2011 May: Isaac Cordal, 2014 August: Cement Eclipses, 2015 July: Social Isolation, Isaac Cordal, and Neighbors (Sasiedzi) in Łódź
Extending the Family at Fazunchar Festival in Portugal with Isaac Cordal
My frame is true: new wave posters – in pictures
“Andrew Krivine began collecting music industry flyers and posters in 1977 on his annual trip from the US to see family in London. ... By the time he’d finished college in the early 80s (spending a year in the UK as well as studying in Chicago), he’d amassed around 5,500 items of memorabilia for punk and new wave LPs, gigs and clubs. The finest of these have now been collected in the book Reversing into the Future (published by Pavilion on 14 October, £35). In a time before Spotify and YouTube, poster art was key to a band selling their sound to an audience. ...”
Anni Albers on How to Be an Artist
“Anni Albers revered experimentation. During her early days studying under Paul Klee at the Bauhaus school, in the 1920s, she set out to expand the scope of weaving by using new, daring methods and materials. ‘I heard [Klee] speak and he said take a line for a walk,’ she once recalled to Nicholas Fox Weber, director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. ‘And I thought, I will take thread everywhere I can.’ In her textile practice, Albers ecstatically mingled organic and synthetic fibers; loom-weaving and hand-weaving; representation and abstraction; art and utility. The resulting lively, bristling compositions revolutionized weaving and helped shape the burgeoning traditions of abstraction. ...”
Impulse Records: Music, Message and the Moment
“Those of us for whom Impulse has been as important a part of our cultural lives as Blue Note, perhaps even a more important one, will not be satisfied until the label reissues its entire catalogue on remastered CDs and audiophile vinyl. In the meantime, it would be churlish to do anything other than applaud such signs of Impulse's rejuvenation as its signing of reed player Shabaka Hutchings and welcome every tickle of its back catalogue such as this mostly well compiled, thoughtfully annotated 4xLP / 2xCD compilation marking the label's 60th Anniversary. ...”
Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans
“When the Hirshhorn Museum told Laurie Anderson that it wanted to put on a big, lavish retrospective of her work, she said no. For one thing, she was busy. She has been busy now for roughly 50 years, hauling her keyboards and experimental violins all over the world to put on huge bonanzas of lasers and noise loops and incantatory monologues that she delivers in a voice somewhere between slam poetry, an evening newscast, a final confession and a bedtime story. Although Anderson plays multiple instruments, her signature tool has always been her voice. Words emerge from her mouth deliberate and hyperenunciated, surrounded by unpredictable pauses. She piles up phrases the way van Gogh piled up brush strokes. ...”
2008 June: Laurie Anderson, 2009 December: Personal Service Announcements, 2011 February: Home studio (late 80's), 2011 March: I Don't Need It, I Don't Want It, And You Cheated Me Out of It, 2011 October: Big Science, 2011 October: Delusion, 2013 June: United States Live
Brew: A Brief History of Coffee
“To some, their morning coffee is an elixir from heaven, their wake-up in a cup, or simply… necessary to carry on. With its energizing properties and storied past, it has an interesting history that deserves to be remembered. This is original content based on research by The History Guy. ...”
2010 September: Espresso, 2013 April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard, 2021 July: The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, August 2021: The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented
Chasing New Revenue, FIFA Is Considering Major Move to U.S.
FIFA officials toured the United States in September, visiting possible host cities for the 2026 World Cup.
"Looking to expand its global footprint beyond its cloistered headquarters next to a zoo on the outskirts of Zurich, soccer’s governing body, FIFA, is studying the feasibility of moving its financial engine, the commercial operation that produces billions of dollars in revenues for the organization, to the United States. The possible move will be determined by technical factors including the suitability of locations on both coasts, the ease of acquiring work visas for overseas staff members and tax rules, according to an official with direct knowledge of the discussions who declined to speak publicly because a final determination had yet to be made. The operations involved represent a vital part of FIFA’s business: They oversee FIFA’s sale of sponsorships and broadcasting rights, which represent some of the most lucrative properties in global sports. ..."
