The Miners' Hymns - Bill Morrison (2011)

"A community processes through a main street, painted banners swaying above the crowd. In their midst a brass band plays on, leading, guiding, giving hope. The images are black and white, peopled by successive generations. This month marks the 30th anniversary of the start of the 1984-85 miners' strike. Unless you already know about The Miners' Hymns, you may not have heard of the composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, or be sure which Bill Morrison created the sequence of archive footage described above. The strange counterpoint between an Icelandic minimalist, an American film-maker and a bitter episode in recent British history has resulted in a work as unclassifiable as it is unforgettable. The Miners' Hymns, produced by Forma Arts, mourns and celebrates a lost industrial past. The pitheads of the north and north-east, most of them, have been grassed over. The contours of a way of life remain indelible. ..."
The Miners' Hymns review – a rich seam of music and mine (Video)
Icarus Films
Feature length films : The Miners' Hymns - Bill Morrison

2012 June: Bill Morrison, 2015 October: Decasia (2002)

The Verso Book of Dissent

"Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest-rallying others around them or, sometimes, inspiring uprisings many years later. Their echoes reverberate from Ancient Greece, China and Egypt, via the dissident poets and philosophers of Islam and Judaism, through to the Arab slave revolts and anti-Ottoman rebellions of the Middle Ages. These sources were tapped during the Dutch and English revolutions at the outset of the Modern world, and in turn flowed into the French, Haitian, American, Russian and Chinese revolutions. More recently, resistance to war and economic oppression has flared up on battlefields and in public spaces from Beijing and Cairo to Moscow and New York City. This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent should be in the arsenal of every rebel who understands that words and ideas are the ultimate weapons."
Verso
amazon

Other Voices, Other Blues - Sun Ra Quartet (1978)

"Other Voices, Other Blues is one of several albums done with this basic lineup in January of 1978. This album is billed to the Sun Ra Quartet, but it sounds like there's a bass player present on at least some of the cuts (it could be Ra, but he'd need three hands). As the title implies, this album shows listeners the many sides of the blues and demonstrates what some highly individual players can do with the blues. ... This is really a great setting to hear what these guys can do as soloists, with the easy-to-follow changes of the blues and stripped-down ensemble. Luqman Ali's drumming is the anchor, and everyone gets plenty of solo space. Fans of John Gilmore should surely seek this out, but Michael Ray and Sun Ra are also simply fantastic. As with other Horo releases, this will be hard to find, but well worth it."
allmusic
W - Other Voices, Other Blues
YouTube: Other Voices, Other Blues (1978) [Full Album]

Tracking The Odds: The Roulette Concert Archive

Pictured: A screening, reading, and performance for Henry Hills' film "Money" at Roulette (1985) with dancer Pooh Kaye surrounded by (L-R) John Zorn, Tom Cora, Ciro Baptiste, (obstructed, possibly Sally Silvers), Abigail Child, Diane Ward, Susie Timmons, Alan Davies, Bruce Andrews, Ikue Mori, Jim Staley, Butch Morris.
"Tracking The Odds: The Roulette Concert Archive is a monthly hour-long radio special produced by Roulette Intermedium (roulette.org) and broadcast in partnership with Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM. The broadcasts feature selected highlights from Roulette’s New York experimental music space dating from the early 1980s to the present. Thousands of rare, formative, and often unheard recordings by innovators and adventurous musicians populate the archive. Tracking The Odds airs the third Thursday of each month at 1am and is archived at wavefarm.org. Founded in 1978, Roulette operates a 400-seat concert hall on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn with a focus on experimental and unorthodox music and performance across all genres and media. It's archive of thousands of audio and video recordings is currently being restored."
Wave Farm - WGXC (Video)

How the Left Can Win in the South

Participants at a pro-union rally near Nissan Motor Company’s Canton, Mississippi, plant listen to Bernie Sanders speak on Saturday, March 4, 2017.
"Bernie Sanders didn’t just lose the South in the 2016 Democratic primary—he got destroyed in it. The Vermont senator lost all 11 states that made up the Confederacy to his opponent, Hillary Clinton—and most of them by huge margins. Clinton won by nearly 50 points in South Carolina, almost 60 in Alabama, and a whopping 66 points in Mississippi. In all, Clinton won around 5.1 million votes to Sanders’s estimated 2.5 million. Without such a poor showing in the region, his party’s nomination might have been within Sanders’s reach. But despite the thorough ass-kicking he received here last year, there’s hope that progressive and leftist candidates can compete against the wave of red that’s washed over the South since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. ..."
The Nation

