African Innovations

Three-Headed Figure. Wood, fiber, kaolin
"A complete reinstallation of roughly 200 works from the Brooklyn Museum’s world-renowned collection of African art, African Innovations is organized with a particular focus on the aesthetic, social, political, and cosmological problems addressed by African artists through their work. A dynamic and diverse range of objects that includes wood sculpture, metal casting, terracotta, textiles, and beadwork, African art has a long history of adaptation to and exchange with cultures near and far."
Brooklyn Museum (YouTube)

John Fahey - Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965)

"John Fahey - Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965) is the long-awaited box set of the earliest recordings by and the first book ever written about John Fahey. The five CDs feature 115 tracks, most of which are available on CD for the first time. The audio was remastered from Joe Bussard’s reel-to-reel tapes to achieve pristine sound quality."
Dust to Digital (YouTube)
The Wire - Listen to Joe Bussard: An Oral History of Fonotone Records (Video)
iTunes: Joe Bussard's Country Classics (iPod) By Dust-to-Digital (Video)
Dusted Reviews (Video)
Pitchfork
amazon
YouTube: Buck Dancer's Choice, Wissenschaftlich River Blues, Bury Me Not On the Lone Prairie

2009 March: John Fahey

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe

Reflection - A Gift from Iwaki, 2004
"Cai Guo-Qiang (b. 1957, Quanzhou, China) has literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time. He draws freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, extraterrestrial observations, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, pyrotechnic technology, Chinese medicine, and methods of terrorist violence. This retrospective presents the full spectrum of the artist's protean, multimedia art in all its conceptual complexity. Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe charts the artist's creation of a distinctive visual and conceptual language across four mediums: gunpowder drawings; explosion events; installations; and social projects."
Guggenheim Bilbao
Guggenheim Bilbao - 1
YouTube: Cai Guo-Qiang at Guggenheim Bilbao

2008 March: Cai Guo-Qiang
2009 October: Cai Guo-Qiang - An Introduction

Anna Betbeze

"For Georges Bataille, the term informe designated matter that 'has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere': the crushed spider, the blob of spit, the big toe. We should, he said, undo the myths that insist on a hierarchy of form and praise the low and debased. Since Bataille celebrated the arbitrary in 1929, many artists have done their best to topple a slew of cherished notions — for instance, that for a painting to be a painting it must actually contain... paint. To the antiform lineage that includes Alberto Burri’s burlap sacks and Lynda Benglis’s poured-latex forms we may now add Anna Betbeze’s highly distressed flokati rugs."
Anna Betbeze: The Filth and the Fury
Kate Werble Gallery
MASS MoCA

Painting as Paris burned

Constance Mayer (1778 - 1821), The Dream of Happiness
"The latter days of the ancien regime, the fiery chaos of revolution and the dawn of the 19th century were witnessed and recorded by legendary French artists working in a variety of media. A new show at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., explores the particular contribution of female artists over the course of this enormously eventful period in European history."
Salon

Joko Sutrisno & Group

"Pemut - a reminder A Gamelan Performance by Joko Sutrisno & Group"
YouTube: Pemut, Pangkur, Puspawarno

"Strange Town" - The Jam

Wikipedia - "The song 'Strange Town' was released on 17 March 1979 by The Jam and reached #15 in the UK singles chart. Backed by the Paul Weller-penned 'The Butterfly Collector', the single was one of many The Jam singles that did not appear on any of the band's studio albums."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Strange Town (1979), The Butterfly Collector, Live

2009 March: The Jam
2011 December: Down in the Tube Station at Midnight - The Jam

Pina Bausch - "Le Sacre Du Printemps"

"This is Pina Bausch's Wuppertal Tanztheater performing the Rite of Spring." 1984, BAM Next Wave Festival.
YouTube: Le Sacre Du Printemps by Pina Bausch Wuppertal Dance Theater
U. Stanford
W - The Rite of Spring

