 1978 starring Nick Nolte, and Time magazine included it in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. ... His best known work is characterized by action-tinged adventures, political concerns and dark humor. Many of his novels are set in unusual, exotic landscapes of raging social turbulence, such as the Vietnam War; a post-coup violent banana republic in Central America; Jim Crow-era New Orleans, and late 1990's Jerusalem."
Wikipedia
The Paris Review: Robert Stone, The Art of Fiction No. 90
NY Times: Robert Stone, Novelist of the Vietnam Era and Beyond, Dies at 77
The Total Anti-Totalist Robert Stone - Interview Magazine
The Contemplating Stone: Robert Stone
amazon: Robert Stone

2013 September: Outerbridge Reach (1993)

Previously unseen footage of the Clash on New Year’s Day, 1977

The Clash
"On the liner notes of their first LP Two Sevens Clash, roots reggae band Culture claimed that Marcus Garvey had prophesied that the date July 7, 1977, 'when the two sevens clash,' would herald great conflagration. Whether Garvey said it or not (some hold that Culture just made the story up), it’s safe to say that 1977 was a year of great chaos. As the Clash sang around that time, 'Danger stranger / You better paint your face / No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones / In 1977.' The tumult of that year is amply demonstrated in 1977, a documentary by Julien Temple, director of The Great Rock’n'Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury, built around never-before-seen footage he shot of the Clash’s early gig at the Roxy on January 1, 1977, a gig that more or less ushered in both the Roxy and the Clash as punk fixtures, although the band ended up lasting a lot longer than the venue."
Dangerous Minds (Video) 1:15:17

Danielle Mastrion

"Danielle Mastrion is an NYC-based Artist: a painter, muralist, and street artist. Born & raised in Brooklyn, New York, Danielle gained a B.F.A in Illustration at Parsons School of Design. Her specialty is portraiture, and she works regularly on public and private commissions. Danielle has painted walls all around NYC, the US and abroad. Her murals in NYC include the recently painted Beastie Boys tribute on Ludlow & Rivington Street in the LES; the mural was featured in Mass Appeal, Rolling Stone, Spin Magazine & Billboard Magazine. She is currently painting a series of commemorative murals for The Yankees at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx along with Lexi Bella. ... This year, Danielle traveled abroad to paint murals in Israel, Cuba, and Mexico; her work can also be found in Berlin, England, & Paris."
Danielle Mastrion Art: About
Danielle Mastrion Art
Danielle Mastrion Art: Video

Imogen Stidworthy

Sacha, installation view, AKINCI, Amsterdam, 2013
"Imogen Stidworthy’s film and installation works concern aspects of voice and language such as the sound of the voice, losing or gaining language and processes of translation. She works with the voice as a sculptural material to question how social space is constituted and how we are located in it. What are the different dimensions and conditions of the voice as a bodily, spatial or discursive material? She focuses on schisms and transitions in the social landscape, observing how they manifest in the voice and the body."
UbuWeb (Video)
The Big Interview: Imogen Stidworthy
[PDF] Portfolio (Video)
W - Imogen Stidworthy
frieze

Gordon Parks

Harlem Neighborhood, Harlem, New York
"Gordon Parks (1912-2006), one of the most celebrated African-American photographers of all time, is the subject of a new exhibition of groundbreaking photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott (January 17–September 13, 2015) traces Parks’ return to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas and then to other Midwestern cities, to track down and photograph each of his childhood classmates. On view in the MFA’s Art of the Americas Wing, the exhibition’s 42 photographs were from a series originally meant to accompany a Life magazine photo essay but for reasons unknown, the story was never published. The images depict the realities of life under segregation in 1950 presenting a rarely seen view of everyday lives of African-American citizens in the years before the Civil Rights movement began in earnest."
MFA
The Gordon Parks Foundation
NY Times: ‘A Long Hungry Look’: Forgotten Gordon Parks Photos Document Segregation
Smithsonian: Unpublished Photos by Gordon Parks Bring a Nuanced View of 1950s Black America
W - Gordon Parks
YouTube: Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn: The Life and Work of Gordon Parks 1:29:56

