Astor Piazzolla - Milonga del angel

"Astor Piazzolla’s Milonga del angel is a track that is adored by many. Astor Piazzolla named this song after the title of his 1993 album which carries the same title. The Milonga is a type of music that immediately precedes the tango music and the tango dance. Therefore, many references to milonga often refers to a type of dance similar to the tango but is executed more softly than the original tango. To accompany this lighter form of dance, the Milonga often starts slow and sentimental to reflect how soft the feeling and emotions should be."
Astor Piazzolla Tango Nuevo - Video

Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass

"Over the course of his career, Dale Chihuly has revolutionized the art of blown glass, moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture and establishing the use of glass—inherently a fragile but also magical material—as a vehicle for installation and environmental art. This exhibition of new and archival works represents the breadth and scope of the artist’s creative vision over the last four decades."
mfa

Your Life, Your Map

"A gallery of personalized subway maps from readers of The Times."
NYT

The Misfits

Wikipedia - "The Misfits is a 1961 American drama film written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, and starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, and Eli Wallach. It was the final film appearance for both Gable and Monroe. It was not a commercial success at the time of its release, but it garnered critical respect for its script and performances."
Wikipedia, A review by Damian Cannon, amazon, YouTube - 'The Misfits' - Trailer [1961], Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift - Phonebooth, John Huston, Punch-drunk Perce, Eli Wallach

Mother Earth - "Make A Joyful Noise"

"Make a Joyful Noise is the follow-up to 1968's Living With the Animals. This time out, Mother Earth neatly divided their joint appreciations for rural and urban American music: à la the thematic 'City Side' and 'Country Side.' The City Side is an R&B workout, powered by a robust horn section and the vocals of Rev. Ron Stallings on burning soul cuts such as 'Stop That Train,' Tracy Nelson's killer performance on Naomi Neville's cooker 'What Are You Trying to Do,' and sultry read of Little Willie John's babymaker 'Need Your Love So Bad'."
CD Universe, W - Mother Earth, W - Tracy Nelson, Robert Christgau - Mother Earth, amazon - "Make A Joyful Noise", YouTube - LIVING WITH THE ANIMALS, When It All Comes Down, Down So Low, You Won't Be Passing Here No More

Andreas Cellarius and his Harmonia Macrocosmica

"The Dutch-German mathematician and cosmographer Andreas Cellarius is well known to map historians and historians of astronomy as the author of the Harmonia Macrocosmica (first published in 1660), a folio-sized work that is commonly regarded to be one of the most spectacular cosmographical atlases that was published in the second half of the seventeenth century."
Andreas Cellarius and his Harmonia Macrocosmica, The Plates with an English Translation of the Title Captions, YouTube - Harmonia Macrocosmica

ESG

Wikipedia - "ESG (Emerald, Sapphire and Gold) are a band from the South Bronx, New York, U.S.. The band originally consisted of the Scroggins sisters Maria (congas, vocals), Renee (vocals), and Valerie (drums), and friends David Miles (guitar) and Leroy Glover (bass). A later incarnation of the band consisted of Deborah, Maria (congas, vocals), Renee (guitar, vocals), and Valerie Scroggins (drums). ESG have been influential across a wide range of musical genres, including hip hop, post punk, disco, and dance-punk."
Wikipedia, YouTube - UFO, You're No Good, Chistelle (A South Bronx Story compilation), Moody, Dance to the Beat of Moody

Scratch Orchestra

Wikipedia - "The Scratch Orchestra was an experimental musical ensemble founded in the spring of 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton. The Orchestra reflected Cardew's musical philosophy at that time. This meant that anyone could join, graphic scores were used (rather than traditional sheet music), and there was an emphasis on improvisation."
Wikipedia, W - Cornelius Cardew, The Scratch Orchestra, YouTube - Scratch Orchestra - STARS, Cornelius Cardew & The Scratch Orchestra - The Great Learning (Paragraph 1), The Great Learning (Paragraph 2), TWO Scratch Orchestra with front card H264 for ICA

Mexican muralism

José David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896 - 1974)
Wikipedia - "Mexican muralism is a Mexican art movement. The most important period of this movement took place primarily from the 1920s to the 1960s, though it exerted an influence on later generations of Mexican artists. The movement stands out historically because of its political undertones, the majority of which are of a Marxist nature, or related to a social and political situation of post-revolutionary Mexico."
Wikipedia, YouTube - Mexican Muralists

Strawberry Alarm Clock

Wikipedia - "Strawberry Alarm Clock is a psychedelic rock band from Los Angeles best known for their 1967 hit 'Incense and Peppermints'. The group took its name as an homage to the Beatles' psychedelic hit 'Strawberry Fields Forever', reportedly, at the suggestion of their record company Uni Records."
Wikipedia, YouTube - Incense and Peppermints, Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow, Strawberries mean love

