Secrets of the Ancient 20th Century Gamers - Mark Bloch

NY Arts Magazine - "There are a lot of points of entry to the multifaceted world of Mark Bloch, so you will have to decide for yourself where to begin. An artist of the future, Bloch emerged from underground this spring with a one-man show at the Emily Harvey Foundation that was not too difficult to get into. His series titled, Storàge Museums seems to be much about the idea of 'storàge,' a term coined by Bloch to relate this work to terms like 'collage,' and 'assemblage' from the 20th century. The accented a transforms the word into a French pronunciation."
NY Arts Magazine, Secrets of the Ancient 20th Century Gamers

Lee Friedlander: America By Car

"Driving across most of the country’s fifty states in an ordinary rental car, master photographer Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) applied the brilliantly simple conceit of deploying the sideview mirror, rearview mirror, the windshield, and the side windows as picture frames within which to record reflections of this country’s eccentricities and obsessions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Friedlander’s method allows for fascinating effects in foreshortening, and wonderfully telling juxtapositions in which steering wheels, dashboards, and leatherette bump up against roadside bars, motels, churches, monuments, suspension bridges, essential American landscapes, and often Friedlander’s own image."
Whitney, amazon, NYT, artbook, YouTube - America by Car

London Calling - The Clash

Wikipedia - "The album represented a change in The Clash's musical style, which featured elements of ska, pop, soul, jazz, rockabilly and reggae more prominently than before. The album's subject matter included unemployment, racial conflict, drug use, and the responsibilities of adulthood."
Wikipedia, YouTube - London Calling, Guns Of Brixton, Should I stay or should I go, Spanish Bombs, Koka Kola, Lost In The SuperMarket, Clampdown, Four Horsemen & I'm Not Down, Jimmy Jazz, Rudie Can't Fail

The Wrong Side - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"The unrepentant revolutionary poet and Beat godfather, now 91, looks back at friendships with Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, Fidel, and the Sandinistas—and asks when The Nation will publish his next poem."
Guernica

Watts Riots, 1965

Wikipedia - "The term Watts Riots of 1965 refers to a large-scale riot which lasted 6 days in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in August 1965. By the time the riot subsided, 34 people had been killed, 1,032 injured, and 3,438 arrested. It would stand as the most severe riot in Los Angeles history until the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The riot is viewed by some as a reaction to the record of police brutality by the LAPD and other racial injustices suffered by black Americans in Los Angeles, including job and housing discrimination."
Wikipedia, YouTube - Watts Riots News Reel

Hitchhiking

Wikipedia - "Hitchhiking (also known as thumbing, 'fingering',tramping, hitching, autostop or thumbing up a ride) is a means of transportation that is gained by asking people, usually strangers, for a ride in their automobile or other road vehicle to travel a distance that may either be short or long. The latter may require many rides from different people; a ride is usually but not always free."
Wikipedia

The Castaways

Wikipedia - "The Castaways are an American garage rock band from the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Their first and only hit single was 'Liar, Liar'. Written by band leader James Donna and Denny Craswell, produced by Timothy D. Kehr and released by Soma Records, it reached number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1965."
Wikipedia, YouTube - Liar, Liar

Beauty in Decay Book Launch

"If you are a regular reader of the Wooster Collective website, they you are already familiar with the absolutely stunning photography of RomanyWG. Based in the UK, RomanyWG has taken the baton passed by such people as Martha Cooper and Jon Naar, to become one of today's most important urban art documentarians."
Wooster Collective

Real Art Ways

"Founded in 1975, Real Art Ways is one of the country's early alternative arts spaces. Real Art Ways presents and produces new and innovative work by emerging and established artists, and serves as a crucial connection for audiences and artists regionally, nationally and internationally. The organization has sustained itself through committed support for new ideas and disciplines, and has steadily built a diverse and unique audience that crosses lines of color, sexual orientation, economics and age."
Real Art Ways

Ali Farka Touré

Wikipedia - "Ali Ibrahim 'Farka' Touré (October 31, 1939 – March 7, 2006) was a Malian singer and guitarist, and one of the African continent’s most internationally renowned musicians. His music is widely regarded as representing a point of intersection of traditional Malian music and its North American cousin, the blues."
Wikipedia, last.fm, YouTube, Ali Farka Toure part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6

Robert Bechtle

Crossing Arkansas Street-Early Morning - 2002
Wikipedia - "Along with Richard Estes, Chuck Close, and Ralph Goings, Bechtle is considered to be one of the earliest Photorealists. By the mid-1960s, he had started developing a style and subject matter that he has maintained over his career. Working from his own photographs, Bechtle creates paintings described as photographic. Taking inspiration from his local San Francisco surroundings, he painted friends and family and the neighborhoods and street scenes, paying special attention to automobiles."
Wikipedia, artnet, KQED - Video

This is Ska!

