Wayne Gonzales

"By addressing the complex relation between photography and the construction and dissemination of history, Wayne Gonzales's new work inserts itself in what appears to be a burgeoning genre: post-photographic history painting."
BNET, artnet, Google, YouTube

Jukebox

Wikipedia - "A jukebox is a partially automated music-playing device, usually a coin-operated machine, that can play specially selected songs from self-contained media. The traditional jukebox is rather large with a rounded top and has colored lighting on the front of the machine on its vertical sides. The classic jukebox has buttons with letters and numbers on them that, when combined, are used to indicate a specific song from a particular record."
Wikipedia, Playa Cofi Jukebox, JukeBox

Afrobeat

Wikipedia - "Afrobeat is a combination of Yoruba music, jazz, highlife, and funk rhythms, fused with percussion and vocal styles, popularized in Africa in the 1970s. Its main creator was the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Fela Kuti who used it to revolutionise musical structure as well as the political context in his native Nigeria. It was Kuti who coined the term 'afrobeat' upon his return from a U.S. tour with his group Nigeria 70 (formerly Koola Lobitos)."
Wikipedia, The Afrobeat Blog, YouTube, (1), (2)

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Wikipedia - "Claude Lévi-Strauss ... (28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called the 'father of modern anthropology'. He also was one of the central figures in the structuralist school of thought, where his ideas reached into fields including the humanities and philosophy."
Wikipedia, NYT, Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Harvey Pekar

"Harvey Pekar's been mining the mundane for magic for more than 30 years in his autobiographical American Splendor comics. Now he has teamed with SMITH and four remarkable artists &mdash Tara Seibel, Joseph Remnant, Rick Parker, and Sean Pryor &mdash to create his first ongoing webcomic series. New stories appear every other week, with interviews, creator spotlights, and behind-the-scenes goodies. - — Jeff Newelt, Comics Editor"
Pekar Project, Wikipedia, WKSU, NPR

Debashish Bhattacharya

Wikipedia - "Debashish Bhattacharya (Bangla: ভট্টাচার্য, Hindi: देबाशिष भट्टाचार्य, Devāśiṣ Bhaṭṭācārya, born 12 January 1963) is an Indian classical musician who plays the lap slide guitar."
Wikipedia, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

Exhibit: Iranian banknotes uprising

Ayatollah Khomeini 10,000 Rial Fantasy Banknote
"Anti-government activists are not allowed to express themselves in Iranian media, so theses activists have taken their expressions to another high circulation mass-medium, banknotes. The Central Bank of Iran has tried to take these banknotes out of circulation, but there are just too many of them, and gave up. For the activists’ people it’s a way of saying 'We are here, and the green movement is going on'."
Payvand

Artistamp

Wikipedia - "The term artistamp (a portmanteau of the words 'artist' and 'stamp') or artist's stamp refers to a postage stamp-like artform used to depict or commemorate any subject its creator chooses. Artistamps are a form of Cinderella stamps in that they are not valid for postage, but they differ from forgeries or bogus stamps in that typically the creator has no intent to fool postal authorities or stamp collectors."
Wikipedia, U. Texas, Faximum, NPCC, Terra Candella, artistamp

Falnama: The Book of Omens

Hell, from the Ahmed I Falnama. Iran or Turkey, 1580-1590
"Whether by consulting the position of the planets, casting horoscopes, or interpreting dreams, the art of divination was widely practiced throughout the Islamic world. The most splendid tools ever devised to foretell the future were illustrated texts known as the Falnama (Book of omens)."
Asia, Smithsonian, Washington Post

Who Shot Rock & Roll

William "PoPsie" Randolph, Wilson Pickett, Jimi Hendrix
"Who Shot Rock & Roll is the first major museum exhibition on rock and roll to put photographers in the foreground, acknowledging their creative and collaborative role in the history of rock music. From its earliest days, rock and roll was captured in photographs that personalized, and frequently eroticized, the musicians, creating a visual identity for the genre."
Brooklyn Museum

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