2016 January: Sanders Is Not Trump, 2016 February: Bernie and the Millennials, 2016 April: Bernie Sanders and the History of American Socialism, 2014 September: Anarchism in America (1983), 2015 August: The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders, 2016 October: Why Bernie Was Right, 2015 October: The Ecology of Freedom (1982), 2016 July: Murray Bookchin’s New Life, 2017 January: Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model - Eleanor Finley, 2017 February: Socialism’s Return, 2017 December: Vermont Progressive Party

What's In My Bag? - Tommy Stinson

"American alt-rock/punk artist Tommy Stinson began his career playing bass for The Replacements while still a teenager. Trafficking in hardcore during the early '80s, the band released their debut LP,  Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash in 1981, followed by the Stink EP in 1982. By their second LP, 1983's Hootenanny, The Replacements were experimenting with other rock subgenres and moving towards their definitively raw alt-rock sound. That same year, Stinson dropped out of tenth grade for the band's first US tour. He stayed with the band until their dissolution in 1991, appearing on classic albums Let It Be, Tim, Pleased to Meet Me, and Don't Tell a Soul. ..."
Amoeba Music (Video)

Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism

Portraits of the *** Family, called The Family Gathering, summer 1867–early winter 1868
"A scion of a Protestant upper-middle-class family from Montpellier in southern France, Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870) seemed destined for a career in medicine. In 1862 he traveled to Paris, ostensibly to pursue his medical studies, though he also enrolled as a student in the studio of the painter Charles Gleyre. It was there that he met fellow artists Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, even sharing studio space with both Monet and Renoir at times. He soon became part of a dynamic circle of avant-garde artists and writers that included Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Émile Zola, and Zacharie Astruc. Like his friends, Bazille created paintings inspired by contemporary life that challenged the aesthetic conventions of the day and helped to lay the groundwork of impressionism. Unfortunately, Bazille was killed in battle during the Franco-Prussian War, just prior to his 29th birthday, bringing his promising career to an abrupt and tragic end. ..."
NGA
NGA (Audio)
New Yorker: Frédéric Bazille’s Short Career, Reconsidered
amazon
Chong reviews Frederic Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism

Carlos Vera: Barcelona's Boogaloo: Mixes and Mashups

"Carlos Vera, a.k.a DJ Turmix, has always been interested in mashups. From his early days spinning breakbeats, house and acid jazz in Spanish clubs, to sharing the stage with Latin soul and boogaloo legends in New York, sonic combination has been his jam. Born outside of Barcelona in the mid ‘70s, Vera had four siblings with distinct musical taste and he sampled liberally from each. Funk soundtracks, breakbeats, pop music and flamenco were all popular with various members of his family. At 13 he started working at a local radio station, learned how to spin records and began collecting. Over the years, he would accumulate massive amounts of club tunes to spin at raves and bars, each genre leading down another rabbit hole of musical intrigue. More than a decade into Vera’s career as a professional DJ, he developed an affinity for the sounds of late ’60s New York City and became a leading expert in boogaloo—the hybridization of cultures and sounds that rocketed out of El Barrio. ..."
Dust and Grooves (Audio)

Detroit After Dark: Photographs from the DIA Collection

"Detroit After Dark is a dramatic display of light and dark, a photography exhibition of works from the DIA's permanent collection. Detroit After Dark is free with general museum admission. General museum admission is free for residents of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Detroit After Dark includes architectural studies, street scenes and graffiti, as well as some of Detroit’s famous night haunts, like jazz club Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the legendary Grande Ballroom, and punk and garage rock venues such as Bookie’s Club and the Gold Dollar. This exhibition is a survey of Detroit photographers documenting the night, both past and present, and also features photography from visiting artists to the city, such as Robert Frank's rarely seen City Hall, Detroit from 1955. To contrast the quiet streets and dramatic buildings, Detroit After Dark also includes photos of notable musicians, night clubs and art galleries where groups often got their start, and where these musicians could perform for smaller, intimate audiences. ..."
DIA
Photo exhibit tells Detroit’s story through music, architecture
15 stunning photographs of ‘Detroit After Dark’ @ the DIA

The Nova Trilogy (The Cut-up Trilogy) - William S. Burroughs (1961-68)

"The Nova Trilogy or The Cut-up Trilogy is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three experimental novels by William S. Burroughs: The Soft Machine (1961, revised 1966 and 1968), The Ticket That Exploded (1962, revised 1967) and Nova Express (1964). Like Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine derived in part from The Word Hoard, a number of manuscripts Burroughs wrote mainly in Tangier, between 1954 and 1958. All three novels use the cut-up technique that Burroughs invented in cooperation with painter and poet Brion Gysin and computer programmer Ian Sommerville. Commenting on the trilogy in an interview, Burroughs said that he was 'attempting to create a new mythology for the space age'. In 2014, restored editions of the three novels were published, edited by Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris. ... The Trilogy is viewed by critics as being one of Burroughs’s most radical experimentations with narrative form. All three novels are crafted using the cut-up method, in which existing texts are cut into various pieces and put back together in random order. ..."
Wikipedia
W - The Soft Machine, W - The Ticket That Exploded, W - Nova Express
W - Cut-up technique
William S. Burroughs Tells the Story of How He Started Writing with the Cut-Up Technique (Video)
amazon: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express

Burroughs in Tangier, photographer unknown.

