The Buena Vista Social Club

Orlando “Cachaito” Lopez
Wikipedia - "The Buena Vista Social Club was a members club in Havana, Cuba that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s."
Wikipedia, PBS, Wim Wenders, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), (3)

Burning Deck Press

Wikipedia - "Burning Deck is an small press specializing in the publication of experimental poetry and prose. Burning Deck was founded by the writers Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop in 1961."
Wikipedia, Burning Deck, Forty Years of Burning Deck Press, 1961 - 2001

The Dark Ages

Inquisition
Wikipedia - "The Dark Ages is the period of cultural decline or societal collapse that took place in Western Europe between the fall of Rome and the gradual recovery of learning between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The period is called 'dark' in two senses, the first reflecting our lack of knowledge of the period and of any significant recorded history; the second reflecting the cultural darkness of the West at a time when there was no architecture of any significance, little philosophical and literary work, and when most of the great works of classical antiquity were 'lost'."
Wikipedia

Italics: Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution 1968–2008

Maurizio Cattelan, All (2008)
"Italics, held in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, looked at Italian art as a sort of train made up of different carriages, some of which have made it onto international networks, others of which have been sidetracked into the tortuous m eanders of Italy’s recent history."
Palazzo Grassi, Exhibition of Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution Opens at Chicago's MCA, Time Out

The Museum of the Dead

"Not far from our hotel in the center of Palermo is Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a little Baroque church founded by one of those orders that looks after the unwanted dead. The space is crammed with plaster skulls and skeletons, mostly painted, but the last chapel on the right held what we had come to see: matching pairs of stucco corpses by the sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, who could impart life and motion to all kinds of unlikely entities, such as abstract Virtues and tired old scriptural stories."
Cabinet Magazine

David Levinthal

Polaroid Polacolor ER Land Film, 20x24 inches
"David Levinthal (1949, San Francisco, California) is a photographer who lives and works in New York."
Wikipedia, David Levinthal, artnet

Rapping

Wikipedia - "Rapping (also known as emceeing, MCing, spitting (bars), or just rhyming) is the rhythmic spoken delivery of rhymes, wordplay, and poetry. Rapping is a primary ingredient in hip hop music, but the phenomenon predates hip hop culture by centuries. Rapping can be delivered over a beat or without accompaniment."
Wikipedia, Rapping

Enrique Martinez Celaya

Boy With Flowers, 2004
"'The Atlantic seems different than I remember. It is probably that for eighteen years I had been near the Pacific, my eyes used to hills diving into the grayish waters of the California Coast. There is no soil in Florida. Only sand. No oaks. Only pine trees and palms. At night, the salty smell coming from the sea is not a Northern smell, like the Pacific's, but a complex Southern mixture of death and melancholia that some around here call excitement.'"
Greg Kucera, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Wikipedia

Bart's Blackboard

Bart's Blackboard

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

"Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade."
NYT, The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000–3500 BC

Trey Ratcliff

"HDR is short for High Dynamic Range. It is a post-processing task of taking either one image or a series of images, combining them, and adjusting the contrast ratios to do things that are virtually impossible with a single aperture and shutter speed."
Trey Ratcliff, (1), (2)

The O'Jays

Wikipedia - "The O'Jays are a Canton, Ohio-based soul/R&B group, originally consisting of Walter Williams (b. August 25, 1942), Bill Isles, Bobby Massey, William Powell (January 20, 1942–May 26, 1977) and Eddie Levert (b. June 16, 1942)."
Wikipedia, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), (3)

Ingram Marshall

Wikipedia - "Ingram Marshall (born May 10, 1942 in Mount Vernon, New York) is an American composer and a former student of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Morton Subotnick. Though the composer uses the term "expressivist" to describe his music, he is often associated with post-minimalism."
Wikipedia, Ingram Marshall, New Albion, New Music Box, Perfect Sound Forever

The World's Best Alternative Subway Maps

"What good for London is not bon for Paris. After Harry Beck, the father of modern subway cartography, designed the now iconic London Underground map, he turned his attentions to Paris. Without a commission or even a request, he offered the Paris Metro an elegant, schematic version of their map, excising landmarks and sticking to the clean, colorful basics. The response was an unequivocal non, and the Paris map, with some modifications, remains geographical to this day."
Treehugger

