Rockefeller Center

"One of the most prestigious office complexes on Manhattan Island, Rockefeller Center is the centerpiece of activity for thousands of New Yorkers who have embraced it as not just another boring office block, but as a warm symbol of a great city. Its rise to national stardom came not so much from the historic name it bears, but because for almost as long as there has been broadcasting, Rockefeller Center has been the home to some of the most powerful networks in the United States."
NYC Architecture

Brian Ulrich

Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, Illinois
Wikipedia - "Brian Ulrich (born 1971) is an American photographer known for his photographic exploration of consumer culture."
Wikipedia, Brian Ulrich, chicagoist

Jacques Villeglé

Wikipedia - "Jacques Villeglé, born Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé (1926, Quimper, Brittany) is a French mixed-media artist and affichiste famous for his alphabet with symbolic letters and decollage with ripped or lacerated posters. He builds posters in which one has been placed over another or others, and the top poster or posters have been ripped, revealing to a greater or lesser degree the poster or posters underneath."
Wikipedia, artnet, Modernism

Timothy Leary

Wikipedia - "Dr. Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American writer, psychologist, futurist, and advocate of psychedelic drug research. An icon of 1960s counterculture, Leary is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic, spiritual and emotional benefits of LSD. He coined and popularized the catch phrase 'Turn on, tune in, drop out.'"
Wikipedia, Timothy Leary, Virginia Uni., Google - High Priest, YouTube, YouTube - (1), (2), (3), (4).

Moby Grape

Wikipedia - "Moby Grape is an American rock group from the 1960s, known for having all five members contribute to singing and songwriting and that collectively merged elements of folk music, blues, country, and jazz together with rock and psychedelic music. Due to the strength of their debut album, several critics consider Moby Grape to be the best rock band to emerge from the San Francisco music scene in the late sixties."
Wikipedia, W - 1, NPR, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), (3)

Willie Foster

"A half-brother of the famous Rube Foster, Willie Foster was the greatest left-handed pitcher from the Negro Leagues. With near perfect control and a wide assortment of pitches, all delivered with the same motion, the tall left-hander was at his best when the stakes were highest. With a crucial game to win, Bill was the kind of pitcher that a manager wanted on the mound."
Black Baseball, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum

Anthony Goicolea

Night Sitting, 2009
Wikipedia - "Anthony Goicolea (born 1971) is a New York-based fine art photographer, born in Atlanta, Georgia. Goicolea's photographs frequently deal with issues of androgyny, homosexuality, and child sexuality."
Wikipedia, Anthony Goicolea, Lenscratch

Viva Cuba

Wikipedia - "In Viva Cuba, a road movie fairy tale, Cremata tackles localized Cuban problems from the literal point of view of the country’s children. He lowers the camera to the eye level of the film’s protagonists, Malú (Malú Tarrau Broche) and Jorgito (Jorgito Miló Ávila)."
Wikipedia, Video Detective

Fred Hampton

Wikipedia - "Fred Hampton (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an African-American activist and deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP)."
Wikipedia, Democracy Now, Black Commentator, YouTube, (2), (3), (4)

King Tubby

Wikipedia - "King Tubby (born Osbourne Ruddock, January 28, 1941 – February 6, 1989) was a Jamaican electronics and sound engineer, known primarily for his influence on the development of dub music in the 1960s and 1970s."
Wikipedia, Perfect Sound Forever, fast.fm, Rhapsody, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

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