Panel Approves Impeachment Articles and Sends Charges for a House Vote

"A fiercely divided House Judiciary Committee pushed President Trump to the brink of impeachment on Friday, voting along party lines to approve charges that he abused the power of his office and obstructed Congress. After a fractious two-day debate steeped in the Constitution and shaped by the realities of a hyperpartisan era in American politics, the Democratic-controlled committee recommended that the House ratify two articles of impeachment against the 45th president. In back-to-back morning votes, they adopted each charge against Mr. Trump by a margin of 23 to 17 over howls of Republican protest. ..."
NY Times (Video)
******NY Times: Impeach. By The Editorial Board
NY Times - ‘No Choice’ or ‘a Sham’: Where Every House Member Stands on Impeachment
NY Times - An Inside Look at the Impeachment Case’s Most Intriguing Moments

Steve Martin on How to Look at Abstract Art

"The standard 'anyone could do that' response to abstract art generally falls apart when the person who says it tries their hand at making something like a Kandinsky or Miró. Not only were these artists highly trained in techniques and materials, but both possessed their own specific theories of abstract art—the role of line, color, shape, negative space, etc., along with grander ideas about the role of art itself. Few of us walk around with such considered opinions and the ability to turn them into artworks. The abstraction begins in the mind before it reaches the canvas...."
Open Culture (Video)
Guardian: The history of art … according to Steve Martin
W - Jason Moran
W - John Waters

Geminids and the Moon Duke it Out

As the Earth cuts through the stream of debris deposited by 3200 Phaethon, material strikes our planet's atmosphere, creating the annual Geminid meteor shower. This visualization depicts Earth's encounter with the densest part of that stream on the night of December 13-14, 2019.
"The annual Geminid meteor shower peaks on Friday night, December 13–14, when upwards of 100 meteors per hour are typically seen from a pristine site under moonless conditions. But this year, there's one little problem: the sky won't be moonless. A fat, waning gibbous sits smack in the middle of Gemini, not far from the shower's radiant. Bad news, right? Yes and no. If we assume the Moon will pare down the display by two-thirds, that still leaves 20-30 meteors per hour. To put those numbers in context, the diminished Geminids still equal or better the well-known Leonid, Orionid, and Lyrid showers viewed under ideal conditions. It doesn't hurt that the Geminids are also known for producing lots of fireballs — exceptionally luminous streaks that flare to magnitude –4 or brighter. Bottom line: I'll be watching, and hope you will too. ..."
Sky & Telescope
W - Geminids

#10: Culture - Natty Never Get Weary + Natty Dub (1978)

"... Over the years Culture has experimented with varying sound formations, including the addition and absence of harmony singing, horns and acoustic sounds. Whatever the sound though, the outcome is always the same: music that reaches straight to the soul and not only powers the feet to dancing, but creates the impulse to get up and make lasting change within the world. Culture's initial impact on the world came about with the formation of the Soul Defenders, one of the finest backing groups to ever come out of Jamaica. The Soul Defenders were comprised of several talented musicians from the Linstead, Jamaica area and formed around 1968. Joseph Hill, or ‘Culture' as he was known, served as the band's sometime lead vocalist, frequent backing vocalist, percussionist and songwriter. The group came to Coxsone Dodd's famed Studio One institution in 1971 and immediately began recording and backing the finest of Jamaican singers, among them Dennis Brown, Burning Spear, Alton Ellis, Freddy McKay, The Heptones and The Abyssinians. ..."
PERFECT SOUND FOREVER - Joseph Hill And Culture: An Inimitable Career, Growing Ever Stronger, YouTube: Culture - Natty Never Get Weary + Natty Dub
TRINITY - Three Piece Suit - JA Joe Gibbs 1975
Creation Rebel ‎- Beware
ERNEST WILSON - I Know Myself [1978]
DENNIS BROWN - Revolution [1983]
Delton Screechie ‎- Jah Is My Light
Chester Coke & Spaner ‎- African Race
Shelton Walks - Trouble In The Ghetto + Ghetto Dub
12'' Everal Cooper - Help Out This Nation
CARL MALCOLM + BIG YOUTH - No jestering + knotty no jester + version (1974 impact)

