Senate Report Details Security Failures in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot

 
U.S. Capitol Police officers hold off rioters loyal to then-President Trump on Jan. 6.

“Top federal intelligence agencies failed to adequately warn law enforcement officials before the Jan. 6 riot that pro-Trump extremists were threatening violence, including plans to ‘storm the Capitol,’ infiltrate its tunnel system and ‘bring guns,’ according to a new report by two Senate committees that outlines large-scale failures that contributed to the deadly assault.An F.B.I. memo on Jan. 5 warning of people traveling to Washington for ‘war’ at the Capitol never made its way to top law enforcement officials. The Capitol Police failed to widely circulate information its own intelligence unit had collected as early as mid-December about the threat of violence on Jan. 6, including a report that said right-wing extremist groups and supporters of President Donald J. Trump had been posting online and in far-right chat groups about gathering at the Capitol, armed with weapons, to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss. ...”

​Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

 
“I think I speak for many of us when I say that coffee fuels our greatest intellectual efforts. And even as we get the jitters and leave brown rings on our desks, we can take comfort in the fact that so it also went with some of the most notable philosophers in the history of the discipline. ... In the 19th century, Søren Kierkegaard would also get into a coffee ritual. He ‘had his own quite peculiar way of having coffee,’ writes biographer Joakim Garff. ‘Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.’ I always drink it black myself, but who among us dares think ourselves too good for the teeth-aching preferred by the author of Fear and Trembling? ...”

International thief thief

 
Queen Mother Pendant Mask, Iyoba, 16th century, Metropolitan Museum

In 1909, Sir Ralph Denham Rayment Moor, British Consul General of the British Southern Nigerian Protectorate, took his life by ingesting cyanide. Eleven years earlier, following Britain’s ‘punitive’ attack on Benin City’s Royal Court, Moor helped transfer loot taken from Benin City into Queen Victoria’s private collection and to the British Foreign Office. Pilfered materials taken by Moor and many others include the now famous brass reliefs depicting the history of the Benin Kingdom—known collectively as the Benin Bronzes. This is in addition to commemorative brass heads and tableaux; carved ivory tusks; decorative and bodily ornaments; healing, divining, and ceremonial objects; and helmets, altars, spoons, mirrors, and much else. ...”

​Liner Notes for Marcus Fischer’s Monocoastal

 
“The Portland, Oregon–based musician Marcus Fischer invited me to write liner notes for his album Monocoastal on the 10th anniversary of its release by the 12k Records label, run by Taylor Deupree. The reissue, on glorious vinyl for the first time, with a cover image by Gregory Euclide, will be released later this month, on June 18. 1. This Second Hum. There is music that one might hum, and there is another musical hum entirely. The latter is music as hum, music that approaches the quality, the substance, of hum itself — music that both envisions and enacts a deeper hum, something that the listener is not merely entranced by but ensconced within. ...”

​What Happened During the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, One of the Worst Episodes of Racial Violence in U.S. History

 
“In February 1915, Thomas Dixon, author of popular novel The Clansman, and D.W. Griffith, the director who adapted the book into the film Birth of a Nation, lobbied then-president Woodrow Wilson for a screening at the White House. The two were sure their story would get a warm reception from the ‘well documented racist’ and onetime scholar who produced a five-volume History of the American People, in which he portrayed the South as ‘overrun by ex-slaves who were undeserving of freedom,’ as Boston University journalism professor Dick Lehr remarks. ... The moment was pivotal for the birth of the Civil Rights movement, he argues in a recent book. Following the country’s entry into World War I, it also lit the fires of what novelist, composer and executive director of the NAACP James Weldon Johnson called ‘Red Summer’… a summer of lynchings, lootings, burnings, shootings and other violence. ...”