International Pop

Roy Lichtenstein, Look Mickey, 1961
"Organized by the Walker Art Center, International Pop chronicles the global emergence of Pop from the 1950s through the early 1970s. While previous exhibitions and prevailing scholarship have primarily focused on the dominance of Pop activity in New York and London during this time, this exhibition examines work from artists across the globe who were confronting many of the same radical developments, laying the foundation for the emergence of an art form that embraced figuration, media strategies, and mechanical processes with a new spirit of urgency and/or exuberance."
Walker Art Center
ARTBOOK@: International Pop

Hopscotch

Walter Rosenblum, Hopscotch, 105th St. New York City, 1952
Wikipedia - "Hopscotch is a children's game that can be played with several players or alone. Hopscotch is a popular playground game in which players toss a small object into numbered spaces of a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces to retrieve the object. To play hopscotch, a course is first laid out on the ground. Depending on the available surface, the course is either scratched out in dirt, or drawn with chalk on pavement. Courses may be permanently marked where playgrounds are commonly paved, as in elementary schools. Designs vary, but the course is usually composed of a series of linear squares interspersed with blocks of two lateral squares. Traditionally the course ends with a 'safe' or 'home' base in which the player may turn before completing the reverse trip. The home base may be a square, a rectangle, or a semicircle. The squares are then numbered in the sequence in which they are to be hopped."
Wikipedia
Street Play
YouTube: Maya Angelou's Harlem Hopscotch: Official Music Video, Hopscotch rules how to play

Rust Never Sleeps - Neil Young (1979)

Wikipedia - "Rust Never Sleeps is an album by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young and American band Crazy Horse. It was released on July 2, 1979, by Reprise Records. Most of the album was recorded live, then overdubbed in the studio. Young used the title 'rust never sleeps' as a concept for his tour with Crazy Horse to avoid artistic complacency and try more progressive, theatrical approaches to performing live."
Wikipedia
NY Times
amazon: Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Rust Never Sleeps - The Concert Film, Rust Never Sleeps
YouTube: Neil Young Rust Never Sleeps Movie 1979
YouTube: 'Rust Never Sleeps Trailer'

2008 February: Neil Young, 2010 April: Neil Young - 1, 2010 April: Neil Young - 2, 2010 May: Neil Young - 3, 2010 October: Neil Young's Sound, 2012 January: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History, 2012 June: Like A Hurricane, 2012 July: Greendale, 2013 April: Thoughts On An Artist / Three Compilations, 2013 August: Heart of Gold, 2014 March: Dead Man (1995), 2014 August: Ragged Glory - Neil Young + Crazy Horse (1990), 2014 November: Broken Arrow (1996).

Reimagining Modernism—Expanding the Dialogue of Modern Art

"Over the course of summer 2014, the Met reinstalled and reopened the enfilade of galleries that showcases modern art from 1900 to 1950. Encompassing approximately 14,500 square feet of gallery space and roughly 250 objects, this project, Reimagining Modernism: 1900–1950, reinterprets and presents afresh the Metropolitan's holdings of modernist paintings, sculpture, design, photography, and works on paper. Organized at the direction of Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, the project integrates European and American modernist collections for the first time in the Museum's history, along with loans in collaboration with the Departments of Photographs, Drawings and Prints, European Paintings, and The American Wing, in addition to loans from private collections."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
NY Times: A Trans-Atlantic View of Modernism

The Mapping Dubliners Project

North Strand Road
"The Mapping Dubliners Project is a project featuring two interactive maps of all the locations and routes mentioned in James Joyce’s Dubliner. It began in 2010 and is updated regularly. The first map version was built in Google Maps. A second version was created shortly afterwards using the Google Maps 'convert to Google Earth file' tool. Once in the Google Earth format, the information was edited and restructured to enable story-centric showing and hiding capabilities. The Google map is available online, and the Google Earth map is downloadable on the Google Earth version page. The blog is updated weekly and features a closer look at one place from the map, including its possible literary interpretations, historical info, and images."
The Mapping Dubliners Project: About
The Mapping Dubliners Project: Blog
Dubliners: the Photographs of J.J. Clarke
The Mapping Dubliners Project: Google Maps Version, Google Earth Version
Open Culture:
James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to 1904

2011 March: Passages from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1965-67), 2010 March: Ulysses Seen, 2013 February: ULYSSES “SEEN” is moving to Dublin!, 2013: Dubliners, 2014 May: The Dead (1987 film), 2014 May: “Have I Ever Left It?” by Mark O'Connell, 2014 July: Digital Dubliners, 2014 September: Read "Ulysses Seen", A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Classic.