2009 May: Cut-up technique - 1, 2010 March: Cut-up technique, 2010 December: The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag, 2014 February: William Burroughs at 100, 2014 September: The Ticket That Exploded, 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2015 June: The Electronic Revolution (1971), 2015 August: Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914 – 2014, 2015 December: Destroy All Rational Thought, 2016 January: Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs, 2016 June: Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1981), 2016 September: # 1 – A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 2016 December: #6 – Call Me Burroughs LP, 2017 January: A Visit to William S. Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Summer, 1958

Black Thought

Wikipedia - "Tariq Luqmaan Trotter (born October 3, 1971), better known as Black Thought, is an American Rapper and the lead MC of the Philadelphia-based hip hop group The Roots, as well as an occasional actor. Black Thought, who co-founded The Roots with drummer Questlove (Ahmir Thompson), is widely lauded for his live performance skills, continuous multisyllabic rhyme schemes, complex lyricism, double entendres, and politically aware lyrics. Black Thought was born Tariq Luqmaan Trotter, to Thomas and Cassandra Trotter, both members of the Nation of Islam who were murdered when Trotter was one and seventeen years old respectively. ..."
Wikipedia
NPR: Black Thought Shows Off The Art Of The Unrelenting Freestyle (Video)
Black Thought Says The Roots Are “Kind-Of” Without A Label (Video)

Ben Webster Quintet - Soulville (1957)

"The by turns grizzled and vaporous-toned Webster really hit his stride on the Verve label. During a stretch from roughly 1953-1959, the Ellington alumnus showcased his supreme playing with both combos and string sections, swingers and ballads -- and lurking beneath his blustery and hulking sound were solo lines brimming with sophistication and wit. This 1957 date with the Oscar Peterson Trio is one of the highlights of that golden '50s run. ... Providing sympathetic counterpoint, Peterson forgoes his usual pyrotechnics for some leisurely compact solos; his cohorts -- guitarist Herb Ellis, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Stan Levey -- are equally assured and splendid. And ending the set with flair, Webster takes over the piano for three somewhat middling yet still impressive stride and boogie-woogie-styled numbers (these are his only piano recordings). Newcomers shouldn't hesitate to start here."
allmusic
W - Soulville
YouTube: Soulville (1957) [Full Album]

Monk Mix: Remixes & Interpretations of Music By Meredith Monk (2012)

"Intrinsic to the artistic vision of this album is curator and producer DJ Spooky (Paul Miller), a conceptual artist, writer, and musician who pushes creative boundaries in the fields of visual art, sound art, music, film, media, and graphic art. His work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as New York's Whitney Biennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, the Vienna Kunsthalle, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, New York’s Lincoln Center Festival, Spoleto Festival, Festival D’Automne (Paris) and many others. ..."
Monk Mix: Remixes & Interpretations of Music By Meredith Monk (Audio)
Discogs
amazon, amazon - 1
YouTube: MONK MIX: Remixes & Interpretations of Meredith Monk's Music- CD Promotion, MONK MIX: Dolmen Music, Part I Shodekeh's Embody & Continuum Remix

2008 March: Meredith Monk, 2009 September: Songs of Ascension - Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton, 2011 February: Meredith Monk: A Voice For All Time, 2011 August: Ellis Island, 2012 December: Turtle Dreams, 2013 February: Quarry: The Rally (Live, 1977), 2014 November; 10 Things You Might Not Know About Meredith Monk, 2015 April: Volcano Songs (1994), 2015 June: Ellis Island, 2016 April: 16 Millimeter Earrings and the Artist’s Body (1966/1998), 2016 December: Beginnings (2009), 2017 February: Book of Days (1988), 2017 May: Piano Songs (2014)

The Three Epic, Early Champions League Showdowns

"The draw for the Champions League round of 16 is set, and even though the first games will not be played for two months, we already know that at least one true European power will be eliminated before the quarterfinals kick off, and a couple more elite clubs could be in trouble. This is because the Champions League draw pitted some of the best teams in the world against each other in early clashes. According to Soccer Power Index, six of the nine best teams to make the knockouts have been drawn against each other. These three matchups — each of which consists of two games, one at each club’s home grounds — should give the Round of 16 a new level of drama. ... "
fivethirtyeight
NY Times: Real-P.S.G. and Barcelona-Chelsea in the Champions League
YouTube: The Three Epic, Early Champions League Showdowns