Freddie McKay / Augustus Pablo - I'm A Freeman (1973)

 
“... Never contracted to one label or producer Freddie recorded sparingly over the next few years. His second album, 'Lonely Man', released on Dynamic in 1974 and produced by Warwick Lynn and Neville Hinds featured a further version of 'I'm A Free Man'. Essential seven inch records such as the captivating 'Rock A Bye Woman', first released on Rad Bryan's Hot Rod label, helped to establish his legendary status. Versioned by Horace Andy and Jah Bull as 'Ital Vital' this ever popular record is regularly played out by discerning selectors. Another version of 'I'm A Free Man' for youth producer Leonald 'Santic' Chin (Leonald Chin), and complete with mournful melodica, proved massively popular and provided the rhythm track for one of Augustus Pablo's most memorable early outings 'Hap Ki Do'. Freddie's chilling version to Dennis Brown's monumental 'At The Foot Of The Mountain', produced by Eddie Wong, entitled Won't Get Away' was yet another certified classic from this period. ...”

​15 Essential Italian Neorealism Films You Need To Watch

Obsession (1943)

“In Italy, fascism and cinema had always been in a strange relationship. After millions of deaths, years of war and violence; fascism left only two positive things behind: Venice Film Festival and Cinecitta. Fascism, as a consequence of WWII, left thousands of people homeless in Italy; and of course, filmmakers studioless. Great Italian Studio Cinecitta, established by Benito Mussolini in 1937, was damaged significantly during the battles and bombings. This led the filmmakers to go into streets, to experience live action. ... From humanism to communism, from liberal to socialist, this new generation searched for new ways to tell stories of post-war Italy (even, Europe), to formulate a story by keeping the budget low and to hold Zeitgeist in palms of their hands. ...”

 
Bitter Rice (1949)

​The Impressionist Art of Seeing and Being Seen

 
Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight - Berthe Morisot (1875)

“The still of the seaside, away from the noise and gossip of the city. Lapping waves, gentle breeze. It's a bit overcast, but why complain? We’re on vacation. Impressionist paintings, after decades of auction records and print-on-demand posters, have become the most reliable crowd-pleasers of European art. Pretty light. Happy haystacks. Believe me: In 1875, they were hardly so soothing. They were views of a society rocketing through modernization, and losing its bearings as it accelerated. ...”

Impossible Owls: Essays from the Ends of the World - Brian Phillips

 
“In his highly anticipated debut essay collection, Impossible Owls, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he's one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels. The eight essays assembled here--five from Phillips's Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces--go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world's most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities (though they do that, too). ...”

Laurie Spiegel - Waveshaper TV. Part 1 of 3: Bell Labs

 
“This is the first in a 3-part video interview series with the seminal electronic & computer music pioneer. In Part 1, Laurie recounts her years working as an in-house composer, developer, and programmer at Bell Labs. Part 1 - Bell Labs (now streaming) = 9min 16sec. Part 2 - Voyager (Jan 28) = 7min 42sec. Part 3 - The Expanding Universe (Feb 04) = 7min 53sec. The full-length Laurie Spiegel interview is over 50 minutes long - it's practically a mini-documentary! - and it will be available exclusively to our Patreon members, who also get early access to all of our interview video Episodes. You can read up on Waveshaper TV on Patreon, and support our mission to document electronic music history. ...”

Habibi Funk: The Scorpions & Saif Abu Bakr - Jazz, Jazz, Jazz

“... This album happens to be my first conscious connection with Sudanese music. Habibi Funk must have already existed for a year or so but I had not yet come across any recording from Sudan that I felt fitting in the context we set for our self. I remember I did some quick research in the aftermath of the auction (which I obviously did not win) to gather some information about the band but apart from some vague bits and pieces I could not find anything. In most encyclopedic overviews of the Sudanese music scene of the 1970s the band appeared as a mere footnote. ...”

​Gowanus Canal

 

Ratzer Map, Discovery Editions

“The Gowanus Canal (originally known as the Gowanus Creek) is a 1.8-mile-long (2.9 km) canal in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, on the westernmost portion of Long Island. Once a vital cargo transportation hub, the canal has seen decreasing use since the mid-20th century, parallel with the decline of domestic waterborne shipping. It continues to be used for occasional movement of goods and daily navigation of small boats, tugs and barges. ... The canal arose in the mid-19th century from local tidal wetlands and freshwater streams. By the end of the 19th century, heavy industrial use had caused large amounts of pollutants to drain into the Gowanus Canal. Various attempts to remove the pollution or dilute the canal's water have failed. Even though most industrial tenants stopped using the Gowanus Canal in the middle of the 20th century, the pollution was never remedied. ...”