THE CODE: A declassified and unbelievable hostage rescue story

"Colonel Jose Espejo was a man with a problem. As the Colombian army’s communications expert watched the grainy video again, he saw kidnapped soldiers chained up inside barbed-wire pens in a hostage camp deep in the jungle, guarded by armed FARC guerillas. Some had been hostages for more than 10 years, and many suffered from a grim, flesh-eating disease caused by insect bites. It was 2010, and the straight-talking Espejo was close to retirement after 22 years of military service. But he couldn’t stand the thought of quitting with men left behind enemy lines. He needed an idea, and when he needed an idea, he always went to one man."
verge (Video)

On the Open Road, Signs of a Changing Cuba

"The signs of the times speak loudly in Cuba, sometimes through their silence. A 17-hour drive across the heart of the island in a battered burgundy and gray 1956 Ford Fairlane included long stretches in which there was surprisingly little ideology on display, few of the billboards that once trumpeted revolutionary slogans. Those that remained had less of the nostalgic lilt of 'socialism or death' and more of the eager pitch of self-help books or business management bibles."
NY Times

2014 December: U.S. to Restore Full Relations With Cuba, Erasing a Last Trace of Cold War Hostility

True Detective (2014)

Wikipedia - "True Detective is an American television crime drama series on HBO created and written by Nic Pizzolatto, with the first season directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson (both executive producers of the series) with Michelle Monaghan, Michael Potts, and Tory Kittles, and uses multiple timelines to trace two Louisiana State Police Criminal Investigations Division homicide detectives' hunt for a serial killer in Louisiana across seventeen years. The first season premiered on January 12, 2014, and consisted of eight episodes, concluding on March 9, 2014. The series has received widespread critical acclaim."
Wikipedia
HBO: True Detective (Video)
Grantland: The Raid (Video)
Wired: Who Is True Detective’s Yellow King? Here Are Our 6 Favorite Theories
Guardian: How we got the shot: Cary Fukunaga on True Detective's tracking shot
YouTube: Official Trailer (HBO), Intro / Opening Scene HD, Life is a dream

Germany in Two-Front War and the Schlieffen-Plan I THE GREAT WAR - Week 2

"Austria-Hungary starts the bombardment of Belgrade. What follows is a race of armies between all major powers in Europe. Nobody wants to be unprepared in case of an attack. Germany is implementing the Schlieffen-Plan to avoid a two front war by conquering Paris via Belgium. One thing gets clear in the first days at the Western Front: This war is going to be different - the modern warfare shows itself."
YouTube: THE GREAT WAR - Week 2
W - Schlieffen Plan

2014 December: The Great War: WWI Starts - How Europe Spiraled Into the Great War - Week 1

Devil Got My Woman Blues at Newport 1966

"Howlin' Wolf, Skip James, Son House, Bukka White and Rev. Pearly Brown Imagine you've stumbled into a juke joint where the mentor of Robert Johnson, Son House, and the idol of the Rolling Stones, Howlin' Wolf, 'dis' one another. Picture a place where Wolf taunts Bukka White while the robust Parchman Farm alumnus spins his proto-funk dance grooves and the spectral Skip James weaves his haunting Devil Got My Woman. It's an archetypal blues 'crossroads' where legends of the 1920s Delta and 1950s Chicago share the same musical space, suspended out of time in a super-real present, a non-specific 'bluestime.' This is no fantasy. ... The resultant film footage captures the blues experience in its first and truest milieu, one in which African-American men and women drink, dance, and share their troubles and triumphs. Brooding faces absorbing the wailing pleas of Son House and rubber-legged dancers strutting to Bukka's buoyant blues are as much a part of the mise-en-scene as the legendary principals of the cast."
amazon
Wild Realm Reviews
YouTube: Devil Got My Woman by Skip James, Howlin' Wolf - How Many More Years, Howlin' Wolf - Meet Me In The Bottom, Howlin' Wolf - Dust My Broom, Skip James - I'm So Glad, Pearly Brown - Blues

