An Excellent Year for the Eta Aquariid Meteor Shower

The Eta Aquariid radiant is shown here from latitude 30° north (Houston, Cairo, Delhi, Shanghai) 90 minutes before sunrise. Farther north, the radiant is lower when the sky starts to get light. Shower members can appear anywhere across the sky, but they all trace their paths backwards to the radiant.
"If you haven't paid much attention to the Eta Aquariid shower due to its early hour, it's time to commit. These speedy spitballs from the constellation Aquarius may be the last good meteor show for the remainder of the year. You can blame the Moon. The richest showers — the August Perseids and December Geminids — will take a severe hit from moonlight this year. In both cases, the Moon will be at or near full and up most of the night. Even October's Orionids will only limp along thanks to a last quarter Moon. ... Maximum occurs Sunday morning, May 5th, in the wee hours before the start of dawn. That means you'll need to be outside watching from about 3–4:30 a.m. To make sure you don't miss that window, click here for your sunrise time and back up about 1 hour and 40 minutes to figure the start of morning twilight. Then back up one more hour to allow time to view the shower under a dark sky. ..."
Sky & Telescope
W - Eta Aquariid
YouTube: Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower- Early May 2019

Eta Aquariids are dribs and drabs of Halley's Comet. Perturbations by planets and the Sun have caused the particles to spread out into a ribbon centered on Halley's orbit. Earth plows through the debris in the outbound leg of the comet's orbit every May and the inbound leg every October.

Epic Vinyls from Brazil

"Based in Copenhagen, Epic Vinyls from Brazil is set to bring you new sounds from the past in the shape of DJ sets and mixtapes consisting of outstanding Brazilian songs that you most likely haven’t heard before. The EVFB tracks are without exception from a collection of vinyl records in which the major part has been found on numerous travels to Brazil since the year 2000. Since 2014, EVFB has played festivals, toured in Europe and Brazil, and supported Brazilian icons such as Jorge Ben, Marcos Valle, Azymuth and Emicida. Currently in the pipeline is the completion of the third mix in a trilogy of 'compacto mixes' with strictly Brazilian 7-inches and launching the second Afro Brazil Orixá mixtape. ..."
Discogs Mix 65 – Epic Vinyls from Brazil (Audio)
Travelling off the grid with Epic Vinyls from Brazil (interview) (Audio)
Soundcloud: Schack - DJ SCHACK
YouTube: Epic Vinyls From Brazil • Vinyl Set 100% Brazilian 7" records • Le Mellotron

Thimar - Anouar Brahem (1997)

"A strikingly attractive 'transcultural' project initiated by Tunisian oud virtuoso Anouar Brahem, who is both an innovator and a traditionalist in the deepest sense (he has been credited with 'restoring the sovereignty of the oud' in Tunisian music). There is no glib fusion of traditions on Thimar but rather a coming together of three very distinctive musicians who sacrifice none of their individuality in the search for common ground. Arab classical music and jazz are the reference points here, but Anouar Brahem, John Surman and Dave Holland meet as improvisors not limited by genre definition."
ECM
W - Thimar
All About Jazz
Discogs
amazon
DailyMotion: Thimar with Dave Holland and John Surman, Montreal International Jazz Festival 2011
YouTube: Talwin (Full)

2012 April: Le Pas Du Chat Noir, 2014 June: Astrakan Café (2000)

Crisis in Venezuela: What We Know So Far

Opposition demonstrators taking cover from tear gas near the Generalisimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base, also known as La Carlota, in Caracas on Tuesday.
"A day after Venezuela’s opposition declared a rebellion against President Nicolás Maduro, nervous uncertainty gripped the nation on Wednesday, with both sides calling for legions of supporters to take to the streets. Antigovernment demonstrators, accompanied by members of the security forces, heeded calls by the opposition leader Juan Guaidó to rise up against Mr. Maduro, in what he called the 'final phase' in the ousting of the socialist leader. Each man appealed to his supporters to make a major, public show of strength on Wednesday, raising the risk of violent confrontation. ..."
NY Times (Video)
New Republic: The Venezuela Coup’s Risky Dependence on Foreign Opinion