2008 May: Pina Bausch
2009 June: Pina Bausch, 1940-2009

Things - Francis Ponge

Rae Armantrout - "My favorite collection of the work of this French poet is Things, translated by Cid Corman (Grossman Publishers, Inc., 1971). It contains (mostly) prose poems with titles such as 'The Piece of Meat', 'The Oyster,' and 'The Notebook of the Pine Woods.' Ponge is a sort of naturalist. His poems are scientifically precise and full of accurate observation, yet they are also fanciful, subtly metaphorical, and eccentric. There is no poet remotely like him." (Bud...)
Find Articles
Google
amazon
YouTube: Translating Francis Ponge at Shakespeare and Company Bookshop

2008 February: Francis Ponge
2011 September: Soap

Manu' Dibango

Wikipedia - "Emmanuel 'Manu' N'Djoké Dibango (born 12 December 1933) is a Cameroonian saxophonist and vibraphone player. He developed a musical style fusing jazz, funk and traditional Cameroonian music. He is a member of the Yabassi ethnic group, though his mother was a Duala. He is best known for his 1972 afrobeat single 'Soul Makossa'."
Wikipedia
African Musicians Profiles
YouTube: Soul Makossa (Live 1974), Bayam Sellam, Pata Pata, New bell 1972, Super kumba, Bessoka, Night in Zeralda, Electric Africa, Echos Beti

Charles Harbutt

"I love this picture of Charlie’s because it’s light as air, as ephemeral as the moment that produced it, a curl of smoke and rays of light in a shuttered hotel bedroom in Arles, 1975. The photo is introspective and inviting, even dreamy, containing the strong hint that it is the result of just one too many tokes. We can’t read the picture on the wall but it provides balance and mystery."
Two Looks
Visura Magazine

Tales of Pirx the Pilot

Wikipedia - "Stanisław Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot ..., published in Poland in 1968, and translated to English in two parts (Tales of Pirx the Pilot and More Tales of Pirx the Pilot) in 1979 and 1982, is a series of short stories about a spaceship pilot named Pirx. ... Pirx stories can be classified as a moderate hard science fiction with some comic elements."
Wikipedia
W - Test pilota Pirxa
Transnational Spaces of Science Fiction: An Estonian-Polish coproduction The Test of Pilot Pirx
Blatherberg
The Spinning Image
Test Pilot Pirx (Mark's take)
amazon: Tales of Pirx the Pilot, More Tales Of Pirx The Pilot
YouTube: Pilot Pirx's Test (1979) 1/7, 2/7, 3/7, 4/7, 5/7, 6/7, 7/7

2011 June: Stanisław Lem

Richard Lerman

"Richard Lerman (1944-) is an American composer and sound artist best known for his use of piezoelectric microphones to record minute natural sounds such as the falling of raindrops on blades of grass or the march of ants across the desert floor. Beyond his artistic production in this domain, Lerman has worked for decades to popularize field recording by educating people about the technical and aesthetic principles of the practice."
Acousmata - Travelon Gamelon, promenade version (1978)(Video)
Richard Lerman's Site (Video)
W - Graphic notation

Burning Spear 1981 - Markthalle Hamburg

"01 Intro (9'00'')02 African Postman (7'40'')03 Slavery Days (7'40'')04 Man In The Hills (7'10'')05 Follow Marcus (5'05'')06 Nyah Keith (4'45'')07 Lion (6'18'')08 Columbus (6'10'')09 Ethiopean Live (12'30'')10 Foggy Road (6'50'')11 Institution (6'20'')12 The Sun (7'15'')13 Jah Ago Raid (8'20'')14 Door Peep / African Teacher (21'00'')"
YouTube: Intro (part 1/15 Full concert 120min.), 2/15, 3/15, 5/15, 6/15, 7/15, 8/15, 9/15, 10/15, 11/15, 12/15, 13/15

Musée d'Orsay. 100 Impressionist Masterpieces

"Beginning with the birth of the movement in 1863, until the term 'Impressionism' was first coined un 1874 - almost haphazardly - in relation to painting by Monet, the author traces the artistic milieu from which the movement emerged and the background to the lives of the painters involved. Then followed the glorious years until 1886, during which eight exhibitions were held to assert the ideas and aims of Impressionism. After this date, the group gradually dispersed; each artist, pursuing his own personal and often solitary research, was driven, as Monet described it, by 'the obsession to carry on painting and making progress until the end'."
Musée d'Orsay. 100 Impressionist Masterpieces
amazon