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys - Viv Albertine (2014)

Viv Albertine 'dances between insecurity and self-belief'.
"With a title that is an incantation and a picture of the gorgeous author on its cover, Viv Albertine's autobiography is quite something. It promises a punk snog'n'tell, but is a real tease: strident, uncertain, compelling, with a structure that jerks all over the place via snapshots of Albertine's life. It's a scrappy book, as in a scrapbook of memories – and scrappy, too, in the sense she is always up for a fight. Albertine's words are naive and in-your-face. Above all they talk about what it is not to be a Typical Girl. This is maddening and magnificent all at the same time – rather like her band, the Slits."
Guardian
NY Times: Clash, Crash, Redemption
Telegraph: Viv Albertine on 'shy' Sid Vicious, IVF and life after punk
amzon
YouTube: Viv Albertine on 'Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.', SLITS Clips 1978-2007 (including Viv and Ari interviews), The Slits' Viv Albertine on clothes, music and boys

2010 October: Ari Up (17 January 1962 – 20 October 2010), 2012 July: Subatomic Sound System meets Lee Scratch Perry & Ari Up of the Slits (7″ vinyl), 2014 September: Live in Cincinnati and San Francisco 1980.

Mitra Tabrizian

Wikipedia - "Mitra Tabrizian is a British-Iranian photographer and film director. She is also a professor of photography at the University of Westminster, London, England. Born in Tehran, Iran, Tabrizian studied at the Polytechnic of Central London in the 1980s. Tabrizian published her first monograph, Correct Distance, in 1990. Her photographic book Beyond the Limits, published in 2004, is a critique of corporate culture and is inspired by the works of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. Her films include Journey of No Return (1993), The Third Woman (1991), and ‘'The Predator'’ (2004). Tabrizian has exhibited her work at the Tate, Modern Art Oxford, Gallery Lelong, New York, the Architectural Association, London, and numerous film festivals."
Wikipedia
Mitra Tabrizian
Photoparley
YouTube: Mitra Tabrizian

Stage Fright - The Band (1970)

Wikipedia - "Stage Fright, the Band's third album, sounded on its surface like the group's first two releases, Music From Big Pink and The Band, employing the same dense arrangements, with their mixture of a deep bottom formed by drummer Levon Helm and bassist Rick Danko, penetrating guitar work by Robbie Robertson, and the varied keyboard work of pianist Richard Manuel and organist Garth Hudson, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel's vocals on top. But the songs this time around were far more personal, and, despite a nominal complacency, quite troubling."
allmusic
W - Stage Fright
Stage Fright
Rolling Stone
YouTube: Stage Fright, The Shape I'm In
YouTube: Stage Fright (1970) [Full Album]


2009 July: The Band, 2011 June: Music from Big Pink, 2011 September: The Last Waltz, 2012 December: King Harvest 2012 January: Rare Concert Footage of The Band, 1970.

The Making of an American by Edward White

"This year marks the centenary of the publication of Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein’s collection of experimental still-life word portraits split into the categories of objects, food, and rooms, and which—excluding a vanity publication in 1909, which she paid for herself—was the first of Stein’s work to be published in the United States. Stein had hoped that this enigmatic little book would be her big break, the thing to convince the American people of her genius. That was not to be. Tender Buttons left critics bemused and made barely a dent on the consciousness of the wider reading public. There was no great clamor for more of her writing; Stein would have to wait another twenty years to become a household name."
The Paris Review

2007 November: Gertrude Stein, 2011 July: The making of "Tender Buttons", 2012 March: The Steins Collect, 2012 May: Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the record straight, 2014 November: Lost Generation.