Juan Guiadó

2016 November: Venezuela, a Failing State, 2017 July: The Battle for Venezuela, Through a Lens, Helmet and Gas Mask, 2018 November: The Politics of Food in Venezuela, 2019 February: Venezuela’s Very Normal Revolution, 2019 March: Venezuela’s Deadly Blackout Highlights the Need for a Negotiated Resolution of the Crisis

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - View at Guernsey (1883)

"In the fall of 1883, Renoir spent a month on Guernsey, an island off the coast of Normandy. This vibrant work depicts one of the island’s most picturesque locations. The path along the bottom of the painting shows the route taken by visitors to admire the bay’s rocky coastline. Renoir’s energetic brushstrokes record the foliage, water, and clouds, all animated by a fresh breeze and brilliant sunlight."
The Clark
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

2010 February: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 2010 July: Late Renoir, 2012 February: Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting, 2012 September: Renoir: Between Bohemia and Bourgeoisie, 2014 December: Dance at Le moulin de la Galette (1876), 2015 June: Dance at Bougival (1883), 2015 December: Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81)

The SoHo Memory Project: A Conversation with Yukie Ohta

"'The story of SoHo is sort of the original story of adaptive reuse,' says Yukie Ohta, who was born and raised in the extraordinary New York neighborhood, which was ushered by artists from industrial to residential in the span of a few decades. Walking today among the painstakingly restored cast-iron buildings such as the 143-year-old “commercial palace” that is home to The Apartment by The Line, it is difficult to believe that SoHo was once viewed as an enormous slum ripe for demolition by the expressway that, thanks to locals and other urban activists, remained a gleam in Robert Moses’s eye. Ohta, who lives in SoHo today with her husband and young daughter, remembers her childhood neighborhood not as a glamorous haven for artists but as a small community of families, all doing their best to domesticate industrial lofts. These were places of makeshift kitchens and bathrooms, typically installed through a bartered exchange with a handy neighbor; wintertime rituals of stapling tarps to the windows as insulation; and blackout curtains to conceal illegal living situations from the eyes of passing authorities. ..."
The Line

Opened in 1920 by Neapolitan immigrants Nunzio and Jennie Dapolito, Vesuvio was a Prince Street institution. The beloved bakery closed in 2008 and reopened the following year as the Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery, preserving the lime-hued storefront of the original, which is pictured here in 1990.

2014 November: Is this the most wonderful sign in Soho?, 2013 September: SoHo, 2017 August: Two Prince Street relics on a pre-SoHo building

The Premier League’s Parity Problem

Liverpool and Manchester City have raced away from their pursuers. But is a top-heavy table good for the Premier League?
"LONDON — A few weeks before Leicester City clinched its improbable, unforgettable Premier League title in the spring of 2016, an executive from one of English soccer’s dominant Big Six clubs was in a basement conference room at a four-star London hotel, explaining that it must not be allowed to happen again. He was not immune to the romance of it all, he explained; he admired how Leicester had made the most of its comparatively scant resources to take its once-in-120-year shot. He even hoped that the international affection and attention the club had generated would benefit the league as a whole. But a repeat, another uplifting underdog tale, he said, could not be sold as prima facie evidence of the Premier League’s strength, its innate competitiveness, its much-trumpeted unpredictability. It would, instead, be a sign of weakness, proof that the superpowers, for all their vast wealth, had fallen back to Earth. ..."
NY Times

Tottenham Hotspur’s bets on young stars and a new billion-dollar stadium are already paying off.

Summoning the servants in the Frick mansion

"Today, the former Henry Clay Frick mansion on Fifth Avenue and 70th Street is a spectacular art museum featuring Frick’s extensive collection of Old Masters paintings and 19th century decorative arts, among other treasures. Frick always intended his mansion to become a museum after both he and his wife (bottom right) died—and as he planned, the museum opened to the public in 1935. (Frick died in 1919; his wife, Adelaide Childs Frick, in 1931.) Since then, the second-floor family rooms where Frick lived with his wife and daughter, Helen (with her father at left in 1910) have been off-limits to the public, and just about all remnants of the family life of this titan of industry have vanished. ..."