Theaster Gates - Sun Salutations (undated), Breathing (2010)

A Game of My Own, 2017, wood, paint, black stain, Alabama ball clay
"Theaster Gates was born in Chicago in 1973. He first encountered creativity in the music of Black churches on his journey to becoming an urban planner, potter, and artist. Gates creates sculptures with clay, tar, and renovated buildings, transforming the raw material of urban neighborhoods into radically reimagined vessels of opportunity for the community. ... Gates’s non-profit, Rebuild Foundation, manages the many projects in his Chicago hometown—including the Stony Island Arts Bank, Black Cinema House, Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative, Archive House, and Listening House—while extending its support to cities throughout the American Midwest. Many of the artist’s works evoke his African-American identity and the broader struggle for civil rights, from sculptures incorporating fire hoses, to events organized around soul food, and choral performances by the experimental musical ensemble Black Monks of Mississippi, led by Gates himself."
UbuWeb (Video)

2013 May: Theaster Gates

How the Index Card Cataloged the World

The Library of Congress card for Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
"Like every graduate student, I once holed up in the library cramming for my doctoral oral exams. This ritual hazing starts with a long reading list. Come exam day, the scholar must prove mastery of a field, whether it’s Islamic art or German history. The student sits before a panel of professors, answering questions drawn from the book list. To prepare for this initiation, I bought a lifetime supply of index cards. On each four-by-six rectangle, I distilled the major points of a book. My index cards—portable, visual, tactile, easily rearranged and reshuffled—got me through the exam. Yet it never occurred to me, as I rehearsed my talking points more than a decade ago, that my index cards belonged to the very European history I was studying. The index card was a product of the Enlightenment, conceived by one of its towering figures: Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, physician, and the father of modern taxonomy. ..."
The Atlantic
W - Index card
How the Humble Index Card Foresaw the Internet

The Dump

The waves at Dead Horse Bay crash against the millions of pieces of glass that hide beneath the sand. The sound is not quite like that of other beaches.
"At a southeastern extremity of Brooklyn, near Floyd Bennett Field, sits a small pocket of ocean water, nestled among the Gerritsen and Rockaway Inlets, that has seen its fair share of muck. In the 19th century, horse-rendering facilities — which boiled carcasses and made glue of their byproducts — would dump the used bones into the water, giving the area its name: Dead Horse Bay. Decades later, as cars replaced horses, the renderers left, and New York City began connecting nearby Barren Island to the Brooklyn mainland, using sand, mixed with coal and garbage, as landfill. But the trash couldn’t quite be contained; it’s been emerging from the ground and washing up on the beach, bit by bit, ever since. Today, Dead Horse Bay is a sight to behold: unremittingly eerie, occasionally revolting, but nevertheless engrossing, even romantic. Visitors can catch a glimpse of New York’s past, take in the apocalyptic tableau — and, of course, enjoy a walk on the beach."
BKLYNR
ABC News: Dead Horse Bay (Video)
W - Dead Horse Bay
Atlas Obscura

New Gabriel García Márquez Digital Archive Features More Than 27,000 Digitized Letters, Manuscript Pages, Photos & More

Gabriel García Márquez in Aracataca, March 1966.
"When Gabriel García Márquez died in 2014, it was said that only the Bible had sold more books in Spanish than the Colombian writer’s work: Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth… and yes, of course, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the 1967 novel William Kennedy described in a New York Times review as 'the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.' García Márquez began to hate such elevated praise. It raised expectations he felt he couldn’t fulfill after the enormous success of that incredibly brilliant, seemingly sui generis second novel. Everyone in South America read the book. To avoid the crowds, the author moved to Spain (where Mario Vargas Llosa wrote a doctoral dissertation on him). He needn’t have worried. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
Digital Collections - Gabriel García Márquez (Video)
NY Times: Gabriel García Márquez’s Archive Freely Available Online

The Graphic Designer Who Maps the World’s Cities by Smell

"Smell has long been dismissed as the second-class citizen of our senses—the 'most ungrateful' and 'most dispensable,' according to Immanuel Kant, who, echoing Plato and Aristotle, praised vision as our 'noblest' sense. But, on a recent Sunday, I spent the afternoon placing full faith in my nose, sticking it into garbage cans, restaurant exhaust vents, and within sniffing distance of my fellow-pedestrians on a stretch of the Lower East Side deemed New York’s smelliest block. The excursion started uneventfully, when I detected familiar fumes of gasoline on Delancey Street, but turning onto Eldridge toward Broome I confronted a pungent, intriguing miasma of garlic, cigarette smoke, rotten melon, roasted meat, and plastic. I trailed this scent to further whiffs of steamed dough and menthol outside a massage parlor, then got distracted by a cloud of incense and darted after it in pursuit—directly into the path of an oncoming biker, whom I admittedly hadn’t smelled coming. .This ignoble pastime, known as a 'smellwalk' in academic circles, was guided by a kit I downloaded from the Web site of Kate McLean, a designer and researcher at England’s Canterbury Christ Church University. ..."
New Yorker
How to Explore a City Through Its Scents - Fold Magazine
Sensory Maps

