Official Secrets - Gavin Hood (2019)

 
“... The whistle-blower in ‘Official Secrets’ has only one memo to print out, a modest if mighty task that here looks like, well, a woman anxiously using an office printer in bad lighting. One of those ripped-from-the-headlines jobs, ‘Official Secrets’ revisits how a British intelligence officer, Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley), tried to stop a war. In 2003, a few months before the invasion of Iraq, Gun received an email that had been sent to her division in Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (a.k.a. GCHQ). It was from Frank Koza, identified as the chief of staff for the regional targets division at the National Security Agency of the United States. ...”

May 25 Should Be a Day of Mourning for George Floyd

 
“Carrying Casket”, by Jammie Holmes, Library Street Collective.

“When the protests started in the streets of Denver last spring, days after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, I watched dozens of people marching with anguish and affliction on their faces. Several of them were crying, or clearly had been. When I watched the video of the final moments of Mr. Floyd’s life, I myself felt the telltale symptoms of grief: a clenched stomach; a surge of adrenaline; and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. As they unfolded over the next days and weeks, the protests seemed like a moment when Black grief — a feeling familiar for Black Americans after the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till and so many others — might finally become collective grief for the rest of America. ...”

 
“George Floyd’s murder felt like everything was the same and nothing was the same, said Miski Noor, an activist in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a white police officer a year ago on 25 May. ‘How many times have we seen Black death go viral?’ asked Noor, the co-founder of Black Visions, which advocates for abolition, an approach to public safety that does not involve the police. Noor, who helped found the group in 2017, knows that to abolish policing you also must confront systemic racism and the weight of history. And Noor also knows as the child of Somali immigrants, that the issues are global. ...”

​Two portraits of one lowdown saloon in 1919 Greenwich Village

“The Village has always had dive bars that attract locals and luminaries. But The Golden Swan, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street, might have been the first—and the most notorious in its day. Inside this Irish tavern dating back to at least the 1870s, writers, artists, activists, and assorted Village characters of the 1910s gathered to drink. (National prohibition was looming, after all.) While the front of the tavern may have catered to locals and Hudson Dusters gangsters, bohemians made the back room—aka, the Hell Hole—their own. Charles Demuth was a fan of the Swan. ...”

​Chess in the arts

 
Honoré Daumier (1863), The Chess Players

Chess became a source of inspiration in the arts in literature soon after the spread of the game to the Arab World and Europe in the Middle Ages. The earliest works of art centered on the game are miniatures in medieval manuscripts, as well as poems, which were often created with the purpose of describing the rules. After chess gained popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries, many works of art related to the game were created. One of the best-known, Marco Girolamo Vida's poem Scacchia ludus, written in 1527, made such an impression on the readers that it singlehandedly inspired other authors to create poems about chess. In the 20th century, artists created many works related to the game, sometimes taking their inspiration from the life of famous players (Vladimir Nabokov in The Defense) or  well-known games (Poul Anderson in Immortal Game, John Brunner in The Squares of the City). ...”

The Chess Players — John Lavery (1929)

Andrea Belfi & Machinefabriek ‎– Pulses & Places (2009)

 
“This ninth release in the Brombron series (hosted by Korm Plastics) comes from the absurdly prolific Machinefabriek and Italian electro-acoustic musician Andrea Belfi.  For this project, Rutger Zuydervelt plays guitar and organ, while Belfi concentrates on drums and assorted percussive instruments. While the mood of the music is consistent with Machinefabriek's propensity towards atmospheric, detailed ambience, there's a markedly more organic aspect to this music that sets it apart from most of the Dutch composer's collaborations. The presence of Belfi's live, acoustic drums puts a very different slant on this music, bringing a kind of swaying, somnolent rhythm to the first piece, while Zuydervelt's layered drones map out a woozy trail. ...”