Youth subculture

Wikipedia - "A youth subculture is a youth-based subculture with distinct styles, behaviors, and interests. According to subculture theorists such as Dick Hebdige, members of a subculture often signal their membership by making distinctive and symbolic tangible choices in, for example, clothing styles, hairstyles and footwear."
Wikipedia

Cool Papa Bell

Wikipedia - "James Thomas 'Cool Papa' Bell (May 17, 1903 – March 7, 1991) was an American center fielder in Negro league baseball, considered by many baseball observers to have been the fastest man ever to play the game."
Wikipedia, NLBPA, Eric Enders, Mississippi Historical Society

Maria Escobar

Lot 11, "The Cocktail Party"
Wikipedia - "Maria Sol Escobar (born May 22, 1930), otherwise known simply as Marisol, is a sculptor born in Paris of Venezuelan lineage, living in Europe, the United States and Caracas."
Wikipedia, Museum, Neuberger Museum of Art, artandculture

War of the Worlds

"An examination of the power of mass media to create panic. In Radio Lab's very first live hour, we take a deep dive into one of the most controversial moments in broadcasting history - Orson Welles' 1938 radio play about Martians invading New Jersey. And we ask: Why did it fool people then? And why has it continued to fool people since? From Santiago, Chile to Buffalo, New York to a particularly disastrous evening in Quito, Ecuador."
WNYC

Steve Wolfe

"These marks become records of time and memory representing the intersection of abstract thought and physical substance. With painstakingly composed illusion, these objects fall within the tradition of trompe l'oeil and blur the line between everyday object and art."
Yale Press, Menil

No Wave

Wikipedia - "No Wave was a short-lived but influential underground music, film, performance art, video, and contemporary art scene that had its beginnings during the mid-1970s in New York City. The term No Wave is in part satirical wordplay rejecting the commercial elements of the then-popular New Wave genre—a term imported into the New York contemporary artworld by Diego Cortez in a show he curated called 'New York/New Wave' held at the Institute for Art and Urban Resources (1981)."
Wikipedia, NO!: The Origins of No Wave, epi tonic

New Zealand Book Council

"It was a happy discovery to find a quick link via swissmiss for a new animated short film for the NZ Book Council. The use of paper-cuts and books as the medium for the animated sequences reminded me immediately of the This Is Where We Live animation for 4th Estate books. But, the 2-minute stop frame animated promo, Going West, still is impressive and uniquely beautiful."
design related

The Bobby Fuller Four

Wikipedia - "Bobby Fuller (October 22, 1942 – July 18, 1966) was an American rock singer, songwriter, and guitar player best known for his single 'I Fought the Law'."
Wikipedia, (1), Classic Bands, Rockabilly Hall, Unofficial Bobby Fuller Webpage, The Strange Case of Bobby Fuller, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), YouTube - Rock n' Roll King of the Southwest

Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut

"Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks)."
NYT, NYPL, (1), Las Vegas Sun, Gratz Industries

Dub music

Wikipedia - "Dub is either an instrumental subgenre of reggae music, or a separate genre of music that involves revisions of existing songs. The dub sound consists predominantly of instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is achieved by significantly manipulating and reshaping the recordings, usually by removing the vocals from an existing music piece, emphasizing the drum and bass parts or, in other words, 'riddim', adding extensive echo and reverb effects, panoramic LR delay, and dubbing occasional snippets of lyrics or instruments from the original version. Sometimes, dub also features melodica melody."
Wikipedia, dub music reggae, Dubmusic Productions, Dub Music - 105 Songs, Dub and Reggae, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4)

Airmail stamp

Wikipedia - "An airmail stamp is a postage stamp intended to pay either an airmail fee that is charged in addition to the surface rate, or the full airmail rate, for a piece of mail to be transported by air. Airmail stamps should not be confused with airmail etiquettes, which are affixed to mail as an instruction to the postal authority that the mail should be transmitted by air."
Wikipedia, The Airmail Stamp Museum, American Airmail Society, Google

The French Revolution (1789–1799)