George Bellows paints the raw New York winter

Snow Dumpers, 1911
"Realist painter and longtime East 19th Street resident George Bellows is best known for his bold views of amateur boxers as well as the grittiness of urban life in the early 20th century. He painted scenes showing every season. But there’s something about his depictions of New York beneath cold gray skies, covered in snow, or surrounded by ice that captures the city’s abrasive, isolating winters. ... Snow Dumpers, painted in 1911, shows us overcoat-clad city workers and snorting horses tasked with carrying loads of snow from Manhattan streets to be dumped into the choked-with-traffic East River. The skies over the river and Brooklyn Bridge look gray and frigid, and the snow has streaks of blue."
Ephemeral New York

Mulberry Street Bar

"... This Little Italy haunt was established over a hundred years ago, as a small bar called Mare Chiaro. Its rich history remains in its original subway tile floor, wooden bar, and pressed-tin ceiling. The bar stayed in the same family for a couple of generations, before being purchased in 2003 by current owner Ed Welsh. His updates have made the bar good for sports fans and karaoke lovers alike, but nothing beats the juke box stocked with Connie Francis, Frank Sinatra, and Four Tops. It has been the site of many films, including: Donnie Brasco, Men of Honor, and The Godfather Part III. Trying to pay with a credit card? Fuhgeddaboudit‎. They only take cash."
Untapped Cities
Little Italy: Mulberry Street Bar: The Death of a Dive, The Birth of a Burger
YouTube: Mulberry Street Bar Toni on NY with Jimmy V, Movies made at Mulberry Street Bar

You Will Summer in Detroit

"When I’m asked about Detroit, the questions often circle around news headlines: bankruptcy and blight, crime stats, bus problems. Whether things in the city really are that bad. Until I first traveled there about a year ago, those were my trigger thoughts about Detroit, too. That and Megatron’s freakish football skills. But after spending a big chunk of 2014 in Detroit, kicking it at Astro Coffee in Corktown, roaming the beautiful Belle Isle, stopping into Shinola in Midtown, meeting entrepreneurs and artists, barbers and chefs and teachers — even a mortician — I’m convinced Detroit is beginning its third act in a great American comeback story."
medium

Dial-A-Poem Poets - Big Ego (1978)

"American label set up in 1972 by the poet John Giorno, the earliest releases were exclusively poetry collections of the 'Dial-A-Poets' (John Giorno, William S Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage etc.): 'In 1961 I was a young poet who hung out with young artists like Andy Warhol, Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, as well as with members of the Judson Dance Theatre. The use of modern mass media and technologies by these artists made me realize that poetry was 75 years behind painting and sculpture, dance and music. And I thought, if they can do it, why can't I do it for poetry. Why not try to connect with an audience using all the entertainments of ordinary life: television, the telephone, record albums, etc? It was the poet's job to invent new venues and make fresh contact with the audience. This inspiration gave rise to Giorno Poetry Systems.' - John Giorno"
Discogs
Discogs: Various ‎– Big Ego
UbuWeb (Video)

2012 June: The Dial-A-Poem Poets: The Nova Convention, 2014 March: The Dial-A-Poem Poets (1972).

Chocolate

Wikipedia - "Chocolate is a typically sweet, usually brown, food preparation of Theobroma cacao seeds, roasted and ground, often flavored, as with vanilla. It is made in the form of a liquid, paste or in a block or used as a flavoring ingredient in other sweet foods. Cacao has been cultivated by many cultures for at least three millennia in Mesoamerica. The earliest evidence of use traces to the Mokaya (Mexico and Guatemala), with evidence of chocolate beverages dating back to 1900 BC. In fact, the majority of Mesoamerican people made chocolate beverages, including the Mayans and Aztecs, who made it into a beverage known as xocolātl, a Nahuatl word meaning 'bitter water'. The seeds of the cacao tree have an intense bitter taste and must be fermented to develop the flavor."
Wikipedia
What Chocolate Are You?
YouTube: First taste of chocolate in Ivory Coast, Documentary. The Dark Side Of Chocolate

Lost & Found: Hip Hop Underground Soul Classics (1995)