Ephemeral New York

Mur Murs - Agnès Varda (1980)

Wikipedia - "Mur Murs is a 1980 documentary film directed by Agnès Varda. The film explores the murals of Los Angeles, California. The vast majority of the scenes of the film are shots of murals, all of which are located in the city of Los Angeles, often with the mural's painter or model staged in front of the mural for dramatic effect. The film alternates between voiceover narration by Agnès Varda and commentary about the murals provided by the murals' creators, as well as commentary provided by locals living in the area. The film also includes several musical performances, including by Chicano punk band Los Illegals. A significant amount of the film's attention is focused on work by Chicano artists, although artists from other backgrounds are also covered extensively. The film also dwells on the role of state violence, both as it affects the communities the murals are situated in and the murals themselves. The film's title is a pun: literally 'Wall Walls' in French, Varda suggests that the murals on the walls are in fact murmuring to each other. ..."
Wikipedia
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Marshall Shaffer on Agnès Varda’s ‘Mur murs’
NY Times: AGNES VARDA'S MURALS (Oct. 2, 1981)
MUBI: Mur Murs

May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000), 2013 September: Cinévardaphoto (2004), 2014 July: Black Panthers (1968 doc.), 2014 October: Art on Screen: A Conversation with Agnès Varda, 2015 September: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), 2017 April: Agnès Varda’s Art of Being There, 2017 April: AGNÈS VARDA with Alexandra Juhasz, 2017 August: Agnès Varda on her life and work - Artforum, 2017 October: Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience, 2018 March: Faces Places - Agnès Varda and JR (2017), 2018 July: Vagabond (1985), 2019 March: Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90

J. Greinke / Pierre Perret ‎– Fragment 1 (1989)

"Pierre Perret - French environmentalist working with Musique concrète and collage techniques to create dreamscapes of environmental sounds with field recordings, female vocals, ethnic music recordings, electronic sounds, library tapes... Jeff Greinke is a musician, composer, performer, sound sculptor, and visual artist. Jeff Greinke began composing and performing music in 1980 while studying meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. After moving to Seattle in 1982, Jeff formed the production company and recording label, INTREPID, through which he produced his first LP, Cities in Fog. He has since released twenty other recordings on various U.S. and European labels. He has composed music for film, video, dance, theatre, radio, and art installations."
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Fragment 1 39:23

2009 December: Jeff Greinke, 2012 September: Cities in Fog, 2013 May: Timbral Planes, 2015 March: Lost Terrain (1992)

At Eternity’s Gate - Julian Schnabel (2018)

"In 'At Eternity’s Gate,' a vivid, intensely affecting portrait of Vincent van Gogh toward the end of his life, the artist walks and walks. Head bowed, he looks like a man on a mission, though at other times he seems more like a man at prayer. Often dressed in a blue shirt, he carries an easel, brushes and paint strapped to his back, trudging in light that changes from golden to wintry blue. One day in 1888, he puts his battered boots on the red tile floor of his room in Arles, France. He quickly begins creating a simple painting of them; the original now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The journey of those shoes from humble floor to museum wall tells a familiar story about van Gogh, whose painful life is part of a lucrative brand known as Vincent the Mad Genius. In 'At Eternity’s Gate,' the director Julian Schnabel imagines a different Vincent. This Vincent — a magnificent Willem Dafoe — is not defined by that brand but by the art with which he at once communes with the world and transcends it. ..."
NY Times - ‘At Eternity’s Gate’ Review: An Exquisite Portrayal of van Gogh at Work (Video)
W - At Eternity’s Gate
NPR - 'At Eternity's Gate': Dafoe Is Van Gogh, And You Should Go
amazon
YouTube: AT ETERNITY'S GATE - Official Trailer - HD

2010 March: Van Gogh Museum, 2010 May: Why preserve Van Gogh's palette?, 2012 April: Van Gogh Up Close, 2015 May: Van Gogh and Nature, 2016 January: Van Gogh's Bedrooms, 2016 November: Wheat Fields - Van Gogh series