 
Gennaro Brooks-Church has converted his house into an ecological laboratory.

​Sans-culottes

 
“The sans-culottes (... literally ‘without breeches‘) were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. The word sans-culotte, which is opposed to that of the aristocrat, seems to have been used for the first time on 28 February 1791 by officer Gauthier in a derogatory sense, speaking about a ‘sans-culottes army’. The word came into vogue during the demonstration of 20 June 1792. The name sans-culottes refers to their clothing, and through that to their lower-class status: culottes were the fashionable silk knee-breeches of the 18th-century nobility and bourgeoisie, and the working class sans-culottes wore pantaloons, or trousers, instead. ...”
 
The uprising of the Parisian sans-culottes from 31 May to 2 June 1793. The scene takes place in front of the Deputies Chamber in the Tuileries. The depiction shows Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles and Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud.

Possessed - Laurel Halo (2020)

 
“Laurel Halo presents an album’s worth of score provided for the 2018 experimental documentary Possessed by Dutch design collective Metahaven, produced in collaboration with Rob Schröder and Dutch Mountain Films. Her first foray into writing music for the screen, the album provides a rich variety of sounds, from aqueous, subterranean drones, to plaintive folk pieces for violin and cello, to uncanny pseudoclassical piano mutations. It’s fitting for Laurel Halo to move into the score world. ...”

​Antares

Antares between τ (lower left) and σ Scorpii. Antares appears white in this WISE false colour infrared image.

Antares designated α Scorpii (Latinised to Alpha Scorpii, abbreviated Alpha Sco, α Sco), is on average the fifteenth-brightest star in the night sky, and the brightest object in the constellation of Scorpius. Distinctly reddish when viewed with the naked eye, Antares is a slow irregular variable star that ranges in brightness from apparent magnitude +0.6 to +1.6. Often referred to as ‘the heart of the scorpion’, Antares is flanked by σ Scorpii and τ Scorpii near the center of the constellation. Classified as spectral type M1.5Iab-Ib, Antares is a red supergiant, a large evolved massive star and one of the largest stars visible to the naked eye.  Its exact size remains uncertain, but if placed at the center of the Solar System, it would reach to somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Its mass is calculated to be around 12 times that of the Sun. ...”

​Epic Iran

 
A room in the exhibition “Epic Iran” at the Victoria and Albert Museum that is devoted to Persepolis, the ancient city that was once the capital of the Persian Empire.

“The board game is roughly 4,500 years old. Shaped like a bird of prey, it has holes running down its wings and chest, where the pieces were once positioned. It’s one of a few dozen ancient objects that were set to travel from the National Museum of Iran for a spectacular exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum here. But they never came.Other artifacts that were set to be shown — as detailed and illustrated and in the catalog for that exhibition ‘Epic Iran’ — included a gold mask, a long-handled silver pan and a carved stone goblet. ...”

 
A folio from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, Tabriz, about 1523 – 35. The Sarikhani Collection

'I make these collages and write': Alice Notley's visual art

 
Alice Notley reading from ‘When I Was Alive’ at her MoMA PS1 show. 

“Alice Notley’s one and only exhibition of her visual art in the United States was in 1980 at MoMA PS1. The press release, written by Notley, notes that her collages are made ‘of paper (potential trash) from the poet/artist’s life, pieces of illustrations from favorite cheap books, sidewalk discoveries, and things she could see on the floor, from her chair, and was too lazy to throw away.’ Notley’s nonchalance toward her materials should not be mistaken for a lack of aesthetic intensity. Like her visionary poetry, which she has written and published continuously for over fifty years, Notley’s visual art is defined by intricate layers of presence and association as well as common themes: light, femininity, and irreducibility. ...”