"A programme from 1964 featuring the best in Jamaican ska, featuring Eric 'Monty' Morris, Jimmy Cliff, Prince Buster, (Toots and) The Maytals, The Charmers, Stranger Cole, Roy and Yvonne, The Blues Busters and Byron Lee and The Dragonaires"
YouTune - This is Ska! (1/4) 1964, (2/4), (3/4), (4/4)

Henry Lee - Nick Cave & PJ Harvey

"Get down, get down, little Henry Lee
And stay all night with me
You won't find a girl in this damn world
That will compare with me
And the wind did howl and the wind did blow
La la la la la
La la la la lee
A little bird lit down on Henry Lee"
YouTube - Henry Lee - Nick Cave & PJ Harvey, Henry Lee - 2

Peter Gizzi - "Jack Spicer, Bruce Conner and the Art of the Assemblage"

"Emotion and innovation is something I’ve thought a lot about relative to my own writing but it’s also something I’ve confronted in very concrete ways in the writing of Jack Spicer, and I thought I would focus here on Spicer’s work, specifically the affinity between his poetry and West-Coast assemblage art, and in particular the film work of Bruce Conner. I am interested in the ways both Spicer and Conner use history as a material texture while leaving gaps within their work to draw the reader into an intimate and emotional engagement with these materials."
The Sienese Shredder

The Art of the Steal

Wikipedia - "The Art of the Steal is a 2009 documentary film about efforts to break Albert C. Barnes's will and relocate the Barnes art collection from its longtime home in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. The collection of late-19th- and early-20th-century art includes 181 Renoirs, 69 Cézannes, 60 Matisses 44 Picassos and 14 Modiglianis. The 9,000 piece collection is valued at over $25 billion."
Wikipedia, NYT, amazon, YouTube - The Art of The Steal, Official Trailer

Avalon Hill

Wikipedia - "Avalon Hill was a game company that specialized in wargames and strategic board games. Their logo contained their initials 'AH', and it was often referred to by this abbreviation. It also published the occasional miniature wargaming rules, role-playing game, and had a popular line of sports simulations."
Wikipedia, W - List of Avalon Hill games, Avalon Hill

Paulina Olowska

"Her collages, performances, paintings, and neons are influenced by myriad sources: Modernism, Soviet and American propagandist typography, 1960s Pop art, French affichistes, American graffiti art, contemporary fashion, and beyond. Her politically and culturally nostalgic, if ironic, art practice is also informed by meticulous research into local histories in post-Soviet Poland."
CCA, artnet, Frieze, One Art World, YouTube - PORTIKUS / PAULINA OLOWSKA / BONNIE CAMPLIN

Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000

"In conjunction with the publication of PFA’s first book, Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, edited by Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid, the Pacific Film Archive is presenting a film and video series that explores the themes and movements, and traces the historic chronology of alternative film and video in the Bay Area. The history of avant-garde cinema in the region goes back to the 1940s, when surrealist-influenced films were created through San Francisco Art Institute workshops, in some of the country’s earliest filmmaking classes."
BAM/PFA, amazon, YouTube

James Casebere

Wikipedia - "James Casebere (born 1953) is an American contemporary artist and photographer living in New York."
Wikipedia, James Casebere, Whitney, artnet, YouTube

The Monterey International Pop Music Festival

Wikipedia - "The Monterey International Pop Music Festival was a three-day concert event held June 16 to June 18, 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. Monterey was the first widely promoted and heavily attended rock festival, attracting an estimated 55,000 total attendees with up to 90,000 people present at the event's peak at midnight on Sunday."
Wikipedia, YouTube - Monterey Pop Festival 1967, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Throbbing Gristle - Interview (2005)

"The Industrial movement rose and fell in Throbbing Gristle's wake, the form subverted by its purveyors to the point of parody. None of the music made in the shade of TG's long shadow ever showed a scintilla of the originality, the audacity, or the moments of incredible beauty regularly displayed by the original model."
The Return of the Wreckers of Civilization, UbuWeb - Interview (2005)

Steve Goodman

Wikipedia - "Steve Goodman (July 25, 1948 – September 20, 1984) was an American folk music singer-songwriter from Chicago, Illinois. The writer of 'City of New Orleans', made popular by Arlo Guthrie, Goodman won two Grammy Awards."
Wikipedia, Steve Goodman, YouTube - City of New Orleans, You've Never Even Called Me By My Name, You're The Girl I Love, Penny Evans, A Dying Cubs Fan's Last Request, Souvenirs, Vegematic, The Dutchman

LoopLoop - Patrick Bergeron

"Using animation, sounds warping and time shifts this video runs forwards and backwards looking for forgotten details, mimicking the way memories are replayed in the mind."
video

Sun Ra - The Magic Sun (1966)