Icebound: The climate-change secrets of 19th century ship's logs

One of the ships tracked by Old Weather is the Jeannette, whose epic story is one of bravery and doom. This engraving shows the Jeannette sinking in June 1881 after nearly two years trapped in the ice.
"On November 14, 1881, an American called George Melville limped across a frozen delta in Siberia and pulled a pole from the snow with his frost-bitten hands. Exhausted and half-starving, Melville was scouring the wasteland for fellow survivors of the most famous ship in the world. The USS Jeannette had set sail from San Francisco to conquer the North Pole. Instead, it quickly got trapped in ice and spent nearly two years drifting across the Arctic Ocean, lost to the rest of humanity. When it was finally crushed by the ice, the Jeannette’s 33 crew members set out across the frozen sea. A storm separated them, and Melville mustered a team of locals in the desolate Lena Delta to find his missing shipmates. He braved the wilderness as the days grew shorter, his legs so swollen and blistered from exposure that he vomited with the pain. First he found the pole. ..."
Reuters

The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war

"A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials. The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle. ..."
Washington Post (Video)
Washington Post: A secret history of the war
NY Times: Lies Have Kept Us in Afghanistan. But the Truth May Not Set Us Free.

Astor Piazzolla - The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night (1989)

"Originally released in 1989, Astor Piazzolla's The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night was recorded in New York in September 1987, with an ensemble that included Fernando Suárez Paz (violin), Pablo Ziegler (piano), Paquito D'Rivera (alto sax, clarinet) Andy González (bass) and Rodolfo Alchourrón (electric guitar). The recording was produced by Kip Hanrahan and originally released by American Clavé. ... That work was adapted by Graciela Daniele and Jim Lewis, and was conceived, choreographed and directed by Graciela Daniele. Astor Piazzolla's nuevo tango, which incorporates classical forms and jazz elements into the traditional tango, was so controversial at its advent that Piazzolla had his life threatened on numerous occasions and was even exiled from Argentina. ..."
Piazzolla
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: The rough dancer and the cyclical night

2008 March: Astor Piazzolla, 2010 September: Astor Piazzolla Remixed, 2011 February: Adios Nonino, 2011 April: Milonga del angel, 2011 August: 1985. Utrecht, Netherlands, 2014 May: Live at The Montreal Jazz Festival (1986), 2015 June: Libertango (1972)

House Democrats Unveil Articles of Impeachment Against Trump

"House Democrats announced on Tuesday that they would move ahead this week with two articles of impeachment charging President Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, as they accused him of violating the Constitution by pressuring Ukraine for help in the 2020 election. Speaking from a wood-paneled reception room just off the floor of the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and leaders of six key committees said that Mr. Trump’s actions toward Ukraine, and his efforts to block Congress’s attempt to investigate, had left them no choice but to pursue one of the Constitution’s gravest remedies. The move will bring a sitting president to the brink of impeachment for only the fourth time in American history. ..."
NY Times (Video)
NY Times: Impeachment
PBS: Guide to the impeachment hearings
BBC: Trump impeachment inquiry: A simple guide (Video)
NY Times: Impeachment Briefing: What Happened Today
NY Times: Testimony and Evidence Collected in the Trump Impeachment Inquiry

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real

Instead of fantasizing about future worlds, Gibson sets his novels in the ongoing, alarming realm of the present.
"Suppose you’ve been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. They’ve uploaded their minds to a cloud-based data bank and can now visit telepresently, forever. A philosophical question arises: What is a family when it never ends? A story flowers where prospective trends meet. This method is quite common in science fiction. It’s not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. ..."
New Yorker

2011 July: William Gibson, 2015 May: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology - edited by Bruce Sterling (1986), 2015 July: A Global Neuromancer, 2016 May: The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990), 2017 August: Sprawl trilogy

Conserving one of the oldest photographs in MoMA's collection

"Tarnish is slowly engulfing one of the oldest objects in MoMA's collection, a daguerreotype from 1842 capturing two separate images—the Arch of Septimius Severus and Capitoline Lion in the Roman Forum. Within two years of the invention of photography, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, a French aristocrat, assembled a team to travel the Mediterranean and make over a thousand images of the region’s cities, people, and ruins. These early daguerreotypes projected images directly onto silver plates, like a mirror imprinting a reflection onto its polished surface. Akin to Polaroids, they were unique photographic objects that offered no convenient method of replication. ..."
YouTube: Conserving one of the oldest photographs in MoMA's collection