Wikipedia - "Lost & Found: Hip Hop Underground Soul Classics is a double-disc album featuring previously shelved albums Center of Attention by InI and The Original Baby Pa by Deda. Both albums were recorded in 1995 and produced entirely by Pete Rock except for five overall tracks produced either by Grap Luva or Spunk Bigga; Neither album had been officially released until this compilation came out. Both albums were recorded in 1995, and were scheduled to be released through Pete Rock's Soul Brother Records label."
Wikipedia
Pitchfork
Spotify
YouTube: Pete Rock - Lost & Found: Hip Hop Underground Soul Classics [Full Album]

Television - Adventure (1978)

"Television's groundbreaking first album, Marquee Moon, was as close to a perfect debut as any band made in the 1970s, and in many respects it would have been all but impossible for the band to top it. One senses that Television knew this, because Adventure seems designed to avoid the comparisons by focusing on a different side of the band's personality. ... Sure, Marquee Moon is a better album, but Adventure has one of the greatest guitar bands of all time playing superbly on a set of truly fine songs, and albums like this come along far too infrequently for anyone to ignore music this pleasurable simply on the grounds of relative evaluation; it's not quite a masterpiece, but it's a brilliant record by any yardstick."
allmusic
W - Adventure
Rolling Stone
aquarium drunkard
YouTube: Foxhole (Live)
YouTube: Adventure LP Outtakes,"I Need a New Adventure" boot,CD rip,16 songs,76 mins.

2007 November: Tom Verlaine, 2010 March: Tom Verlaine - 1, 2011 October: Warm and Cool, 2012 Nov: Little Johnny Jewel, 2012 December: Words from the Front, 2013 July: Flash Light, 2013 October: See No Evil, 2014 October: Dreamtime (1981), 2014 November: Marquee Moon (1977).

Home Movies of Duke Ellington Playing Baseball (And How Baseball Coined the Word “Jazz”)

"... In this clip unearthed by the Smithsonian earlier this year, we find two great American traditions intertwined — baseball and jazz. As John Edward Hasse explains in his online essay, jazz and baseball grew up together. According to some, the first documented use of the word 'jazz' came from a 1913 newspaper article where a reporter, writing about the San Francisco Seals minor league team, said 'The poor old Seals have lost their jazz and don’t know where to find it.' 'It’s a fact … that the jazz, the pepper, the old life, has been either lost or stolen, and that the San Francisco club of today is made up of jazzless Seals.' Or, if you listen to this public radio report, another use of the word can be traced back to 1912. That’s when a washed-up pitcher named Ben Henderson claimed that he had invented a new pitch — the 'jazz ball.'”
Open Culture (Video)

2011 November: Duke Ellington - "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", 1943, 2011 September: "Take the A Train" - Duke Ellington, 2012 June: The Sound of Jazz (1957), 2013 May: Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black, Starring a 19-Year-old Billie Holiday.

Anna Matos on WallWorks NY — A New Gallery Space in the South Bronx

BUZ163
"Founded by John Matos aka Crash and Robert Kantor and directed by Anna Matos, WallWorks NY is a wonderful new gallery space at 39 Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. While visiting its current  – and final – unofficial exhibit, Open Gallery, we had the opportunity to speak to Anna."
NYC Street Art

On the Waterfront - Elia Kazan (1954)

Wikipedia - "On the Waterfront is a 1954 American crime drama film about union violence and corruption amongst longshoremen. The film was directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg. It stars Marlon Brando and features Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, and, in her film debut, Eva Marie Saint. The soundtrack score was composed by Leonard Bernstein. It is based on Crime on the Waterfront, a series of articles published in the New York Sun by Malcolm Johnson that won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. The stories detailed widespread corruption, extortion, and racketeering on the waterfronts of Manhattan and Brooklyn."
Wikipedia
filmsite
Hoboken Historical Museum, On the Waterfront Locations
Five Great Oscar-Winning Supporting Roles (Video)
NY Times (Video)
On the Waterfront: Everybody Part of Everybody Else
YouTube: Three Reasons, Aspect Ratio Visual Essay, Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones Discuss On the Waterfront

Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception

"Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception at The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 opens on 8 May, drawing upon MoMA’s unique and important collection of work by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. 1959), who uses poetic and allegorical methods to explore the social realities of political concepts, including the cyclical nature of change in modernizing societies, the urban landscape, and patterns of economic progress. Alÿs’s personal, ambulatory explorations of cities form the basis for his practice, through which he compiles extensive documentation reflecting his process, producing complex and diverse bodies of work that include video, painting, performance, drawing, and photography."
aesthetica
MoMA (Video)
frieze
YouTube: Re-enactment by Francis Alys

Small.