"Stunning visuals and the sounds of Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra fill this classic 1966 black and white short experimental film by composer/photographer/ filmmaker and multi-media artist Phill Niblock. The Arkestra provide its characteristic spacial sounds in conjunction with visually abstract images - severe closeups on hands and heads to ornate cosmic/psychedelic patterned costumes. Opening spooky reed exclamations, pulsing bass bellows, syncopated percussion, blistering yet warm-toned trumpet - the Arkestra eventually is heard in its disorienting orchestral glory, ideally suited to the morphing visuals."
All About Jazz, amazon, YouTube

Arthur Rimbaud

Wikipedia - "Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (...20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as 'an infant Shakespeare'—and gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent movement, Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music and art. He was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, traveling extensively on three continents before his death from cancer less than a month after his 37th birthday."
Wikipedia, The New Yorker, YouTube, Arthur Rimbaud Poetry, Index des poemes, Guardian, Library of Biographies and Articles, Fleurs du mal / Flowers of Evil, 1857 Edition

Doug Aitken

Sleepwalkers
Wikipedia - "Doug Aitken was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1968 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. Aitken’s body of work ranges from photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, and installations. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris."
Wikipedia, Doug Aitken, MoMA, YouTube - sleepwalkers, sleepwalkers [60-second trailer], Eraser, 1999, Electric Earth, 2009, Frontier (Rome), Happening

John Berger - Ways of Seeing

Wikipedia - "Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30 minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. Berger's scripts were adapted into a book of the same name. The series and book criticize traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images. The series is partially a response to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation series, which represents a more traditionalist view of the Western artistic and cultural canon."
Wikipedia, UbuWeb

Over The River - Christo and Jeanne-Claude

"Over The River is a temporary work of art by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Christo plans to suspend 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels high above the Arkansas River along a 42-mile stretch of the river between Salida and Cañon City in south-central Colorado."
Over The River, (1), YouTube

Priit Pärn

Elu ilma Gabriella Ferrita (2008)
Wikipedia - "Priit Pärn (born 26 August 1946 in Tallinn) is an Estonian cartoonist and animation director whose films have enjoyed success among critics as well as the public at various film festivals."
Wikipedia, vimeo - Hotel E, veoh - Breakfast on the Grass

Cannibal & The Headhunters

Wikipedia - "Cannibal & The Headhunters were an American band originating from East Los Angeles, that is known for being one of the first Mexican-American groups to have a national hit record, 'Land of a Thousand Dances', recorded on the RAMPART label. They were also the opening act for The Beatles' second American tour, backed up by the King Curtis band."
Wikipedia, YouTube - Land Of 1000 Dances

Fractal

Fractal (The Mandelbrot Set), sometimes described as "the thumbprint of God."
Wikipedia - "A fractal is 'a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,' a property called self-similarity."
Wikipedia, YouTube - Arthur Clarke - Fractals - The Colors Of Infinity 1 of 6, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Lionel Corporation

Wikipedia - "Lionel Corporation was an American toy manufacturer and retailer that did business from 1900 to 1993. Founded as an electrical novelties company, Lionel specialized in various products throughout its existence, but toy trains and model railroads were its main claim to fame. Lionel trains, produced from 1901 to 1969, drew admiration from model railroaders around the world for the solidity of their construction and the authenticity of their detail."
Wikipedia, Lionel, Postwar Lionel Trains, amazon - "Inside The Lionel Trains Fun Factory", Robert's Lionel Trains Layout, YouTube - Lionel Trains for Christmas - CBS Sunday Morning, Lionel Trains - Railroad Story

Bob Marley and the Wailers

"Bob Marley was born in the country village of Nine Mile in Jamaica's St. Ann Parish. When he was 12 years old he moved to the poverty stricken Trenchtown area of Kingston where he decided that his future lay in making music. Marley worked with many musicians throughout his teenage years, including Peter McIntosh (Peter Tosh) and Neville Livingstone (Bunny Wailer). The three of them would later go on to record under the name 'The Wailers'."
Jamaica Travel and Culture, YouTube - Biography part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5, part 6, part 7

Red Scare

January 4, 1920 photo of Massachusetts prisoners seized during government raids awaiting transport to Deer Island.
Wikipedia - "The term Red Scare denotes two distinct periods of strong anti-Communism in the United States: the First Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, and the Second Red Scare, from 1947 to 1957. The First Red Scare was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare was focused on (national and foreign) communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both."
Wikipedia, CUNY, Google, YouTube - First Red Scare

Robert Wyatt

Wikipedia - "Robert Wyatt (born Robert Wyatt-Ellidge, 28 January 1945, Bristol) is an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career. He is married to English painter and songwriter Alfreda Benge."
Wikipedia, last.fm, YouTube - Shipbuilding, I'm A Beleiver, Sea Song, Catholic Architecture, Gharbadzegi, Alifib, Little Red Robin Hood - Robert Wyatt Documentary, The Canterbury Scene: An Interview with Robert Wyatt - BBC South, Dondestan (Revisited) Interview (Part One of Two), (Part Two of Two)