Pierre Henry: The Avant-Garde Composer Who Shaped Rock’s Future

Pierre Henry at Studio D’Essai in 1951.
"A word to the wise: should you ever be asked, in the course of your next pub quiz, which young revolutionary was responsible for proclaiming, 'It is necessary to destroy music,' your mind might reflexively scroll through a Rolodex of iconoclasts and provocateurs including the likes of John Lydon, Frank Zappa, Thurston Moore, Conrad Schnitzler and Brian Eno. Credible guesses all; but these words were in fact expressed by Pierre Henry, a trailblazer in the sound-sourcing and -manipulating principles of musique concrète, in a short, pugnacious essay entitled For Thinking About New Music, which the composer, who was born on 9 December 1927, wrote as long ago as 1947, when he was just 20. ..."
udiscover (Video)
W - Pierre Henry
W - Musique concrète
Discogs (Video)

Around the World in 5 Kids’ Games

Girls playing a game from Yemen at a middle school in Borough Park, Brooklyn.
" On every schoolyard across the world you will find games invented by children. Hand-clapping routines, rhyming stanzas and intricate rules for tiny competitions; games born of the creativity, insight and idiosyncrasy of children’s minds. In New York City’s diverse playgrounds, kids play games in Haitian Creole, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Polish, just to name a few. Unlike nursery rhymes, lullabies, or children’s songs these games are conceived of, built upon and passed along by kids, largely by girls. Irene Chagal, who researched the history and spread of hand-clapping games for her documentary 'Let’s Get the Rhythm: The Life and Times of Miss Mary Mack,' describes these games as 'playground lore,' a rich body of folk literature that is just outside the attention of most adults. ..."
NY Times (Video)

A group from the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Occult information

Vanessa Redgrave and Madeleine Potter in The Bostonians, directed by James Ivory, 1984
"'On the whole', wrote R. H. Hutton, reviewing The Bostonians in the Spectator in 1886, 'though we can truly say that we have never read any work of Mr. Henry James which had in it so much that was new and original, we must also say that we have never read any tale of his that had in it so much of long-winded reiteration and long-drawn-out disquisition.' Of all James’s major novels from his middle phase, it is The Bostonians which so often seems to elicit qualifying 'thoughs' and 'buts', even (or especially) from its defenders and admirers. Indeed, its creator got a pre-emptive strike in first, remarking in a letter to his brother William that 'all the middle part is too diffuse and insistent – far too describing and explaining and expatiating'. ..."
TLS

2018 January: The Bostonians (1886), 2018 September: The Golden Bowl (1904), 2018 December: Washington Square (1880)

Hexagrams - Anna Blackmer (2019)

"These Hexagrams, written over a period of 30 years in response to the great Chinese book of divination and cosmology, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, form an autobiography of sorts. They also operate as meditations on the landscape, ciphers yearning to be free, arguments with the self, and snapshots of ordinary moments in flux. Anna Blackmer is a third-generation Californian who migrated to Vermont in the early 1970’s. She has an MFA in Writing from Goddard College, and worked as a poet in the schools, a bookstore owner, a freelance arts critic, and for many years taught writing and literature at Burlington College. She currently lives and writes in Essex Junction, Vermont."
Fomite Press
Quick Lit Review: 'Hexagrams' by Anna Blackmer
amazon

A Blueprint for Europe’s Just Transition

"On December 3, the Green New Deal for Europe launched its new landmark report, A Blueprint for Europe’s Just Transition. The publication coincides with the arrival of the new European Commission, which has promised to deliver a 'green deal' within its first 100 days (read the leaked contents of that 'green deal' here) — an all-together uninspiring vision that we believe is doomed to fail. The report sets out an alternative vision for a Green New Deal — one that gets Europe to carbon neutrality by 2030 while delivering environmental justice across the continent and around the world. ..."
ROAR
A Blueprint for Europe's Just Transition | Green New Deal
YouTube: 10 Pillars of the Green New Deal for Europe

The Return of Martin Guerre - Daniel Vigne (1982)