"Tonight I Can Write" - Pablo Neruda

"Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. ..."
YouTube - Andy Garcia

February 2009: Pablo Neruda

"Sound" (1966-67)

Morton Feldman
"The first installment of a short film featuring Rahsaan Roland Kirk, John Cage and David Tudor among others. Directed by Dick Fontaine."
YouTube - pt.1, pt.2, pt.3

"Waste Land" - Vik Muniz

"Often working in series, Vik has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to create bold, witty and often deceiving images drawn from the pages of photojournalism and art history."
Waste Land - Video, NYT: "Where Art Meets Trash and Transforms Life", Waste Land Image, YouTube - Vik Muniz - Pictures of Garbage: Irmã

"Red Headed Stranger" - Willie Nelson

Wikipedia - "Red Headed Stranger is a 1975 album by American outlaw country singer Willie Nelson. A concept album, Red Headed Stranger is about a fugitive on the run from the law after killing his wife. Sparse and jumbled, with brief, poetic lyrics, no one involved in the creation of the album thought it would sell well."
Wikipedia, amazon, YouTube - Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, Red Headed Stranger, Can I Sleep In Your Arms

White Material

"Film-going is a total experience, so, when I went to see Claire Denis’s White Material in San Francisco this week, I had to sit through an advertisement for visiting South Africa and having a marvelous time. I’ve seen the ad before, and it gets increasingly depressing. There is lovely scenery and a complacent couple who can’t wait to get back there to regain the best Thai cooking of their lives and the rapturous experience of seeing elephants come to drink in the evening."
TNR: "David Thomson on Films: 'White Material'", Wikipedia, Slant Magazine, Criterion - Video

Fairport Convention - Maidstone 1970

"First part of the film of Fairport performing in Maidstone in 1970 near my school in Oakwood Park."
YouTube - pt1, pt2, pt3, Matthews Southern Comfort - pt4, pt5, Fairport Convention pt6

Underground Art: Chris Marker's "PASSENGERS" Exhibit

"We should thank the voracious observers among us for keeping a look out—they seem so few, amongst all the unquestioning images of the contemporary media. Foremost among mobile visionaries, if by age and certainly by reputation, is Left Bank quasi-nouvelle vague affiliate and all around proliferate and perspicacious explorer of images and interrogator of the world around us, Chris Marker."
MUBI

Ship Graveyards: Abandoned Ships, Boats and Shipyards

"Ships and boats are ancient inventions whose rise parallels the spirit of human adventure. From antiquity to modernity great powers have relied on shipping to expand empires, while grand liners transported tourists to far flung places previously only accessible to the imagination."
Urban Ghost, Cockatoo Island Project, Photography by Patrick Boland, Hours of Darkness, Twisted Sifter

Songs of Innocence and Experience

Wikipedia - "Songs of Innocence and Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul."
Wikipedia, The Other Pages, Google

The Birka Jazz Archive

James P. Johnson: New York Jazz, 10" LP 1950
"Records we have bought and sold over the years - the rare and the beautiful!"
David Stone Martin, Columbia RecordsBlue Note 1500 series, Atlantic Records, France, Sweden 1960s, Germany, The Birka Jazz Archive

The Silvertones

Wikipedia - "The Silvertones (who also recorded as The Musketeers and The Muskyteers) were a Jamaican reggae harmony group formed in 1964, best known for their recordings for Lee 'Scratch' Perry in the early 1970s."
Wikipedia, YouTube - Smile, It's Real, True Confession, Stop Crying (Studio One 12"), Blue Bird, Take A Little Love

German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse

Emil Nolde. Young Couple. 1913. Lithograph.
"From E. L. Kirchner to Max Beckmann, artists associated with German Expressionism in the early decades of the twentieth century took up printmaking with a collective dedication and fervor virtually unparalleled in the history of art. The woodcut, with its coarse gouges and jagged lines, is known as the preeminent Expressionist medium, but the Expressionists also revolutionized the mediums of etching and lithography to alternately vibrant and stark effect."
MoMA, MoMA: German Expressionism

Neil Young delivers emotional speech about philanthropy

"Young co-founded the Farm Aid benefit concerts and the Bridge School, which educates children with severe speech and physical impairments. His two sons have cerebral palsy, while his daughter, Amber -- who helped Young navigate the red carpet on a frigid spring Sunday -- suffers from epilepsy, like Young himself."
No Depression

Black Delta Religion

"Rare 8mm footage of black churches in the Mississippi Delta in 1968. Includes footage from rural church services and a full immersion baptism. The audio is only roughly in sync with the picture, but this makes the film even more powerful and authentic. Produced by Center for Southern Folklore by William Ferris and edited in 16mm by Judy Peiser."
folkstreams