The Battle of Algiers

 
“The Battle of Algiers was a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare carried out by the National Liberation Front (FLN) against the French Algerian authorities from late 1956 to late 1957. The conflict began as a series of attacks by the FLN against the French forces followed by a terrorist attack on Algerian civilians in Algiers by a group of Pieds-Noirs (European settlers), aided by the police. Reprisals followed and the violence escalated leading the French Governor-General to deploy the French Army in Algiers to suppress the FLN. Civilian authorities left all prerogatives to General Jacques Massu who, operating outside legal frameworks between January and September 1957, successfully eliminated the FLN from Algiers. The use of torture, forced disappearances and illegal executions by the French later caused controversy in France. ...”
 
 
The Battle of Algiers - Gillo Pontecorvo

The Battle of Algiers is a 1966 Italian-Algerian historical war film co-written and directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and starring Jean Martin and Saadi Yacef. It is based on events undertaken by rebels during the Algerian War (1954–1962) against the French government in North Africa, the most prominent being the titular Battle of Algiers, the capital of Algeria. It was shot on location in a Roberto Rossellini-inspired newsreel style: in black and white with documentary-type editing to add to its sense of historical authenticity, with mostly non-professional actors who had lived through the real battle. The film's score was composed by Ennio Morricone. It is often associated with Italian neorealist cinema. The film concentrates mainly on revolutionary fighter Ali La Pointe during the years between 1954 and 1957, when guerrilla fighters of the FLN regrouped and expanded into the Casbah, the citadel of Algiers. Their actions were met by French paratroopers attempting to regain territory. The highly dramatic film is about the organization of a guerrilla movement and the illegal methods, such as torture, used by the colonial power to contain it. Algeria succeeded in gaining independence from the French, which Pontecorvo addresses in the film's epilogue. The film has been critically acclaimed. Both insurgent groups and state authorities have considered it to be an important commentary on urban guerrilla warfare. ...”

Albert Camus
 
Frantz Fanon

Deux Filles ‎– Silence & Wisdom / Double Happiness (2013)

 
“The short, mysterious career of the female French duo Deux Filles is bookended by tragedy. Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule met as teenagers at a holiday pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which Coule's mother died of an incurable lung disease and Forque's mother was killed and her father paralyzed in an auto accident. The two teens bonded over their shared grief and worked through their bereavement with music. However, after recording two critically acclaimed albums and playing throughout Europe and North America, Forque and Coule disappeared without a trace in North Africa in 1984 during a trip to visit Algiers. The short and terribly unhappy lives of Forque and Coule are at the root of the small but fervent cult following the mysterious duo have gained since their disappearance, not least because the placid, largely instrumental music on the duo's albums betrays no hint of the sorrow that framed their personal lives. ...”

​The Super League Thought It Had a Silent Partner: FIFA

 
“Tucked away in the pages and pages of financial and legal jargon that constitute the founding contract of the Super League, the failed project that last month briefly threatened the century-old structures and economics of European soccer, were references to one ‘essential’ requirement. The condition was deemed so important that organizers agreed that the breakaway plan could not succeed without satisfying it and yet was so secret that it was given a code name even in contracts shared among the founders. Those documents, copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times, refer to the need for the Super League founders to strike an agreement with an entity obliquely labeled W01 but easily identifiable as FIFA, soccer’s global governing body. ...”

​Trump Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence

 
“At the beginning of last week, former President Donald Trump referred to the 2020 election as the ‘greatest Election Fraud in the history of our Country.’ By the end of the week, he had issued a statement saying, ‘As our Country is being destroyed, both inside and out, the Presidential Election of 2020 will go down as THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!’ What else is new? These are the ravings of a 74-year-old sociopath, isolated and banned from social media, living in Mar-a-Lago, where he is crashing wedding parties and delivering rambling monologues. ...”

Projective Verse - Charles Olson (1959)

 
“Charles Olson’s influential manifesto, ‘Projective Verse,’ was first published as a pamphlet, and then was quoted extensively in William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography (1951).  ... Composition by field opposes the traditional method of poetic composition based on received form and measure. Olson sees the challenge of the transference of poetic energy from source to poem to reader, and the way in which that energy shifts at each juncture, as particularly of concern to poets who engage in composition by field, because the poet is no longer relying on a received structure as a propulsive force. ...”