Albert Camus on the Responsibility of the Artist: To “Create Dangerously” (1957)
“Literary statements about the nature and purpose of art constitute a genre unto themselves, the ars poetica, an antique form going back at least as far as Roman poet Horace. The 19th century poles of the debate are sometimes represented by the dueling notions of Percy Shelley — who claimed that poets are the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ — and Oscar Wilde, who famously proclaimed, ‘all art is quite useless.’ These two statements conveniently describe a conflict between art that involves itself in the struggles of the world, and art that is involved only with itself. In the mid-twentieth century, Albert Camus put the question somewhat differently in a 1957 speech entitled ‘Create Dangerously.’ ...”
2011 October: Albert Camus on Nihilism, 2014 November: Albert Camus: Soccer Goalie, 2015 May: LISTEN: New Cave And Ellis Soundtrack, 2016 April: Anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche, 2016 April: Algerian Chronicles (2013), 2017 November: The Stranger (1942), 2018 July: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960), 2019 September: Les Pieds-Noirs: Algeria’s Forgotten Footballers, 2020 March: The Plague (1947), 2020 September: An Animated Introduction to Albert Camus’ Existentialism, a Philosophy Making a Comeback in Our Dysfunctional Times
Whistle-Blower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety’
“John Tye, the founder of Whistleblower Aid, a legal nonprofit that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking, was contacted this spring through a mutual connection by a woman who claimed to have worked at Facebook. The woman told Mr. Tye and his team something intriguing: She had access to tens of thousands of pages of internal documents from the world’s largest social network. In a series of calls, she asked for legal protection and a path to releasing the confidential information. ... On Sunday, Frances Haugen revealed herself to be ‘Sean,’ the whistle-blower against Facebook. ...”
How Gramercy Park became the only private park in Manhattan
“The story begins in 1831, when Samuel B. Ruggles, a New York City lawyer and real estate investor, had an idea. The metropolis was growing fast, pushing past its Lower Manhattan borders and creeping up to 14th Street and beyond. The builders of all the new houses and commercial buildings didn’t always care much about urban planning, and Manhattan’s naturally hilly topography was being leveled and turned into streets and building lots. Ruggles knew that elite New Yorkers would pay big to reside in a different kind of setting, even if it was somewhat north of the posh sections of the city. ‘He recognized the value of centering residences around inviting open spaces within Manhattan’s strict city grid,’ stated the National Parks Service. ...”
Jan. 6 Was Worse Than We Knew
“However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse. The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of Mr. Trump himself. In the days before the mob descended on the Capitol, a corollary attack — this one bloodless and legalistic — was playing out down the street in the White House, where Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and a lawyer named John Eastman huddled in the Oval Office, scheming to subvert the will of the American people by using legal sleight-of-hand. ...”
2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election, 2021 February: First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack., 2021 February: A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack , 2021 March: Police Shrugged Off the Proud Boys, Until They Attacked the Capitol, 2021 March: ‘We’ve Lost the Line!’: Radio Traffic Reveals Police Under Siege at Capitol, 2021 April: Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds, 2021 May: Trump Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence, 2021 June: Senate Report Details Security Failures in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot, 2021 July: Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol, 2021 July: ‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins., 2021 September: Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant
Van Dyke Parks: Enjoying the Distraction of Collaboration
“A chance to talk with the man who penned the line ‘columnated ruins domino’ in the Beach Boys’ epic song ‘Surf’s Up’? Yes, please. His recent collaboration, Van Dyke Parks orchestrates Verónica Valerio: Only in America – Solo en América, is a sonic treat, featuring Verónica’s vocals and harp and Van Dyke’s unique arrangements, and is well worth checking out. A conversation with Van Dyke is a rollicking affair of big words, grand statements, history lessons, piano tinkling, and unabashed humanitarian positivity. ...”