Listen to Last Seen, a True-Crime Podcast That Takes You Inside an Unsolved, $500 Million Art Heist

"In the early morning of March 18, 1990, two thieves entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and stole 13 pieces of precious art, including paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt. To this day, those paintings, valued at $500 million dollars, have never been recovered. The story of the bold heist and the various attempts to recover the paintings--they get told in a 10-part series of podcasts called Last Seen. Created by WBUR and The Boston Globe, the true-crime podcast 'takes us inside the ongoing effort to bring back the jewels of the Gardner collection.' You can listen to the engrossing episodes online, or via iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify. Or simply stream the episodes below. And if you know anything that cracks the case, there's a $5 million dollar reward. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2012 April: Renzo Piano’s Addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, 2013 March: Gardner Museum Heist Case Might Crack, 2014 April: Carla Fernández: The Barefoot Designer: A Passion for Radical Design and Community, 2015 December: The Scandalous Legacy of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Collector of Art and Men

NIGHT OF 100 SOLOS: NEW YORK - Deborah Jowitt on the New York celebration of Merce Cunningham's 100th birthday

Night of 100 Solos: A Centenary Event. Performance view, Brooklyn Academy of Music, April 16, 2019.
"On April 16, One Hundred Years Ago, Merce Cunningham was born. On April 15, 2019, I was sitting in the balcony of the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House among the hundred or so people watching the final run-through of the 'Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event.' Can I say that I assisted at the memorial’s birth? Probably not. The program took even more risks than the patchworked material that his company used to perform worldwide as Events. Each of the seventy-five dancers celebrating his birthday (twenty-five in New York, and the same number in London and in Los Angeles) learned short passages culled from his pieces. In New York, these were taught by a bevy of former Cunningham company members and staged by two of them: Patricia Lent and her associate, Jean Freebury. Chance procedures, rather than choices, surely governed some of their decisions. Talk about a rainbow coalition. None of the people onstage had been members of Cunningham’s company, although many had taken classes in his technique or been influenced by his ideas. ..."
ARTFORUM (Video)
Harkness Dance Fest celebrates 2 milestones

2009 July: Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies, 2012 November: Dancing around the Bride

Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (2018)

"The names of the women pioneers of Abstract Expressionism were often eclipsed by those of the men. Only in recent years has the work of artists like Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, and Lee Krasner been reassessed, not as a footnote to a mostly male narrative, but in its own right, for its radicalism and impact on art history. These women, along with Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler, made up the movement as much as men like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell did. To a greater extent than their male counterparts, they also made larger sacrifices. Their struggles were personal but also public. They were often uncompromising in their resistance to the status quo. That’s what’s clear in author Mary Gabriel’s new book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, an epic narrative of these five artists who challenged art world expectations. ..."
Women on the verge of Abstract Expressionism
Grace and Will: An Excerpt from Mary Gabriel’s New Book ‘Ninth Street Women’ on Painter Grace Hartigan and Art Market Changes in the 1950s
NY Times: ‘Ninth Street Women’ Shines a Welcome New Light on New York’s Postwar Art Scene
amazon
YouTube: Ninth Street Women: Mary Gabriel in conversation with Deborah Solomon | Live from the Whitney

Grace Hartigan circa 1951 on the roof of her studio.

Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore - Blowing in From Chicago (1957)

"Both born in 1931 and raised in Chicago, tenor saxophonists Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore scaled the heights of hard bop style motifs with a 1957 collaborative project that served as their shared album-length debut. A touch less intense than contemporaneous blowin’ sessions (like, uh, A Blowin’ Session [1957]), the aptly named Blowing in From Chicago showcases both the fluid phrasing of its constituent soloists and the deep, almost unfathomably tight rhythmic pocket generated by bassist Curly Russell, pianist Horace Silver, and ever-propulsive drummer Art Blakey. Doubling up on a particular instrument in a performance context almost always engenders an element of competitiveness, but this album finds each performer totally at ease with themselves and with their fellow musicians. Jazzwax.com tells me that Jordan is the one who mellows out whereas Gilmore plays with a more aggressive tone, and that befits their statuses as, respectively, roots-oriented narrator of human consciousness and adventurous Sun Ra associate. ..."
Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore, Blowing in From Chicago (1957)
W - Blowing in from Chicago
Doc Wendell’s Prescription For Bop
W - Clifford Jordan, W - John Gilmore
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Blowin in From Chicago 7 videos