John Coltrane 1960 - 1965

"John Coltrane provides an epic 95-minute detailed overview of the truth of music giant 20-th century. Three concerts have shown increasing creative arc of Coltrane from the hard bop genre as a member of the Quartet Miles Davis Quartet in 1960, at the sole bandleader in 1961, unsurpassed dreamer jazz to 1965. This concert not only represents classic Trane's quartet with Elvin Jones (drums), Jimmy Garrison (bass) and McCoy Tyner (piano), but also with other jazz legends including Stan Getz, Eric Dolphy and Oscar Peterson."
Soft Archive
Live in Germany & Belgium (1960, 1961, 1965) [DVD]
YouTube: Live (1960-1961-1965)

2011 November: John Coltrane Quartet, Live at Jazz Casual, 1963

Valero Doval

"Every now and then we get nostalgic for the past. Fortunately we need only turn to the pages of history, where we’ll find our forefathers worshiping at the church of triangle, or toiling away in the workhouse of rectangle… wait, what? It’s Valero up to his tricks again! He got us before with his circus pets on postcards – this time he’s taking vintage prints and interjecting his own particular brand of ostentatious geometry. These colourful cut-and-pastes are sure to inject some serious cheer into you afternoon."
It's Nice That
Valero Doval

"The Great Spruce" by Alex Carnelevale

Fairfield Porter, Wheat, 1960
"This summer, the Michael Rosenfeld gallery exhibited a few of Fairfield Porter's paintings of places surrounding his family's summer home in Great Spruce Head, Maine. It was a little underwhelming. For I have always thought that beneath Porter's ostensibly placid paintings lurks something more, evidence of his greatness in the form, if you know the right places to look. Although literature is often easy to enjoy without knowledge of its author, visual art is a different story, and Porter lived passionately in an interesting time and place."
This Recording

2008 May: Fairfield Porter
2010 June: Fairfield Porter - 1
2011 August: "Respect For Things As They Are" - by John Ashbery

Lou Stoumen

"In one of the catalogues that accompanied his many showings, Stoumen wrote: 'I try to learn enough art, compassion and laughter to stop time occasionally--to manifest on photographic paper a few ordinary miracles.' Born in Pennsylvania, he worked as a journalist and photographer in New York just before World War II, a period in which he took many of the Times Square photos for which he was famous. In 1985, he put them between hard covers and published the anthology 'Times Square: 45 Years of Photographs'."
Lou Stoumen
Joel Soroka Gallery

Iva Bittová

Wikipedia - "Iva Bittová (born 22 July 1958) is a Czech avant-garde violinist, singer and composer. She began her career as an actress in the mid 1970s, appearing in several Czech feature films, but switched to playing violin and singing in the early 1980s. She started recording in 1986 and by 1990 her unique vocal and instrumental technique gained her international recognition. Since then, she has performed regularly throughout Europe, the United States and Japan, and has released over eight solo albums."
Wikipedia
Iva Bittová
YouTube: Déšť (když zpívá), Uspavanka, Proudem mleka, Improvisation -- 1, Improvisation -- 2, Improvisation -- 3, Bang on a can & Bolis me lasko, Lullabies

Happenings: New York, 1958-1963

Wikipedia - "A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere (from basements to studio lofts and even street alley ways), are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience. Key elements of happenings are planned, but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation. This new media art aspect to happenings eliminates the boundary between the artwork and its viewer. Henceforth, the interactions between the audience and the artwork makes the audience, in a sense, part of the art. In the later sixties, perhaps due to the depiction in films of hippie culture, the term was used much less specifically to mean any gathering of interest, from a pool hall meetup or a jamming of a few young people to a beer blast or fancy formal party."
Wikipedia
NYT: What Happened at Those Happenings? (Slide)
amazon: Happenings: New York, 1958-1963, Mildred L. Glimcher
NYMag: How Happenings Happened
artnet
artcritical - Time Regained: The “Happenings” Show at Pace

The Original Sound of Cumbia

"Soundway set sail for Colombia once again, delving deeper into the South American country’s rich musical past. Boasting 55 tracks spread over two CDs and two triple LPs, ‘The Original Sound of Cumbia’ is Soundway’s definitive guide to the origins of Colombian cumbia and porro and the result of five years pain staking re-search by Will ‘Quantic’ Holland."
Soundway: The Original Sound of Cumbia (Video)
SoundCloud: 'The Original Sound of Cumbia' Medley (Video)
amazon
YouTube: The Original Sound of Cumbia
Telegraph: The Original Sound of Cumbia