“Parthenon Fan,” 1992

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell

 “Wild Combination begins with interviews of Russell's parents discussing their youngest offspring's childhood. The film describes how Russell as a young boy is obsessed with Timothy Leary and insecure about his acne. Leaving Iowa for San Francisco in the late sixties, he joins a Buddhist collective and befriends Allen Ginsberg. Russell decides to move to New York in the early seventies, where he starts working as the musical director of the Kitchen and becomes part of the downtown scene of artists, sharing an apartment building with Allen Ginsberg and Richard Hell. Russell engages in nearly every music scene the city has to offer: disco at David Mancuso's Loft, rock at CBGB, minimal composition at the Kitchen, and Allen Ginsberg's poetry recitations. In 1978, Russell begins dating Tom Lee, whom he stays with until his AIDS-related death in 1992. ...”

​60 minutes of music that sum up art-punk pioneers Wire

 
“... It’d be a stretch to say that Wire was the first art-punk band, given that much of the New York proto-punk scene (such as Patti Smith and Television) had ties to the art world, and a lot of the arty musicians that inspired Wire (such as Roxy Music and Neu) were skating on the edge of punk years before the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. But at a time in rock ’n’ roll when ‘art’ meant something either aggressively avant-garde or pretentiously progressive, Wire offered an attractive combination of the experimental and the accessible. Even at its inception, when the band was redefining what a song could be by writing and recording minute-long vignettes, the music usually had actual melodies and riffs—or, at the least, interesting sounds that could pass for a hook. ...”

Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965 - David H. Rosenthal

From The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1988: “Hard Bop, as a dominant school of jazz, flourished between 1955 and 1965—a decade unrivalled by any other in jazz history for the number of musically brilliant records that were issued. ... In addition to these magnificent recordings—and many others could be cited—the period also witnessed an outpouring of superb music that, while not quite up to the level of the records just mentioned, was notable for its passion and beauty. The foundation for this music was ‘bebop,’ a style that flourished in the late 1940s, whose high priests included trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, alto-saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Bud Powell and composer Tadd Dameron. ...”


Walter Benjamin - Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1969)

 
“German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) was a writer, a philosopher, a critic, a spiritual sceptic, and, most of all, a collector. Benjamin collected ideas, concepts, books, and small items of personal cosmic worth. Illuminations is a collection of Benjamin’s essays—critical and otherwise—chosen and edited by philosopher Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a scholar on institutionalized evil, tell us that collecting was ‘Benjamin’s central passion’ and that he had a destructive affinity for the past. ...”

Glen Brown And King Tubby - Termination Dub (1973-79)

 
“Originally a singer, Glen Brown first ventured into production in the early '70s, releasing his distinct creations through homegrown labels. However, financial constraints ultimately led to a lack of success, with Brown unable to press as many copies as he would undoubtedly have been able to sell. Regardless, he continued to produce, turning out a series of excellent records during the second half of the decade. The rhythms Brown oversaw during those years, as performed by drummers Carlton Barrett and Carlton ‘Santa’ Davis, bassists Aston Barrett and Lloyd Parks, organists Winston Wright and Earl Lindo, and many others of similar stature, stand up to virtually anything from the roots era. ...”

​Debatable: Has the Pentagon covered up space aliens?

 
Former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who worked to fund a Pentagon program for U.F.O. research in 2007.

“At some point next month, U.S. intelligence agencies are expected to brief Congress about recorded encounters between military personnel and mysterious flying objects appearing to defy the limits of known human technology. Yes, U.F.O.s. And yes, explained to the same branch of government that once had to ask Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook works. ... How did we get here, and how should we take the suggestion — made by a former C.I.A. director, among others — that these U.F.O.s are of alien origin? Here’s what people are saying. ...”

​Dawn Delight: Catch the Total Lunar Eclipse on May 26th

 
“If it feels like a while since the Moon took a deep dive into Earth's shadow, you're right. The last total lunar eclipse occurred on January 21, 2019, followed by four penumbral eclipses in 2020. Wait no more! On May 26th, observers in the western half of North America, western South America, East Asia, and Australia will once again see the Moon fully eclipsed. This eclipse will be short and sweet much like the total solar variety, with the Moon spending just 15.9 minutes inside the umbra, Earth's central shadow. The brief visit is due to two factors. First, the Moon passes well north of the umbra's center with its northern limb nearly tangent to the umbra's edge. Minutes after it enters the shadow, it pushes out the other side. ...”