Black Ace (December 21, 1905 – November 7, 1972)

"Black Ace was the most frequently used stage name of the American Texas blues musician, Babe Kyro Lemon Turner (December 21, 1905 – November 7, 1972), who was also known as B.K. Turner, Black Ace Turner or Babe Turner. Born in Hughes Springs, Texas, United States, he was raised on the family farm, and taught himself to play guitar, performing in east Texas from the late 1920s on. During the early 1930s he began playing with Smokey Hogg and Oscar 'Buddy' Woods, a Hawaiian-style guitarist who played with the instrument flat on his lap. Turner then bought a National steel guitar, and began playing what one later critic called 'Hawaii meets the Delta,' smooth and simple blues. In 1937, Turner recorded six songs (possibly with Hogg as second guitarist) for Chicago's Decca Records in Dallas, including the blues song 'Black Ace'. In the same year, he started a radio show on KFJZ in Fort Worth, using the cut as a theme song, and soon assumed the name. ..."
Wikipedia
Arhoolie
American Music
YouTube: I Am The Black Ace, Whisky And Woman, You Gonna Need My Help Someday, Golden Slipper, Legs Too Little, Lowing Heifer, Triffling Woman

Puerto Rico Sketchbook: The Artists with the Shovels

"Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi has lost track of how many times he’s been to Barrio Paloma Abajo since the hurricane hit. As he drove up the vertiginous roads of the Cordillera Central, he ticked off what he and his colleagues at Defend PR have accomplished so far. They were working with an architect to rebuild houses wrecked by Maria. They brought seeds and water filters and set up a solar-powered cinema. Solar lights, mosquito nets, batteries, bug spray, rat traps. They drove kids to a local comedy show. They installed tarps on roofs and brought chain saws to cut down the dangling tree branches and shoveled debris from the broken bridge. They organized themselves into brigades to clean wrecked farms. Jacobs-Fantauzzi rolled up his sleeve and showed me a trail of red welts. Ants, he suspected. Jacobs-Fantauzzi is a filmmaker, not an aid worker. Defend PR, the media collective he cofounded, had been known for its documentary shorts, not for delivering hundreds of meals, as they planned to that day. ..."
The Paris Review

2016 May: Molly Crabapple

10 Moroccan Musicians You Need to Know

"Morocco has a rich musical culture with flavors of Berber, Spanish, Arabic, and Saharan influences. Berbers, indigenous North Africans, have a proud heritage of folk music predating Arabic times, with a sound distinct from Chaabi – a popularized folk genre. Gnawa music originates from sub-saharan Africa and involves a minimal combination of hejhouj (a three-string camel skin bass instrument), percussion, and religious or mystical chanting. Here are 10 Moroccan musicians utilizing these traditions. ..."
The Culture Trip (Video)

What Is the ‘Russia Story’?

"In late 2016, top United States intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government directed a massive cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and putting Donald J. Trump in the White House. This broad campaign included hacking and leaking Democratic emails, pushing false information on Russian media outlets, gaining access to state and local electoral boards, and using social media to disseminate misinformation. President Trump and his advisers have been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings, emails and phone calls between Russian officials and people connected to Mr. Trump during the campaign and presidential transition. ..."
NY Times

Astoria Hotel

The Astoria in 1956.
"As a young man in the late 1800s, Henry E. Braden, Sr. moved to New Orleans from the cotton fields outside Natchitoches, Louisiana. He opened a restaurant here called the Astoria, which he eventually expanded to include a barbershop, pool room, tavern, hotel, and the Astoria Gardens dance hall, one of the largest in the South for black audiences. (Successive generations of Bradens would go on to serve prominently in the civic life of New Orleans, often as the first people of color in their respective positions.) For decades the Astoria was a fixture of African-American society, hosting artists like Duke Ellington and Count Basie and luminaries of the black intelligentsia. For visitors turned away elsewhere in the Jim Crow South, the dignified service at the hotel was an oasis. It was popular for locals, too, who came here to eat, drink, dance. ..."
A Closer Walk (Audio)
The Birth of Jazz and the Jews of South Rampart Street