"The Return of Martin Guerre (Le Retour de Martin Guerre) is a 1982 French film directed by Daniel Vigne, and starring Gérard Depardieu. It was based on a case of imposture in 16th century France, involving Martin Guerre. The film relates a historical case of alleged identity theft. Martin Guerre leaves his young wife in a small French village to go fight in a war, and to travel. Eight or nine years later, Martin (played by Depardieu) returns to resume his life. The man is initially acknowledged and welcomed by the wife, family, and friends because he knows the intimate details of his former life. As time passes, however, vagabonds identify Martin as Arnaud of the neighbouring village of Tilh, but the villagers dismiss these claims as lies. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: The Return of Martin Guerre By Vincent Canby (June 10, 1983)
amazon
YouTube: The Return of Martin Guerre (4K Restoration) | Official US Trailer

A House on Royal Street

The Seignouret-Brulatour building and interior courtyard after a six-year historic renovation.
"What lies beneath the floors or behind the walls in your home? Archaeologists, curators, historians, and preservationists have been seeking answers to these questions at a Creole townhouse in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Begun in 1816, this three-story brick and stucco building located at 520 Royal Street was constructed for François Seignouret, a native of Bordeaux and veteran of the Battle of New Orleans who rose to become one of the city’s most prominent antebellum merchants. Also hailing from Bordeaux and a merchant in his own right, Pierre Ernest Brulatour purchased the house in 1870, and members of the Brulatour family continued to reside there for several decades. During the Crescent City’s nineteenth-century heyday, the house formed part of a larger urban compound that provided both Seignouret and Brulatour with commercial and utilitarian space on the lower levels and refined living areas upstairs. ..."
64 Parishes

18th-century trash becomes 21st-century treasure with these pieced-together fragments of a tin-glazed earthenware, or faïence, vessel recovered from a historic household trash pit.

Burning Deck Postcards

"I’ve been thinking for a while on what to write about Burning Deck’s Postcards, published in a series of four sets from 1974–1978, which are part of The Little Magazine in America Collection at DU Libraries. Where, exactly, does one start when addressing a small piece among nearly sixty years of Burning Deck publications, of Burning Deck publishers Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop’s presence in American poetry? To briefly revisit the last couple posts in this Commentary series, I’ll point out that Burning Deck published Pam Rehm’s The Garment in Which No One Had Slept in 1993, as well as Barbara Guest’s The Countess from Minneapolis in 1976 and her Biography in 1980. And Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop were contributing editors for apex of the M. ..."
Jacket2

Twin Peaks Actually Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demystifies It All

"I don’t know about you, but my YouTube algorithms can act like a nagging friend, suggesting a video for days until I finally give in. Such was the case with this video essay with the tantalizing title: 'Twin Peaks ACTUALLY EXPLAINED (No, Really)'. First of all, before, during, and after 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return, theories were as inescapable as the cat memes on the Twin Peaks Facebook groups. After the mindblowing Episode 8, they went into overdrive, including the bonkers idea that the final two episodes were meant to be watched *overlayed* on each other. And I highlighted one in depth journey through the entire three decades of the Lynch/Frost cultural event for this very site. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2008 September: Twin Peaks, 2010 March: Twin Peaks: How Laura Palmer's death marked the rebirth of TV drama, 2011 October: Twin Peaks: The Last Days, 2014 October: Welcome to Twin Peaks, 2015 June: David Lynch: ‘I’ve always loved Laura Palmer’, 2015 July: Twin Peaks Maps, 2016 May: Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played..., September: Twin Peaks Tarot Cards For The Magician Who Longs To See Through The Darkness Of Future Past, 2014 September: David Lynch: The Unified Field, 2014 December: David Lynch’s Bad Thoughts - J. Hoberman, 2015 March: Lumière and Company (1995), 2015 April: David Lynch Creates a Very Surreal Plug for Transcendental Meditation, 2015 December: What Is “Lynchian”?, 2017 March: Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me, 2017 April: Trading Card Set of the Week – Twin Peaks (Star Pics, 1991), 2017 April: Your Complete Guide to Rewatching "Twin Peaks", 2018 February: Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?, 2018 March: Twin Peaks VR Lets You Live Inside A Dream, 2018 November: An Echo Of Owls: watching repeats of Twin Peaks eleven years later