2016 August: Sun Ra - The Cry of Jazz (1958)

Sebastien Waknine: “Learning from Migrants and Refugees” In Barcelona

"Owing to the scarceness of resources that are usually allotted to those who arrive as refugees, Street Artist and muralist Sebastien Waknine relies solely upon the thinnest piece of charcoal as he works on this new wall. “Learning from Migrants and Refugees” is the name of the collection of scenes that document the situations that people can be in when escaping from strife and fear – the human aspect of appealing to the help of another society. After five weeks of intensive work, Waknine stood aside during a public introduction as a Syrian man held the microphone and described the scenes to an assemble crowd in Barcelona. ..."
Brooklyn Street Art
Instagram

Judah Eskender Tafari

"The seventies was the so called ‘golden era’ where reggae flourished with innovation, inspiration and power. Roots music was at its very peak during most of that period, and the activities down at Sir Dodd’s 13 Brentford Road, the address for Jamaica Recording Ltd AKA Studio One, was perhaps not in the same productive scheme as it had been a decade earlier, but the creativity was nonetheless extraordinary. Albums by names like Jennifer Lara, Sugar Minott, Pablove Black, Johnny Osbourne and Freddie McGregor springs to mind, as well as several brilliant 45’s by a plethora of artists. ... The songwriter, Ronald Merrills, known to one and all as Judah Eskender Tafari, was a shadowy figure in the music until the long-serving Small Axe fanzine gave us a more detailed history of the man about twelve years ago. It was a long overdue piece to say the least, but indeed very welcome. ..."
Reggae Vibes
YouTube: "Ta Fa Ri" & Sound Dimension - Danger In Your Eyes + Version, Danger In Your Eyes Riddim Megamix - Revolutionary Brothers Music, Jah Light + version

From the Purveyors of New York’s Best Mozzarella, a New Cafe

The main Di Palo’s shop, on the corner of Grand and Mott Streets, where you can buy Italian cheeses, prosciuttos, salamis, pastas and olive oils, as well as freshly made ricotta and mozzarella.
"With the new Di Palo osteria getting ready to open, there was excitement on Mott Street last week. This is a 21st-century addition to Di Palo’s 109-year-old Italian food shop just around the corner, on Grand Street, and the enoteca (wine store) next to it. At the new place, which will open officially on Monday, you can drink wine, nibble cheese — deep blue Gorgonzola, a creamy ricotta, pecorino studded with fresh peppercorns — or an ephemerally light slice of prosciutto, and there will be events and talks about Italian food and wine. I’ve been coming to Di Palo’s all my life, and I rarely make it out of the store without biting into the mozzarella made there, the milk dripping down my chin. ...  There are no pushcarts on Mott now, but according to Lou Di Palo, who owns Di Palo’s with his sister Marie and brother Sal, the street was jammed with them in 1910, when his great-grandfather Savino Di Palo opened a tiny dairy, where he made ricotta and mozzarella, at 131 Mott. In 1903, Savino fled poverty and oppression in the Lucania region of Italy, where he was a farmer and cheesemaker; when he arrived in New York, he did what he knew. ..."
NY Times
W - Mozzarella
YouTube: How Italy’s Biggest Mozzarella Balls Are Made

Savino Di Palo, the current owners' father, in front of the store on Grand Street in 1948.