Learn Constellations with a Planisphere

"The movements of the stars have taxed the human mind throughout the ages — from ancient Babylonians seeking to predict sky events, to Greek philosophers wrestling with the structure of the universe, to beginning skywatchers today trying to figure out where's the Andromeda Galaxy. The turning of the celestial sphere perplexes everyone who takes up skywatching, but sooner or later the picture snaps into place and the whole setup becomes obvious. However, those who think the sky's motion is inherently simple should try explaining to a beginner why every star follows a different curved path across the sky at a different speed. And why do some stars move from west to east while most move east to west? Can you explain why some constellations turn somersaults during the night while others just tilt from side to side? ..."
Sky and Telescope
W - Planisphere
How to Make a Star Wheel the Simple Way
YouTube: How to Use a Star Chart

A Few Thoughts from Monet on Those Stacks of Wheat

Wheatstacks (End of Summer), (1890-91).
"Beginning in 1890, Claude Monet spent one year painting giant stacks of wheat. Here is his journal from that time. May 14, 1890. Saw giant stacks of wheat today. I think I am going to start painting those. June 8, 1890. Having a tough time painting these giant stacks of wheat. I guess I assumed I’d blow through them no problem because they’re just giant stacks of wheat and I’m a professional painter, but getting all the wheat to look good is tough. June 30, 1890. Painted a decent stack of wheat today. Going to call it, 'Wheatstack in the Sunlight, Morning Effect.' Something like that. Confession: I hated literally everything about painting that stack of wheat, especially how the light bounced off it. But here’s the thing: I have to paint the light right. People go apeshit about the light and how accurate the light is. They ask annoying questions like, 'Are the shadows accurate based on the light?' And I always think to myself, 'Who gives a fuck? It’s a painting of a red boat and it looks like a million bucks.' ..."
New Yorker

Sultan's Picnic - Rabih Abou-Khalil (1992)

"Composer and oudist Rabih Abou-Khalil generates variety and interest by bringing aboard different guest musicians for each album. The personnel on Sultan's Picnic is so similar to that of Blue Camel that one might expect them to sound similar. But there's a key difference in the presence of Howard Levy on Sultan's Picnic. Levy is a talented harmonica player who has done a lot of offbeat work, including a stint with Béla Fleck & the Flecktones. Despite the power of Charlie Mariano on alto sax and Kenny Wheeler on trumpet, this album is dominated by the idioms of the harmonica, specifically the jazzy, quirky, lackadaisical idiom popularized by Levy's work with the Flecktones. This domination is noticeable from the beginning, on 'Sunrise in Montreal.' Occasionally, the harmonica recedes to the background and allows other instruments to shine through. On 'Solitude,' Levy provides only the occasional raspy sound effect, while Abou-Khalil steps forward with an instrument he had custom-built: the bass oud. ..."
allmusic
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: Sultan's Picnic (Full Album)

La Notte - Michelangelo Antonioni (1961)

"Michelangelo Antonioni was a cinematic cubist. Fragmenting time and space, the Italian master created a potent new language for storytelling, and in the process charted a topography of modern ennui. His work’s glamorously broody visual surfaces might have been mimicked in perfume commercials — they were hardly the only artistic invention to be co-opted by advertising — but no one has quite duplicated the way he built poetic depth from narrative shards. However exquisitely his characters suffer, their search for meaning is real. Two of the screen’s most melancholic beauties, Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni, are the searchers in 'La Notte,' which is receiving its first major stateside reissue in more than half a century. The virtuosic 1961 drama is the second film in what’s regarded as a trilogy, beginning with 'L’Avventura,' Antonioni’s international breakthrough, and concluding with 'L’Eclisse.' Made in quick succession, the three pictures explore disillusion and romantic emptiness, and they all feature Monica Vitti. ..."
LA Times: Michelangelo Antonioni's melancholy classic 'La Notte' gets a stunning restoration
W - La Notte
senses of cinema
Guardian
YouTube: La Notte Trailer, 1961

2011 September: Red Desert (1964), 2014 December: The Passenger (1975), 2017 April: Blow-Up (1966), 2017 October: L'Avventura (1960)

Work in Progress - Robert Wyatt EP (1983)

"Though I love the sparse keyboard and percussion sound of much of his 80s' work the songs don't always suit the style, but here everything works beautifully. Three of the songs are covers but when they're of this quality who can complain? His cover of Peter Gabriel's Biko is restrained and haunting where Gabriel's original - though good - was a touch bombastic. Equally great is the one original song, Amber And The Amberines, inspired by the Reagan administration's illegal invasion of Grenada in 1983. - silver_plane"
Rate Your Music
Discogs
YouTube: Biko (Robert Wyatt version), Amber & the Amberines, Yolanda, Te Recuerdo Amanda

2010 November: Robert Wyatt, 2011 October: Sea Song, 2012 October: Comicopera, 2013 March: The Last Nightingale, 2013 September: Solar Flares Burn for You (2003), 2014 March: Cuckooland (2003), 2014 October: Robert Wyatt Story (BBC Four, 2001), 2014 December: Different Every Time (2014), 2016 March: Interviews (2014), 2016 June: Dondestan (Revisited)(1998), 2016 September: Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975), 2017 January: '68 (2013), 2017 May: Shleep (1997)