The New York City Subway Map as You’ve Never Seen It Before

"New York City has changed a lot over the past 40 years. But the M.T.A subway map, designed in 1979, has largely endured. The city has changed drastically over the past 40 years, yet the M.T.A. map designed in 1979 has largely endured. New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1970s. Crime was on the rise, and subway ridership had dropped to its lowest level since 1918. The Hertz firm’s map was digitized in 1998, with many of the design elements from the 1979 map incorporated into the new version. The primary designer assigned to the 1979 redesign, Nobuyuki Siraisi, was a trained sculptor and painter. He prepared for the task of representing the subway lines using an unconventional method. ..."
NY Times

Their Soccer Club Vanished. They Kept Coming.

Curtis and his colleagues maintain Gigg Lane out of a combination of love, pride and hope.
"BURY, England — Michael Curtis still comes to Gigg Lane every day, Monday through Friday. He pulls in at 7:30 a.m., just as he used to, and makes the short walk to the building past a makeshift shrine — a jumble of different teams’ scarves, flags and jerseys from the days when Bury Football Club was fighting for its life. Half an hour or so later, the others start to arrive. ... It has been three months since Bury, unable to meet its financial obligations or find an owner to take over from the reviled Steve Dale, was thrown out of the English Football League. It is only a couple of weeks before it will be formally liquidated, before the club that traces its roots to 1885 ceases to exist entirely. ..."
NY Times
Bury, the inside story: Neil Danns explains what life was really like at a dying football club
W - Bury F.C.
Guardian - The Guardian view on the collapse of Bury FC: a tragedy bigger than mere football

It has been three months since Bury was thrown out of the English Football League.

Amy Sillman

Dub Stamp (detail), 2018–19, acrylic, ink, and silk screen on multiple sheets of paper. Installation view
"Amy Sillman (born 1956, Detroit) is a painter, drawer, writer and maker of zines and animated videos. Her work in all media is characterized by a playful, incisive humor and a direct, exuberant engagement with materials and ideas. Drawing on all spheres of learning, ancient and contemporary, as well as her own experiments with paint, paper, and other technologies in the studio for inspiration, she creates a restless, rollicking, panoply of ever-evolving images. ..."
Brooklyn Rail
Frieze: The Vicarious Warmth of Amy Sillman’s Paintings
The 5-Minute Journal: Artist Amy Sillman Opens Her Diary for Galerie
W - Amy Sillman
‘I’m working with and against painting’ – an interview with Amy Sillman
YouTube: Amy Sillman on Landline at Camden Arts Centre, 2018

SK37, SK38, 2017. Acrylic, ink and silkscreen on paper

Live in Lesotho - Hugh Masekela and Company

"For an artist as prolific and famous as Hugh Masekela, it is remarkable that the music and story of Live in Lesotho has remained buried for so long. On 28th December 1980, Masekela together with Miriam Makeba staged an unprecedented stadium-filled concert in Lesotho, an event that deeply challenged and disturbed apartheid South Africa’s oppressive fabric. It also uplifted a crowd of more than 75,000 South Africans and their fellow Southern African revelers. This recording evidences an extraordinary confluence of experiences linking music, defiance, exile, and reconnection. At the time South Africa’s front line neighbors Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, and Mozambique gave safe haven to South African volunteers going into exile to join organizations of the liberation movement. ..."
Africa is a Country: Music is the weapon
Trumpeter Hugh Masekela’s 1980 protest concert, Live in Lesotho, reissued on vinyl (Audio)
Live in Lesotho (Audio)
YouTube: Part Of A Whole (Live In Lesotho), Stimela (Live in Lesotho - Live)

2016 August: The Chisa Years: 1965-1975 (Rare and Unreleased), 2018 November: Jazz on 45 Vol. 5 Mixape – Hugh Masekela Special Edition

Inside a New York Depression-era “relief station”

"Saul Kovner was a Russia-born artist best known for his poetic glimpses of 1930s New York, from East Side tenement backyards to kids playing in a snow-blanketed Tompkins Square Park. But one painter Kovner completed in 1939 tells a story about what it was like to be poor in Depression-era New York. 'Relief Station' depicts a group of mostly strangers sitting on wood benches in a drab facility, facing forward as if they’re waiting for their names to be called. Where is this group? In a place New York new longer has, a relief station—where jobless people with no money to buy food or pay rent sought what was known as 'home relief.' ..."
Ephemeral New York