Sylvia Plimack Mangold

Wikipedia - "Sylvia Plimack Mangold (born September 18, 1938) is an American artist, painter, printmaker, and pastelist. She is known for her representational depictions of interiors and landscapes. ... Her paintings in the early 1960s were photorealistic renderings of floors, compositions characterized by hard-edged angles into which mirror images were introduced, making more complex the works' illusionism."
Wikipedia
Brooklyn Rail: SYLVIA PLIMACK MANGOLD with John Yau
artnet
MoMA
amazon

Time Lapse - Michael Nyman Band

"Time Lapse is one of the few non-Darwinian pieces in the soundtrack and it was, unusually, designed for a specific scene - the long tracking shot through the laboratory where the time lapse photography of the decaying animals was taking place. Against the profusion of camera shutter clicks I decided to establish a slow, funereal steady pulse. The emotional content was my private affair, not really related to the requirement of the film. I suppose it also became the model for Memorial, mad familiar in The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover."
Chester Novello
YouTube: Live - Time Lapse, Metrópolis (Fritz Lang; música: Michael Nyman, Time Lapse), Time Lapse form :: Zed & Two Noughts Peter Greenaway

2008 April: Michael Nyman
2010 March: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond
2010 August: Decay Music
2010 December: After Extra Time
2011 August: Michael Nyman Band

The Steins Collect

"Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife Sarah were important patrons of modern art in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century. This exhibition unites some two hundred works of art to demonstrate the significant impact the Steins' patronage had on the artists of their day and the way in which the family disseminated a new standard of taste for modern art. The Steins' Saturday evening salons introduced a generation of visitors to recent developments in art, particularly the work of their close friends Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, long before it was on view in museums."
Metropolitan Museum of Art
NYT: ‘The Steins Collect’, A Movable Feast for the Eyes
amazon: The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
The Steins' Collection Of Parisian Avant-Garde Art Hits The Met (Photos)
YouTube: The Steins Collect at SFMOMA

New York Dolls on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert

"New York Dolls live concert on television in 1975, near the end of the bands existence till 2003. 1. (There's Gonna Be a) Showdown 2. Stranded in the Jungle 3. Trash 4. Chatterbox 5. Don't You Start Me Talking 6. Personality Crisis"
YouTube

The Threepenny Opera - Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill

Wikipedia - "The Threepenny Opera ... is a musical by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, in collaboration with translator Elisabeth Hauptmann and set designer Caspar Neher. It was adapted from an 18th-century English ballad opera, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, and offers a Marxist critique of the capitalist world. It opened on 31 August 1928 at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. By 1933, when Brecht and Weill were forced to leave Germany by the rise of Hitler, the play had been translated into 18 languages and performed more than 10,000 times on European stages."
Wikipedia
The Threepenny Opera
NYT: Toxic Dispatches From Weimar (Robert Wilson)
TheaterMania: The Threepenny Opera (Robert Wilson)
BAM Presents Robert Wilson's Glittering Nihilist Romp
W - The Threepenny Opera (1931 - Film)
YouTube, 1931: Shooting Down Pictures, amazon: 1931
YouTube: L'Opera da Tre Soldi: Robert Wilson's jewel at Spoleto51

Earth, Wind & Fire

Wikipedia - "Earth, Wind & Fire is an American R&B musical group founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1971 by Maurice White. Also known as EWF, the band has won six Grammy Awards and four American Music Awards. ... The band's music contains elements of African, Latin American, funk, soul music, pop and rock music, jazz and other genres. The band is known for the dynamic sound of their horn section, and the interplay between the contrasting vocals of Philip Bailey's falsetto and Maurice White's tenor. The kalimba (African thumb piano) is played on all of the band's albums."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Boogie wonderland, September, Lets Groove, That's The Way Of The World, Shining Star, Head to the Sky, Early 70's live medley