What to Wear to Smash the State

"In late August, a crowd of thousands — primarily leftists and liberals — cascaded down Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley, Calif. They were marching on a spattering of right-wingers, Trump supporters and Nazis who were gathering under the mission to say 'no to Marxism in America.' At the front of the march were about 100 people dressed in head-to-toe black. According to many people present, this was the largest so-called black bloc they’d seen. This medley of black-clad anarchists, anti-fascists (known as 'antifa' activists) and their fellow travelers was a response to the previous week’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. There, protests ended with 19 injured and 32-year-old Heather Heyer killed when James Fields, an admirer of Hitler who demonstrated with white supremacists, drove his car into a crowd. This mass of solid black descending upon the park in Berkeley, hunting for fascists, was an intimidating aesthetic. That’s by design. ..."
NY Times
The Femme’s Guide to Riot Fashion
W - Antifa
THE BLACK BLOC WHICH WAS NOT
A Taxonomy of Protest Clothing
Staying Safe in the Streets
the accidental uniform of the antifa

Spinal columns: the joy of the collection

DISCO by Mark Vessey
"‘A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot,” Alan Bennett once wrote. For a while, e-readers and music streaming appeared set to replace their physical counterparts, but the resurgence in vinyl and printed book sales suggests otherwise. For the past decade, Brighton-based photographic artist Mark Vessey has been capturing the beauty of these objects in a series of photographs: his Collections series documents magazines, books, vinyl records and other assorted items, stacked on top of one another or neatly lined up. For Vessey, 35, the passion for collecting started with Attitude magazine. Growing up in Chingford, on the outskirts of north-east London, Vessey would pick up the gay lifestyle title every time he was in central London – it wasn’t stocked in Chingford – and it showed him a life outside the 'bland, safe area' where he was. ..."
Guardian
Guardian - Collectors' corner: book and music libraries – in pictures

Fela Kuti - Koola Lobitos / The '69 Los Angeles Sessions (1969)

"A new reissue that unearths a series of previously unreleased sides recorded between 1964 and 1968 with Fela's first band, Koola Lobitos. These songs are steeped in the style of highlife jazz that was popular in African clubs, a fiery hybrid of Latin jazz, rhythm and blues, even calypso. With most of the vocals sung in his native Nigerian, the music is bubbling over with punchy brass arrangements, simmering percussion, and bass grooves that mortar the sound. Highlights include an ode to Nigerian nightlife, 'Highlife Time,' and 'Omuti Tide,' with Fela's tongue-in-cheek phrasing of 'When the Saints Go Marching In' during his trumpet solo. The '69 L.A. Sessions find Fela & Nigeria '70 fleshing out the sound that would bring him acclaim and popularity. Ensconced in the knowledge of the American black struggle of the time from a female companion in Los Angeles, his approach went from bright and snappy to contemplative and hypnotic without compromising the groove. ..."
allmusic
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: The '69 Los Angeles Sessions

Paterson - Jim Jarmusch (2016)

"Jim Jarmusch is among the rarest and most precious filmmakers of our time, because, at his best—as he is in his new film, 'Paterson'—he conjures an entire world of his own imagination. He does so with his wry and tamped-down tone, his loping rhythms, his puckishly frontal compositions, his worn-in sense of design, the winking terseness of his dialogue—and the loving precision of his documentary-rooted observations, which anchor his microcosmic cinematic world, with its austerely whimsical passions, in the world at large. 'Paterson,' the story of a poet and his poems, is set in Paterson, New Jersey, and its protagonist is a bus driver named Paterson, who is played by Adam Driver. Paterson the driver writes poetry; he thinks poetry while walking to and from the depot, he writes in his notebook (his so-called secret notebook) at the wheel of his bus while waiting for his shift to begin; he writes during his lunch hour while sitting on a bench beside his favorite place, the Great Falls of the Passaic River, with his copy of Frank O’Hara’s 'Lunch Poems' beside his lunchbox; he writes at his cramped desk in his basement, surrounded by building supplies and hardware. ..."
New Yorker: Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” and the Myth of the Solitary Artist By Richard Brody
W - Paterson
TIME: Jim Jarmusch Talks About His New Movie, Paterson, and the Exuberance of Great Poetry
The Atlantic: Paterson Is a Quiet, Considered Masterpiece
YouTube: Official Trailer #1 (2016)

2014 October: Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, 2015 December: Broken Flowers - Jim Jarmusch (2005).,2016 October: An Immersive Audio Tour of the East Village’s Famed Poetry Scene, Narrated by Jim Jarmusch, 2016 July: The Philosophy of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic Persona, 2016 December: Jim Jarmusch Lists His Favorite Poets: Dante, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery & More