Fillmore West

Wikipedia - "The Fillmore West was an historic music venue in San Francisco, California made famous by concert promoter Bill Graham. Named after Graham's original 'Fillmore' location at the intersection of Fillmore Street and Geary Boulevard, it stood at Market Street and South Van Ness Avenue and was formerly known as both The Carousel Ballroom and El Patio."
Wikipedia - Fillmore West, W - The Fillmore, Google

Ann Hamilton's "indigo blue"

"Explore Ann Hamilton's performance installation indigo blue — which comprises 18,000 pieces of used, blue work clothes and a live 'attendant' who erases printed text from a book. This dynamic, web-based feature includes interviews with the artist and a time-lapse movie that compresses the work's three-week installation process into three minutes of footage."
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (1), YouTube - Ann Hamilton on creating "indigo blue", SFMOMA installs Ann Hamilton's "indigo blue"

Jay-Z – Empire State of Mind - Lyrics & Meaning

"Yeah, I'm out that Brooklyn
Now I'm down in Tribeca
Right next to DeNiro
But I’ll be hood forever
I’m the new Sinatra
And since I made it here
I can make it anywhere
Yeah, they love me everywhere..."
RapGenius

The Grand Piano

"The Grand Piano is an experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers identified with the rise of Language poetry in San Francisco — Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. The eleventh pianist, Alan Bernheimer, takes the lead in organizing documentation for the books and for use on this website."
The Grand Piano

Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise (1980)

"60-minute portrait of visionary artist Sun Ra and his avant-garde jazz Arkestra filmed in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in 1978 and 1980. One of jazz music's most entertaining and eccentric figures is profiled in Robert Mugge's hourlong, 1980 profile of the late bandleader-keyboardist-composer Sun Ra."
UbuWeb

Movie Posters of the Week: The Posters of Dziga Vertov

Poster for Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera by Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg.
"Some of the first movie posters that I ever took seriously, or seriously loved, were Soviet posters of the 1920s. Instantly arresting, intensely colorful and irresistibly dynamic, as well as being rendered more appealingly abstract because of their Cyrillic typography, the best of these posters, like those of the Stenberg Brothers and Alexander Rodchenko, are, it almost goes without saying, among the greatest works of 20th century graphic design."
MUBI

"I Want You" - Marvin Gaye

Wikipedia - "I Want You is the thirteenth studio album by American soul musician Marvin Gaye, released March 16, 1976, on Motown-subsidiary label Tamla Records. ... The album has often been noted by critics for producer Leon Ware's exotic, low-key production and the erotic, sexual themes in his and Gaye's songwriting. The album's cover artwork adapts neo-mannerist artist Ernie Barnes's famous painting The Sugar Shack (1971)."
Wikipedia, W - I Want You (Marvin Gaye song), W - Ernie Barnes, Google - Ernie Barnes, amazon, YouTube - I Want You Live 1981, After The Dance (Live In Ostend, 1981), All The Way Around, Since I Had You Live

Rose Hobart (1936) - Joseph Cornell

Wikipedia - "Rose Hobart (1936) is a short, 19-minute experimental film created by the artist Joseph Cornell, who cut and re-edited the Hollywood film East of Borneo into one of America's most famous surrealist short films. Cornell was fascinated by the star of East of Borneo, an actress named Rose Hobart, and named his short film after her. The piece consists of snippets from East of Borneo combined with shots from a documentary of an eclipse."
Wikipedia, W - Rose Hobart, Film Preservation - Video

Romare Bearden

Wikipedia - "Romare Bearden (September 2, 1911 – March 12, 1988) was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage."
Wikipedia, ROMARE BEARDEN FOUNDATION, NGA, Met Museum, Google, npr, YouTube - Romare Bearden's Southern Sensibility

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic

Wikipedia - "Birdsongs of the Mesozoic is a musical group founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1980. The music of Birdsongs of the Mesozoic is almost entirely instrumental, and incorporates many different musical elements; critic Rick Anderson writes, 'Very few bands have ever managed to straddle the worlds of modern classical music and rock as successfully as this one did.' In his liner notes for their Beat of the Mesozoic EP, Boston rock critic Eric Van dubbed them 'the world's hardest-rocking chamber music quartet.' Another memorable description came from Jim Sullivan of the Boston Globe: 'classical-punk-jazz-car-wreck music.'"
Wikipedia, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Cuneiform Records, YouTube - Transformation of Oz, Transformation of Oz (2), Peter Gunn, To a Random - Pt. I, To a Random - Pt. IIV, Encanti, Ptoccata

The Magician

Wikipedia - "The Magician, The Magus, or The Juggler (I) is the first trump or Major Arcana card in most traditional Tarot decks. It is used in game playing as well as in divination. In divination it is considered by some to succeed The Fool card, often numbered 0."
Wikipedia