The storming of the Bastille, July 14, 1789, an iconic event of the French Revolution.
Wikipedia - "The French Revolution (1789–1799) was a period of political and social upheaval and radical change in the history of France, during which the French governmental structure, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, underwent radical change to forms based on Enlightenment principles of citizenship and inalienable rights."
Wikipedia, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, French Revolution, Google

Robin Blaser (1925 - 2009)

Helen Adam
"We at PennSound were devastated to learn of the passing of Robin Blaser yesterday morning, weeks shy of his 84th birthday. Charles Bernstein paid tribute to the late poet in a blog entry reposting his afterword to The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser yesterday afternoon. That essay begins by noting, 'Robin Blaser's poems are companions on a journey of life, a journey whose goal is not getting someplace else, but, rather, being where you are and who you are — where you is always in the plural.'"
PennSound, The Vancouver Sun, EPC, Golden Handcuffs Review, Jacket Magazine, Wikipedia, Griffin, Berkeley Daily Planet, Dooneys Cafe - Robin Blaser, 1925-2009: Death’s Duty, The Globe and Mail - ‘Showing us things both marvellous and horrific', The incomparable Robin Blaser, "The hippest guy in the room:" Poet Robin Blaser at 83, Belladodie, UCTV, MP3 - Lunch Poems: Robin Blaser, Atwater Library and Computer Centre - Poetry Project: Robin Blaser March 14, 2008, YouTube, (1), YouTube - Blaser interview pt 1, Blaser interview pt 2, Blaser interview pt 3

Katharina Grosse

"Her site-specific design engages the lobby's architectural features and uses every available surface, including the floor and windows. In this installation, Grosse places eight cubic meters of coarse dirt and fine top soil over Styrofoam to form a large hill, which she sprays with white acrylic before coating it in a Technicolor mist."
Contemporary Arts Center, Katharina Grosse, artnet

Ida Applebroog

"Applebroog has been making pointed social commentary in the form of beguiling comic-like images for nearly half a century. She has developed an instantly recognizable style of simplified human forms with bold outlines."
PBS, Ida Applebroog, artnet, Google

Western swing

Carl Cole & his Flint Hill Boys
Wikipedia - "Western swing is a style of popular music that evolved in the 1920s in the American Southwest among the region's popular Western string bands. Fundamentally an outgrowth of jazz, much Western swing is dance music with an up-tempo beat consisting of an eclectic combination of rural, cowboy, polka, and folk music, New Orleans jazz, or Dixieland, and blues blended with a jazzy 'swing' and played by a hot string band often augmented with drums, saxophones, pianos and, notably, the steel guitar."
Wikipedia, Westerns Swing, Western Swing 78

Kitty Kraus

"Standing amid Kitty Kraus’ installations, you find yourself in the presence of things that wouldn’t normally take up much space – panes of glass, items of clothing, light bulbs – but which have suddenly expanded by means of the artist’s crafty, hand-crafted interventions."
Frieze, e-flux, Art In America Magazine

The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

Wikipedia - "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show is the collective name for two separate American television animated series: Rocky and His Friends (1959 – 1961) and The Bullwinkle Show (1961 – 1964). Rocky & Bullwinkle enjoyed great popularity during the 1960s."
Wikipedia, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

Shiva Ahmadi

Oil Barrel #4
"I have always been very fascinated by oil politics and the role it plays in Iranians’ lives. I think the source of conflicts, such as the Revolution and the war with Iraq, also lie in our resources, which have made Iran very important to the industries of major world economies."
Chelsea Art Museum, College for Creative Studies

Eric Elliott

Artist’s Studio: View from Easel (2008)
"In past work, the artist's attention was turned towards any number of random objects available in his studio-paint cans, a teapot, and a myriad of vessels. In his current exhibition, Elliott presents six paintings, each organized simply around a single plant. Using this common theme, the artist makes evident his interest in both interconnectedness and difference, and the balance between the two."
James Harris Gallery, Eric Elliott

A Humument

Wikipedia - "A Humument: A treated Victorian novel is an altered book by British artist Tom Phillips, first published in 1970. It is a piece of art created over W H Mallock's 1892 novel A Human Document whose title results from the partial deletion of the original title: A Human document. First page of A Humument, 1970 edition Phillips drew, painted, and collaged over the pages, while leaving some of the original text to show through."
Wikipedia, Tom Phillips, A Humument