Discogs: Van Dyke Parks Orchestrates Verónica Valerio – Only In America Solo En America (Video)
2012 July: Van Dyke Parks, 2015 December: Moonlighting: Live at the Ash Grove (1998), 2016 November: Song Cycle (1967), 2017 March: Jump! (1984), 2017 April: Orange Crate Art - Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks (1995)
VF Live: Jayson Wynters
Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, Is Fake
The Vinland Map was unveiled in 1965 by a Yale team that believed it was made in 1440. A new team found a titanium compound used in inks first produced in the 1920s.
“Doubts crept in around Greenland, which looked so good it was frankly suspicious, and questions soon spread all over the map: about the wormholes, the handwriting and, most important, the weirdly crumbling ink. For over half a century, scholars have fought over the authenticity of the Vinland Map, which Yale University unveiled to the world in 1965; at the time, calling it evidence of Viking explorations in the western Atlantic, the first European depiction of North America and a precious medieval treasure. Yale now says someone duped a lot of people. ...”
Jah Lloyd - “No Tribal War/Ark Of The Covenant” (1975)
“... Released in 1972, this single is one of the very first to be released by Teem, the label of Patrick Lloyd Francis, Jah Lloyd's birth name. Francis began his singing career with the Mediators in the mid-60s. At the end of the decade, he recorded for Rupie Edwards and Lee Perry. For a while, Francis became their record salesman, frequenting the studios and getting closer to King Tubby, with whom he studied the technical aspect of music. In the early 70s, Pat Francis started producing and founded his Teem label. Inspired by U-Roy, Big Youth or Dilinger, he took the name Jah Lloyd and recorded his first Deejay style productions at Randy's Studio - with the support of Edwards and the help of Perry. ...”
The 12 Defining Scenes of ‘The Sopranos’
2011 June: The Sopranos, 2012 March: The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos, 2013 June: James Gandolfini, 2015 April: David Chase Reveals the Philosophical Meaning of The Soprano’s Final Scene, 2019 January: Television Learned the Wrong Lessons From The Sopranos, 2019 June: Don’t Stop: The Sopranos ends, 2020 July: The Sopranos - Season 1, 2020 July: Season 2, 2020 August: Season 3, 2020 August: Season 4, 2020 September: Season 5, 2020 December: Season 6
Balanchine, the Teacher: ‘I Pushed Everybody’
“The setting is a ballet class, and the year is 1974. George Balanchine throws up his arms in exasperation at the sight of a dancer executing a step incorrectly at the barre. ... The new film ’In Balanchine’s Classroom,’ directed by Connie Hochman, focuses on the teaching of the groundbreaking choreographer — and how it instilled his dances at New York City Ballet with articulate, musical brilliance. It’s both enthralling and heartbreaking. To love Balanchine is to love this film; to love this film is to love ballet, specifically Balanchine’s kind and his kind of dancer: daring, fast, strong, free, at one with the music. Each is different from the next. That mattered to him. ...”
Minor Threat
Downtown Pulaski, Virginia.
“Derek Craft, a six-foot-eight right-hander out of east Texas, carefully guided his 1995 Toyota pickup through the final winding miles of his journey to Pulaski, Virginia. Worn-out after a long day driving north from Florida, Craft felt a spike of adrenaline as the night enveloping Draper Mountain gave way to the bright lights of Calfee Park. Perched proudly above the darkened town of Pulaski like a citadel, the stadium has lit up summer nights there for more than eighty years, immune to the forces that have eaten away at this once prosperous textile and railroad town. It was the spring of 2019, and Craft, a sixteenth-round draft pick, had been assigned to pitch for the Appalachian League’s Pulaski Yankees. ...”
Astronomia Playing Cards (1829)
“... One particularly fine example is the Astronomia deck. Transcending the earthly concerns of betting and regal motifs, this pack focuses exclusively on the heavens. From the collection of card aficionado Melbert Cary, which contains another lovely celestial spread from c. 1717, the Astronomia pack — printed in London in 1829 and reissued in 1831 — recalls the mystical origins of playing cards. Whereas the Tarot tradition followed astrology into occult realms, this deck remains soberly astronomical. Above the skyscape on each card is a table of cosmological data for particular extra-terrestrial objects: its distance from the sun, orbital eccentricity, and progression-per-hour are displayed on decorative curtain swags. Were you to fan them across a table, it would be like gazing through fifty-two windows onto outer space, framed by classical stone columns. ...”