The People’s Emergency

"In France, the neon-yellow vests known as gilets jaunes are like proverbial opinions: Everyone has one, or at least every motorist does. In case of a breakdown, drivers are supposed to don these reflective garments and lay a high-visibility 'warning triangle' (also provided in one’s kit de sécurité) on the road in front of their vehicles. When men and women wearing yellow vests began slowing down traffic at hundreds of ronds-points (traffic circles) throughout the countryside last November, and then massing by the thousands on Saturdays in Paris, Bordeaux, and Toulouse, it was hard to dismiss them as a bunch of radical-fringe demonstrators. They were wearing the uniform the government itself had asked good citizens to wear to make themselves visible in an emergency.
 ..."
New Republic (Audio)
W - Yellow vests movement

2018 December: Paris Burning

Kologbo ‎– Africa Is The Future (2017)

"Guitar legend Oghene Kologbo was born in Warri, Nigeria in 1957. His father was the well known highlife musician Joe King Kologbo. When Kologbo was a teenager, he began performing with the revolutionary Afrobeat master Fela Kuti. Kologbo went on to record more than 50 sides with Africa 70. He played the hypnotic tenor guitar lines, but often recorded bass and rhythm guitar too. Kologbo was Fela's personal assistant and 'tape recorder'. That is, it was his job to remember the melodies Fela would sing to him late at night, then teach them to the band at rehearsal the next day. In 1978, after a show at the Berlin Jazz Festival, Kologbo left the band (along with Tony Allen and a few others) and stayed in Berlin. ..."
ParisDJs (Video/Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Don’t Mind Them

Notes from an Exiled Revolutionary

"The writer and revolutionary Victor Serge was one of the few prominent opponents of Stalin to escape the despot’s wrath. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Terror, Serge fled the Soviet Union for France. When the Nazis took Paris, in 1940, he fled to Mexico, where he spent the rest of his days in an exile rife with poverty and grief. In a sense, his notebooks became his new home, a place where he felt comfortable to contemplate everything from World War II to Russian literature, from the aftermath of the Revolution to the beauty of an erupting volcano. A new volume from New York Review Books Classics, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman, presents for the first time in English Serge’s notebooks in their entirety. Below, in a series of entries from 1944, Serge marvels at the brilliance of his daughter’s art critiques, mourns his friends Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Max Jacob, and muses on the darkness of a world at war. ..."
The Paris Review
W - Victor Serge
NYRB: Notebooks 1936–1947 by Victor Serge

Minton's Playhouse

"Minton's Playhouse is a jazz club and bar located on the first floor of the Cecil Hotel at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem and is a registered trademark of Housing and Services, Inc. a New York City nonprofit provider of supportive housing. The door to the actual club itself is at 206 West 118th Street where there is a small plaque. Minton's was founded by tenor saxophonist Henry Minton in 1938. Minton's is famous for its role in the development of modern jazz, also known as bebop, where in its jam sessions in the early 1940s, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, pioneered the new music. Minton's thrived for three decades until its decline near the end of the 1960s, and its eventual closing in 1974. After being shuttered for more than 30 years, the newly remodeled club reopened its doors on May 19, 2006, under the name Uptown Lounge at Minton's Playhouse. However, the reopened club was closed again in 2010. Remodeling began again in 2012. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: The Harlem Jazz Club Where the Spirit of Billie Holiday Lives On
Minton's Playhouse - About (Video)
YouTube: The History Of Minton's Playhouse

Billie Holiday at Minton’s Playhouse, 1953.

The Sensual Sound Studies of Annea Lockwood

"The 78-year-old performance artist and tape music composer Annea Lockwood grew up at the end of the world, in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she was immersed in the power and interconnectedness of the wild forces of nature. As a young woman, Lockwood traveled to Europe to study classical composition, but ended up falling in with what became known as the Darmstadt School, where she began composing electronic music and experimental pieces. But instead of focusing on the particulars of wires and oscillators, Lockwood’s work would draw out the innate qualities of the natural world and the human experience. Whether in her sound studies of rivers, recordings of conversations or dramatic stunts like burning a piano, Lockwood’s art is about listening deeply to what surrounds us. Recently, the composer reissued Tiger Balm, a sensual sound collage of tiger purrs, breaths, gongs and the drone of airplanes that was influenced by indigenous trance music and set the tone for much of her career. Sophie Weiner spoke to Lockwood about the experiences that formed her sensibility as an artist, her enduring interest in deep listening and what she’s learned in her half-century of composing avant-garde works. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)
W - Annea Lockwood
Lovely