Alejandro Cartagena

"Alejandro Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. His work also engages with a larger history of photography by reinterpreting or rethinking the ways in which poignant issues have been addressed or represented in the past. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited and published internationally, and is in several public and private collections in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, and the United States."
Alejandro Cartagena
Alejandro Cartagena Blog (vimeo)
monterrey (vimeo)

Downton Abbey

Wikipedia - "Downton Abbey is a television series, coproduced by Carnival Films in the UK and WGBH Boston in the US. The series is set on the fictional estate of Downton Abbey in the North Riding of Yorkshire, and features an ensemble cast. It was created and principally written by actor and writer Julian Fellowes, and premièred on ITV on 26 September 2010 and on PBS on 9 January 2011."
Wikipedia
pbs: Downton Abbey (Video)
itv: Downton Abbey (Video)
NYBooks: The Abbey That Jumped the Shark
The Paris Review: The Aristocrats
Under the Sign of Sylvia: Downton Abbey as Amos 'n Andy for lower-, to middle-middle class whites, Think of me as the dead maid, one of the absent women (say Vinnie), A parallel: Oakland, Ohio & Damascus, Syria: Another Maggie Smith
Vulture: Print Out Vulture’s Downton Abbey Paper Dolls
Washington Post: ‘Downton Abbey’ fashion, from costume to the runway
amazon: Downton Abbey, 2
amazon: The World of Downton Abbey

"The House at Pooneil" - Jefferson Airplane

Wikipedia - "The House at Pooneil corners is a song by the American rock group Jefferson Airplane which firsts appears in their successful album Crown of Creation in which it is the eleventh track on the album (track five of side two). It also appears in their album The Roar of Jefferson Airplane alongside the similarly named song 'The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil' suggesting that they are related, though they were made at different times. Unlike The Ballad, The House At Pooneil Corners was mainly written by Marty Balin and not Paul Kantner. This song was the only one Jefferson Airplane was able to complete when performing on RCA's roof in New York before the police men stopped the show."
Wikipedia
YouTube: House at Pooneil Corners (In a New York roof 1968)

So Percussion

Wikipedia - "So Percussion (often styled Sō Percussion) is an American percussion quartet based in New York City. Composed of Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting, and Eric Beach, the group is well known for recording and touring internationally and for its work with composers such as Steve Reich, David Lang, Paul Lansky, Martin Bresnick, Steven Mackey, Fred Frith, Dan Trueman, Evan Ziporyn, and Arvo Pärt."
Wikipedia
So Percussion
amazon
disquiet: So Percussion Remixes So Percussion (Video)
SoundCloud (Video)
I Care if You Listen (YouTube)
YouTube: Amid the Noise, Steve Reich's "Drumming", Steve Mackey's "It Is Time", "Shifty" by Dennis DeSantis, Paul Lansky's "3rd Mvmt", Behind the scenes with So Percussion

French Painting of the 19th Century

Jean Beraud, Au Cafe
"As the century began, the academic style favored by the official Salon still dictated the success of artists and public taste. But soon that began to change. Realists turned convention on its head to give heroic character to everyday subjects. Manet scandalized the public with his images of modern life. Impressionists tried to capture fleeting effects of light and atmosphere."
NGA (Video)
Wikipedia

Cliff Bruner & His Texas Wanderers

Wikipedia - "Cliff Bruner (April 25, 1915 – August 25, 2000) was a fiddler and bandleader of the western swing era of the 1930s. Bruner's music combined elements of traditional string band music, improvisation, blues, folk, and popular melodies of the times."
Wikipedia
amazon: Cliff Bruner & His Texas Wanderers
YouTube: It Makes No Difference Now~1938, Kangaroo Blues, One Sweet Letter From You, When You're Smiling, Sugar, Sublime Western Swing, One Sweet Letter From You

Pulp magazines

Wikipedia - "Pulp magazines (often referred to as 'the pulps'), also collectively known as pulp fiction, refers to inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was seven inches wide by ten inches high, half an inch thick, and 128 pages long. Pulps were printed on cheap paper with ragged, untrimmed edges. The name pulp comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper were called "glossies" or 'slicks.' In their first decades, they were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks were 25 cents apiece."
Wikipedia
NYT: Want to Be a Pulp Fiction Writer? Here’s Your Chance
Google
Picasa Web
Pulp Maps
Going Postal T-shirts