Will We Remember the Victims of the Kabul Drone Strike?
Graffiti denouncing US drone strikes in Sanaa, Yemen in 2014.
“As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a ‘righteous strike.’ The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that August 29 air strike averted an Islamic State car-bomb attack on the last American troops at Kabul’s airport. At least, that’s what the Pentagon told the world. Within two weeks, a New York Times investigation would dismantle that official narrative. Seven days later, even the Pentagon admitted it. Instead of killing an ISIS suicide bomber, the United States had slaughtered 10 civilians: Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a US aid group; three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three children of Ahmadi’s brother Romal, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya. ...”
The Lenox School of Jazz 1959
Percy Heath
“1959 was the year Ornette Coleman broke into the jazz consciousness, a big bang event that forever changed the perception of what jazz is and the esthetics of the genre. In May of that year, while still in the west coast, he recorded his debut on Atlantic Records, the milestone album The Shape of Jazz to Come. In November he opened a two week engagement at the Five Spot Café in New York City, which expanded to ten weeks and generated a heated debate about his music. In between these events, that watershed year also included a period of three weeks that gave Coleman a flavor of what’s to expect from the jazz community, in particular fellow musicians. ...”
amazon: The Lenox School of Jazz: A Vital Chapter in the History of American Music and Race Relations
Discogs: Featuring Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry And Kenny Dorham – Lenox School Of Jazz Concert, 1959 (Video)
Revolt of the Delivery Workers
“The Willis Avenue Bridge, a 3,000-foot stretch of asphalt and beige-painted steel connecting Manhattan and the Bronx, is the perfect place for an ambush. The narrow bike path along its west side is poorly lit; darkened trash-strewn alcoves on either end are useful for lying in wait. All summer, food-delivery workers returning home after their shifts have been violently attacked there for their bikes: by gunmen pulling up on motorcycles, by knife-wielding thieves leaping from the recesses, by muggers blocking the path with Citi Bikes and brandishing broken bottles. ...”
August 25, 4:30 P.M. Between the lunch and dinner shifts, delivery workers rest at an underground garage that serves as a makeshift break room.
The Desolation Age - Beyond the Ghost (2021)
“Beyond the Ghost presents his second album in the Europa Series, a futuristic, bleak and moving sound voyage that merges electronics and acoustics. London, the year is 2061. War is raging across Europe. Ultra-nationalist powers are fighting against each other, trying to conquer more territory and assert their supremacy. In London, enemy armies of cyborg soldiers and drones are taking over the city. The capital is quickly falling into ruins, the dust from the rubble is still suspended in the air. ...”
Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant
Records show that an F.B.I. informant marched from the Washington Monument to the Capitol and told his handler that Trump supporters were entering the building.
“As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march. The recipient was his F.B.I. handler. In the middle of an unfolding melee that shook a pillar of American democracy — the peaceful transfer of power — the bureau had an informant in the crowd, providing an inside glimpse of the action, according to confidential records obtained by The New York Times. In the informant’s version of events, the Proud Boys, famous for their street fights, were largely following a pro-Trump mob consumed by a herd mentality rather than carrying out any type of preplanned attack. ...”
2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election, 2021 February: First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack., 2021 February: A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack , 2021 March: Police Shrugged Off the Proud Boys, Until They Attacked the Capitol, 2021 March: ‘We’ve Lost the Line!’: Radio Traffic Reveals Police Under Siege at Capitol, 2021 April: Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds, 2021 May: Trump Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence, 2021 June: Senate Report Details Security Failures in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot, 2021 July: Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol, 2021 July: ‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins.