​Deeper Listening: An Introduction to Drone Composition

 
“Drone composition encompasses a variety of music, all of which use long, slow-moving pitches as a vehicle for questioning how we perceive sound. Composers create these transfixing pieces by manipulating tape, layering acoustic instruments, and even inventing whole new instruments; but regardless of the nuts-and-bolts of their creation, the aim of drone composition is have us reconsider the role of sound in our day-to-day lives.The genre is garnering new attention thanks to the documentary Sisters With Transistors (2020), which sheds light on the work of female electronic musicians, many of whom were pioneers in the field of drone composition. ...”

Burning Spear - The Fittest Of The Fittest (1983)

 
“After the rather disappointing Farover, this mellow album laid down a firm foundation for the future, ensuring that while Burning Spear's fire no longer burned as fiery as before, a bright glow would still last down through the years. The Fittest of the Fittest's title track encapsulates both the sound and vision of what was to come. The Burning Band's rhythm section lays down a succulently meaty groove, while the rest of the musicians weave in and out, layering on riffs and flourishes to create a rich tapestry of sound. Overhead, Winston Rodney chants along, a long-distance roadrunner eating up the miles and passing cultural touchstones along the way. ... A superb album, which while not in the same class as Spear's first five releases, proves that the artist still has a good deal of simmer left. ...”                ”

A Radical Rebellion: The Transformation of the GOP – A Fareed Zakaria Special

 
“CNN’s Fareed Zakaria investigates the roots of the radicalization of the modern Republican party.  A Radical Rebellion: The Transformation of the GOP – A Fareed Zakaria Special, explores the roots that foreshadowed this critical moment for American democracy in a one-hour prime time special that premieres Sunday, May 16 at 8:00pm Eastern on CNN and CNN International. From Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society, to the conspiracy theories of the defeated Donald Trump, who refused to accept the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election and fomented an insurrection, Zakaria traces the GOP’s tradition of elevating personalities prepared to suppress the democratic franchise through the pursuit of illiberal extremism and conservative grievances against a changing world. Zakaria shows the political pathway of how America landed at the current inflection point for the ‘Party of Lincoln.’ ...

Extraterrestrial Plutonium Atoms Turn Up on Ocean Bottom

 
The remnants of a supernova, center bottom in blue-green, near the Small Magellanic Cloud, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“Scientists studying a sample of oceanic crust retrieved from the Pacific seabed nearly a mile down have discovered traces of a rare isotope of plutonium, the deadly element that has been central to the atomic age. They say it was made in colliding stars and later rained down through Earth’s atmosphere as cosmic dust millions of years ago. Their analysis opens a new window on the cosmos. ... Dr. [Anton] Wallner works at the Australian National University as well as the Helmholtz Center in Dresden, Germany.Dr. Wallner and his colleagues reported their findings in Science on Thursday.Plutonium has a bad reputation, one that is well-deserved. ...”

America’s Dead Souls

 
Engraving from Gustave Doré’s 1861 illustration of Dante’s Inferno.

“There is money to be made off the dead. Nikolai Gogol knew this when he wrote his masterpiece, Dead Souls, the story of a middle-aged man named Chichikov who buys dead serfs with the intention of mortgaging their souls for a profit. I chose to read this novel at the start of quarantine, when everyone else was reading War and Peace. I had already read War and Peace. It ruined my life. I wasn’t keen to have my life ruined again. I wanted some other grand, sweeping Russian epic to fill my time. I wish I would have been more cautious in picking a book. Every time I read one of the Russian greats my life transforms into an eerie mirror of the work....”

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. ... DeLillo's work displays elements of both modernism and postmodernism. ... He has said the primary influences on his work and development are ‘abstract expressionism, foreign films, and jazz.’ Many of DeLillo's books (notably White Noise) satirize academia and explore postmodern themes of rampant consumerism, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence. ... The psychology of crowds and the capitulation of individuals to group identity is a theme DeLillo examines in several of his novels, especially in the prologue to Underworld, Mao II, and Falling Man. ...” Wikipedia

W - White Noise, NY Times: White Noise by Jayne Anne Phillips (Jan. 13, 1985), Mapping Don DeLillo’s White Noise, LitCharts: White Noise Study Guide

Colette: The French resistance fighter confronting fascism

 
“90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine confronts her past by visiting the German concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora where her brother was killed. As a young girl, she fought Hitler's Nazis as a member of the French Resistance. For 74 years, she has refused to step foot in Germany, but that changes when a young history student named Lucie enters her life. Prepared to re-open old wounds and revisit the terrors of that time, Marin-Catherine offers important lessons for us all. Film-makers Anthony Giacchino and Alice Doyard explain how they found out about the story of Colette and why they decided to make a documentary about her. Read the interview here ...”