2017 March: Source: Music of the Avant Garde, 1966-1974

America’s Original Socialist

Pins from Eugene Debs's various presidential campaigns.
"One hundred years ago this month, the American Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, reported to a penitentiary in Moundsville, W.V., to begin a 10-year prison term. Debs had been convicted the previous fall of violating the Espionage Act, which had been enacted shortly after the United States entered World War I with the ostensible aim of punishing citizens who provided aid to the enemy. By the time Debs went to prison, scores of his fellow Socialists had already been imprisoned under the act’s provisions. Approaching his 64th birthday in ill health, depressed and dreading separation from family and friends, Debs did not crave martyrdom. But he knew he had a role to play, one he had freely chosen, and thus remained outwardly defiant. 'Tell my comrades,' Debs declared on beginning his sentence in April 1919, 'that I entered prison doors a flaming revolutionist, my head erect, my spirit untamed and my soul unconquered.' ..."
NY Times
New Yorker: Eugene V. Debs and the Endurance of Socialism
W - Eugene V. Debs

Eugene Debs speaking in Chicago in 1912.

Small Worlds: Miniatures in Contemporary Art

Lori Nix / Kathleen Gerber, “Library (detail),” 2007.
"In 'Small Worlds: Miniatures in Contemporary Art'— at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art in Burlington from Feb. 13 to May 10, 2019—artists adopt the techniques of dioramas, model train figures and architectural models to invent tiny worlds that reflect our dreams and fears. 'Miniatures, reminiscent of our childhood playthings, can recall in us that sense of wonder for the world around us, but can also suggest dark forces hidden beneath the seduction of the small,' the opening sign says. 'As our inherent attraction to the miniature pulls us into the imagined world of the artist, real-world traumas such as violence, displacement, and environmental disaster are brought to our attention in intricate and intimate ways.' ..."
In ‘Small Worlds,’ Artists Fashion Tiny Models Of Dreams And Nightmares
SevenDays
Fleming Museum of Art
RETN: Small Worlds: Miniatures from the Collection 41:58

Detail of Mohamad Hafez's "Hiraeth," 2016

The Metamorphosis

"'Literature is fire,' Mario Vargas Llosa declared in 1967, when he accepted a prize commemorating Rómulo Gallegos, the esteemed Venezuelan novelist and former president. Gallegos represented the center-left tradition in Latin America, and Vargas Llosa was determined to challenge his audience from the left. Literature, the Peruvian novelist continued, 'means nonconformism and rebellion…. Within ten, twenty or fifty years, the hour of social justice will arrive in our countries, as it has in Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the order that despoils it, from the castes that exploit it, from the forces that now insult and repress it.' Nearly 40 years later, in 2005, Vargas Llosa received a very different sort of prize and delivered a very different kind of speech. Accepting the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute, he denounced the Cuban government and called Fidel Castro an “authoritarian fossil,” praised the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises as a “great liberal thinker,” and defended calls for privatizing pensions. It was quite a remarkable transformation. ..."
The Nation
Continental shifts
amazon: Sabers and Utopias: Visions of Latin America: Essays

2015 March: Mario Vargas Llosa

Fame Northern Soul (2019)

"Best-known for producing some of the greatest southern soul from their Muscle Shoals, Alabama studios, FAME was successful at any type of music they turned their hands to. The young writers and musicians were as keen to replicate the sound of Motown as they were to follow the innovative sounds of Stax. This CD spotlights uptempo southern grit with club classics like Clarence Carter's 'Looking For A Fox' and Arthur Conley's 'I Can't Stop; No, No, No', but the label was also capable of chasing on-the-fours dance appeal, with James Barnett's 'Keep On Talking' and Linda Carr's 'Everytime'. They could also ape the big city soul sounds of New York and LA with tracks such as Jimmy Hughes 'I'm Getting Better' and June Conquest's 'Almost Persuaded'. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
amazon
Juno: VARIOUS