The Internet Should Be a Public Good
ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer. US Army
“On October 1, the Internet will change and no one will notice. This invisible transformation will affect the all-important component that makes the Internet usable: the Domain Name System (DNS). When you type the name of a website into your browser, DNS is what converts that name into the string of numbers that specify the website’s actual location. Like a phone book, DNS matches names that are meaningful to us to numbers that aren’t.For years, the US government has controlled DNS. But in October, the system will become the responsibility of a Los Angeles-based nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).ICANN has actually already been managing DNS since the late 1990s under a contract with the Commerce Department. ...”
Kawina, coups, and Sranan soul: a brief history of Surinamese music
Lieve Hugo and The Happy Boys
“A culmination of political windfall has struck the country of Suriname in recent months. President Dési Bouterse, who had held office since 2010, was found guilty in July 2019 of the murder and execution of 15 political opponents in the aftermath of a 1982 military coup. ... Though no arrests have been made, Bouterse, the 74-year-old politician, faces a potential 20-year prison sentence. In celebration of this historic victory for the Surinamese people, and in celebration of the country’s original independence day from Dutch colonial rule on November 25, 1975, we want to look into Suriname’s volatile political history and explore how, through the trials of the centuries, Surinamese music has become a symbol of hope, strength, and perseverance. ...”
Parliament of Republic of Suriname; people with signs bearing slogans (Surinamese) Date: December 1, 1975
The Louvre Under Snow - Camille Pissarro (1902)
“You can see the echoes of Japanese prints by Hokusai and his contemporaries in this Impressionist picture of the floating world. Pissarro’s brush alights on the passing beauty of a winter white-out, observing central Paris from an apartment he rented for its great view of the Seine. The cinematic way he frames the scene, the sense of ephemerality and immediacy, even the joy in winter as a beautiful season all speak of Pissarro’s debts to Hokusai. He shares this enthusiasm with Van Gogh, Whistler and Monet. Japanese art hit Europe’s avant garde in the the 19th century like a great wave.“
Fire Music: a history of the free jazz revolution, writer/director Tom Surgal
“Although the free jazz movement of the 1960s and ‘70s was much maligned in some jazz circles, its pioneers – brilliant talents like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane – are today acknowledged as central to the evolution of jazz as America’s most innovative art form. FIRE MUSIC showcases the architects of a movement whose radical brand of improvisation pushed harmonic and rhythmic boundaries, and produced landmark albums like Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Inspiration and Coltrane’s Ascension. A rich trove of archival footage conjures the 1960s jazz scene along with incisive reflections by critic Gary Giddins and a number of the movement’s key players. ...”
Sun Ra Arkestra
Harvest Moon - Nina MacLaughlin
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558
“In 1957, the first satellite was launched into orbit around the earth. A gleaming metallic sphere about two feet in diameter with four long antennae, it had the look of a robot daddy longlegs. It weighed a hundred and eighty-four pounds and sped through space at about eighteen thousand miles per hour. After three months and more than fourteen hundred spins around this planet, it reentered earth’s atmosphere, blazing into flames. ...”
2021 May: What Color Is the Sky?, 2021 June: Strawberry Moon, 2021 August: Sturgeon Moon
‘The Village Detective’ decays into the avant-garde
“It was probably inevitable, baked into the chemical essence of film, that the medium’s own ephemerality would become a metaphor for time, aging, and death. Filmed images outlive the people in them, but time’s army eventually catches up, and what we’d long thought was immortal confronts the laws of decomposition just as we do. Movie images are ghosts, but eventually the ghosts themselves begin to rot away. It may’ve been because cinema was finally a century old, or due to a leveling-up in the world of film preservation, but it was in the ’90s when artists began recycling old film not for its subject but for its nitrate collapse. Emerging around the same time as Dutch archivist Peter Delpeut, Bill Morrison quickly became this domain’s archdruid; soon, he was, and still is, America’s most viewed and most distributed avant-garde filmmaker. ...”
2012 June: Bill Morrison, 2015 October: Decasia (2002), 2017 December: The Miners' Hymns (2011), 2018 January: The Dockworker's Dream (2016), 2018 October: Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) , 2018 November: Director Bill Morrison
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