Anarchy Around The World: Punk Goes Global

“Forty years after it officially crash-landed in our midst, it’s easy to believe punk ‘sold out’ its lofty original ideals, not least because its leading acts all eventually signed to major labels and played ball with The Man. Yet regardless of its shortcomings, punk still had a seismic global impact during the mid-to-late 70s and its legacy can still be felt in everything from its inherent DIY ethos to its (broadly) anti-sexist stance. However, while countless revisions of this flawed – yet exhilarating – period have since been published, they nearly always fix punk as a purely transatlantic phenomenon. … This is entirely understandable, as both nations have reason to claim punk as their own. In North America, the 70s had barely dawned before New York was spawning remarkable proto-punk acts such as Suicide and New York Dolls, while across 1974-76, trailblazing US refuseniks such as Pere Ubu, Patti Smith, Ramones and Blondie were already hurling out remarkable, oeuvre-defining discs. …”
uDiscover (Audio)

Sex Pistols

The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Company

Sylvia Beach in front of her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, Paris, May 1, 1941
"One hundred years ago this month, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop opened its doors for the first time in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. As we celebrate the centennial, the popular story of the shop’s founding is sure to be retold. The origin story of the shop often goes as follows: during the 1920s, Sylvia Beach, a devoted enthusiast for the literary genius of her time, decided to set up shop a few steps from the Luxembourg Gardens. From there, Beach’s biography is often framed as a Cinderella story of Modernism. When James Joyce asked her, an amateur bookseller, to publish Ulysses, and she rose to the occasion, she underwent a transformation from an anonymous shopkeeper into an internationally famous figure. ..."
NYBooks

George Whitman with a group of women at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 1980

2012 December: Shakespeare and Company, 2016 January: What It's Like to Live Inside the Legendary Paris Bookstore Shakespeare & Co., 2016 September: Shakespeare and Company, Paris - A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart

7 Days: The City Below (Dec. 6, 1989)

"... Imagine grabbing Manhattan by the Empire State Building and pulling the en­tire island up by its roots. Imagine shaking it. Imagine millions of wires and hundreds of thousands of cables freeing themselves from great hunks of rock and tons of musty and polluted dirt. Imagine a sewer system and a set of water lines each three times as long as the Hudson River. Picture mysterious little vaults hidden just beneath the crust of the sidewalk, a sweaty grid of steam pipes 103 miles long, a turn-of-the-18th-century merchant ship buried under Front Street, rusty old natural-gas lines that could be wrapped 23 times around Manhattan, and huge, bombproof concrete tubes that descend almost 80 stories into the ground. ..."
Voice

An Illustrated Map of Every Known Object in Space: Asteroids, Dwarf Planets, Black Holes & Much More

"Name all the things in space in 20 minutes. Impossible, you say? Well, if there’s anyone who might come close to summarizing the contents of the universe in less than half an hour, with the aid of a handy infographic map also available as a poster, it's physicist Dominic Walliman, who has explored other vast scientific regions in condensed, yet comprehensive maps on physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, and computer science. These are all academic disciplines with more or less defined boundaries. But space? It’s potentially endless, a point Walliman grants up front. Space is 'infinitely big and there are an infinite number of things in it,' he says. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

French New Wave film posters: ‘They broke the rules’

L-r: Lola (1961) by Maciej Hibner, Mon Oncle (1958) by Pierre Étaix, Alphaville (1965) by Andrzej Krajewski.
"When Tony Nourmand began collecting movie posters and other print memorabilia from the French New Wave 30 years ago, he could usually pick them up for next to nothing. 'I remember going to Paris and walking into poster shops and digging for hours,' he recalls, 'and then I’d suddenly find a poster for Breathless and it was 50 francs, and I’d be so excited. Nobody else seemed to care.' ... The poster design for films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and other boundary-pushing French directors of the late 1950s and 60s was anything but. For evidence, take a look at Nourmand’s hefty French New Wave: A Revolution in Design. ..."
Guardian