Paul Chiappe, Untitled 48, 2010
"This group exhibition features a selection of international contemporary artists who adopt an intimate format to explore issues related to visual perception, personal and historical memory, the construction of gender stereotypes, and the power of the imagination. In an age when cavernous galleries and outsized images and objects suggest that bigger is necessarily better, working small carries a certain risk. It is a risk, however, that the nine artists in the exhibition are willing to take as they create minute worlds that absorb the viewer while resisting possession. The selected works range from graphite photo-realist renderings to interventions in found objects to site-specific installations, including a custom-made tabletop bearing microscopic figurations and a postage-stamp-sized watercolor inserted directly into the gallery wall."
The Drawing Center
issuu

New Year, Old Memories, in Times Square

"What does it say about New Year’s Eve that we mark the end of a year with mass consumption of an elixir that induces forgetting? Is it a ritual act of disdain for the past or fear of the future? Think of all the list-making at year’s end. Is it just so we’ll remember something of 2014 after we wake up on the other side? ... It is Burning Man, Fourth of July fireworks, the last day of school and a full-contact Black Friday sale-a-bration all wrapped up in one. Only New York would think that’s a good idea."
NY Times (19 Photo)

Ken Schles

View from 224 Avenue B
"Ken Schles is the author of Invisible City (1988; reprint 2014), The Geometry of Innocence (2001), A New History of Photography: The World Outside and the Pictures In Our Heads (2007), Oculus (2011) and Night Walk (2014). His books have been exhibited by The Museum of Modern Art, noted by the New York Times Book Review, cited in histories of the medium (Parr/Badger, Auer & Auer, 10x10 American Photobooks) and issued by some of the foremost publishers of our time (Steidl, Hatje Cantz, Twelvetrees Press). They're considered 'intellectual milestones in photography' (Süddeutsche Zeitung), 'hellishly brilliant' (The New Yorker), notable by New York Times and a favorite of the photographer Robert Frank."
Ken Schles
NY Times: The East Village, in the 1980s and Looking Back (14 Photo)

In This Week's Voice: The Year in Protests

"As we began to look back on 2014 for our last issue of this year, we found it awfully hard to see past the demonstrators. All of December has seemed like one long protest, with thousands clogging New York's streets (and bridges) night after night. Most came out to decry a grand jury decision that cleared an NYPD officer in the death of a man whose only crime appeared to be selling untaxed cigarettes. (Some came out to decry the protests.) The fate of 43-year-old Staten Island resident Eric Garner twinned to that of Michael Brown, a young man from a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. ... At least not right away. View this week's photo-essay feature story, The Year in Protests."
Voice
Voice: NYC Protests (Photo)

Great Dismal Swamp maroons

Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia by Thomas Moran, 1862
Wikipedia - "The Great Dismal Swamp maroons were freed and escaped slaves who inhabited the marshlands of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina. Although conditions were harsh, research suggests that thousands lived there between about 1700 and the 1860s. Harriett Beecher Stowe told the maroon people's story in her 1856 novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. The most significant research on the settlements began in 2002 with a project by Dan Sayers of American University." (flapjax at midnite)
Wikipedia
NY Times: Life in the Swamp
Slaves of the Great Dismal Swamp
NPR: Fleeing To Dismal Swamp, Slaves And Outcasts Found Freedom (Video)

Johanna's Visions - Melbourne 1966 - Bob Dylan

"Lights flicker from the opposite loft,
in this room the heat pipes just coughed,
the country music plays soft,
but there's nothing really nothing to turn off,
just Louise & her lover so entwined
& these vision of Johanna
that conquer my mind."
YouTube: Johanna's Visions - Melbourne 1966