2021 January: Colette (2018 film)

The National Pastime - SABR

“Since 2009, The National Pastime has served as SABR’s convention-focused publication. Published annually, this research journal provides in-depth articles focused on the respective geographic region where the National Convention is taking place in a given year. From 1982 to 2008, the magazine was intended as a more literary outlet for SABR members to publish their research, in comparison to the more statistically inclined Baseball Research Journal. Click on a cover image below to read articles online from The National Pastime. (Note: Some TNPs are still being digitized and are only available as PDF downloads. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to view those files.) Most past editions of The National Pastime can be purchased at Amazon.com. ...”

Debatable: ‘Full-scale war’

 
President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, left, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

A synagogue on fire. Gazan apartment buildings leveled by bombs. Jews attacking Arabs and Arabs attacking Jews on the street. It’s been called the worst outburst of Israeli-Palestinian violence in seven years. At least seven people, including two children, in Israel and 103 Palestinians, including 27 children, have been killed as of Thursday, and by Friday those numbers will probably be outdated. If the situation continues to escalate, the United Nations’ special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process warned, the region could be headed toward a ’full-scale war.’ Why is this happening, and what does it portend for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Here’s what people are saying. ...”

Richard Skelton’s Newest Ambient Works Are Inspired by 19th Century Magical Medicine

 
“For many years Richard Skelton has explored the natural world through sound. Ambient compositions that reflect nature often conjure up associations of soothing serenity, with the immersive soundscapes acting as the peaceful bliss and idyllic beauty of stretching landscapes. However, Skelton plunges deeper than this, exploring his own personal relationship and history to specific places, as well as the raging contradictions of nature, channelling its harshness and unforgiving unpredictability alongside its staggering splendor.In the early days Skelton never intended his music to be performed for, or heard by, anyone. His audience was the same as his inspiration: nature. ...”

Articulate Silences interview with ambient/modern classical (Audio/Video)

​See Reopening Plans and Mask Mandates for All 50 States

 
“All across the country, mask mandates are easing, restrictions are lifting and many states have gone back to business as usual. It appears much of the country will be open with few restrictions in the coming months. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, it has been largely up to state and local officials to determine what restrictions, if any, to impose to slow new infections. A nationwide patchwork of rules for businesses and residents resulted over months of trial and error, as governors reopened some sectors only to later re-close and reopen them again as infection rates rose and fell. ...”

​Pina Bausch Magazine

 
“A conceptual magazine spread detailing the life and career of ballerina, modern dancer, and choreographer Pina Bausch. The brushed type treatment is a nod to her own style, which created motifs of rapid movement, disorientation, and distress through dance.  The text is taken from the biography published to her webpage. The cover design is inspired by ArtForum's styling. Typefaces used are Avenir Next, Bratz, and Baskerville. ...”

​The Pleasures of Destroying a Good Book

 
“It is a sin, she said, to damage the spine. My elementary school librarian showed us a cracked book. The creases and wrinkles looked like an exposed skeleton. After her elegiac presentation, we were sent to the stacks to find books. I handled them with more fear than care. When I got the nerve to peek inside, I eased open the pages as if each text would crumble to dust. My librarian had good reason for her method: she had to preserve books for years of students. Unfortunately, her warnings made me think that books were meant only to be borrowed. As a reader, I want to inhabit a book as a form of communion. Most books took years to write—and likely a few more years to rewrite. They deserve more than a single read before being consigned to silent prison among their cousins of other genres on untouched bookshelves. Some books become part of my weekly, daily life. Those books are inevitably flattened on my desk. Dog-eared. Highlighted. Circled. ...”