Marcel Proust - The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925)

Wikipedia - "Volume Five: The Prisoner. The Narrator is living with Albertine in his family's apartment, to Françoise's distrust and his absent mother's chagrin. He marvels that he has come to possess her, but has grown bored with her. He mostly stays home, but has enlisted Andrée to report on Albertine's whereabouts, as his jealousy remains. ... Volume Six: The Fugitive. The Narrator is anguished at Albertine's departure and absence. He dispatches Saint-Loup to convince her aunt Mme Bontemps to send her back, but Albertine insists the Narrator should ask, and she will gladly return. The Narrator lies and replies he is done with her, but she just agrees with him. He writes to her that he will marry Andrée, then hears from Saint-Loup of the failure of his mission to the aunt. Desperate, he begs Albertine to return, but receives word: she has died in a riding accident. ..."
W - In Search of Lost Time
The 14-Minute Marcel Proust
amazon

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 August: Paintings in Proust - Eric Karpeles, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: "Paintings in Proust" - View of the Piazza del Popolo, Giovanni Battista Piranes, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online

Live Textural Ambient Synthesizer Performance

Live Jam #25 - Slow evolving drone / Ambient - Self playing patch on Eurorack modular synthesizer
"Monorail, the solo musician not the retro-futuristic vision of transportation utopia, has a running series of live synthesizer jams on his YouTube channel. The styles and tools vary from jam to jam, though there is usually a modular synth at the core. Some might argue that the contemporary rise of the modular synth is itself a form of retro-futurism. If you scroll through his video archive you can chart, in the thumbnail images, the steady progression of his studio:

... This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at Monorail’s YouTube channel. Monorail is Rijnder Kamerbeek, based in Berlin, Germany."
disquiet (Video)

Walden on the Rocks - Ariel Dorfman

J.M.W. Turner: Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, 1834
"The bodies are strewn everywhere along the beach. Burials are complicated because nobody knows the names of the dead—mostly women and children fleeing famine and poverty, trying to reach the land of plenty that has been promised to them but finding, instead, an early end in turbulent waters. Spectators gape at the debris from the recent shipwreck 'cracked up like an eggshell on the rocks,' while others go about their business. ... This scene of devastation and indifference seems torn from the latest headlines or photos from around the world, just one more group of refugees appearing fleetingly on our screens and in our consideration. ... The eyewitness referred to above, without whom we might not remember the incident at all, was none other than Henry David Thoreau. ..."
NYBooks

November 2007: J. M. W. Turner, 2009 April: Turner & Italy, 2011 June: J. M. W. Turner - 1, 2014 June: In Which We Find His Theory Of Color Implausible, 2014 May: Ruin Lust, 2014 September: The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free, 2016 June: Turner’s Whaling Pictures, 2017 March: Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages through Time, 2017 July: Turner set free: Nature as roughhouse theater by W.S. Di Piero

2009 April: Henry David Thoreau, 2012 September: Walden, 2015 March: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), 2017 March: Civil Disobedience (1849), 2017 April: The Maine Woods (1864), 2017 June: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, 2017 July: Pond Scum - Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia. By Kathryn Schulz, 2017 July: Walden, a Game, 2017 October: Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece

As Greenland Melts, Where’s the Water Going?

"In the summer of 2015, two New York Times journalists joined a team of researchers in Greenland that was conducting a unique experiment: directly measuring a river of meltwater runoff on the top of the ice. Now, the scientists have published the results of that work. A key finding — that not as much meltwater flows immediately through the ice sheet and drains to the ocean as previously estimated — may have implications for sea-level rise, one of the major effects of climate change. The scientists say it appears that some of the meltwater is retained in porous ice instead of flowing to the bottom of the ice sheet and out to sea. ..."
NY Times

Vermont Progressive Party

Wikipedia - "The Vermont Progressive Party is a political party in the United States. It was founded in 1999 and is active only in the U.S. state of Vermont. The party is largely social democratic and progressive. ... The Vermont Progressive Party originated with the independent campaign of Bernie Sanders for mayor of Burlington (prior to being elected mayor Sanders was a leader in the VT Liberty Union Party). ... Progressives started running for the Burlington City Council and getting elected from the poor, student, and middle-class areas of Burlington. They cleaned up the waterfront, which had been left trashed by industry, started citywide recycling, and established a public/private partnership with a land trust to make low- and moderate-income rental and home ownership available. The Progressive Administration started a women’s small business technical assistance program and an affirmative action ordinance for the awarding of city contracts. ..."
Wikipedia
Vermont Progressive Party
Vermont’s Cautionary Tale
Dare to Win: A Brief History of Vermont’s Progressive Party
NY Times: As Vermont Goes, So Goes the Nation?