Wim Mertens - "Struggle for Pleasure", "Maximizing The Audience"

"'Struggle for Pleasure' is the name of a song released in 1983 by Belgian composer Wim Mertens. It is the theme song used by the Belgian phone operator Proximus. It featured in the Peter Greenaway movie 'The Belly of an Architect'. Energy 52's song 'Café Del Mar' features a main melody based on 'Struggle for Pleasure'. It was also covered by Belgian dance music group Minimalistix in 2000 and reached dance charts across Europe."
Internet Cultural Network
YouTube: Struggle for Pleasure, Maximizing The Audience

2009 April: Wim Mertens
2011 December: Soft Verdict

Linotype: The Film

"Linotype: The Film is a feature-length documentary centered around the Linotype type casting machine. Called the 'Eighth Wonder of the World' by Thomas Edison, it revolutionized printing and society. The film tells the charming and emotional story of the people connected to the Linotype and how it impacted the world. The Linotype (pronounced 'line-o-type') completely transformed the communication of information similarly to how the internet is now changing communication again. Although these machines were revolutionary, technology began to supersede the Linotype and they were scrapped and melted-down by the thousands. Today, very few machines are still in existence."
Linotype: The Film
vimeo: "Linotype: The Film" Official Trailer

Hail H.I.M. - Burning Spear

"Across five seminal albums, Burning Spear would do more than just define roots; he would leave a fiery legacy that no other artist has equalled. Kicking off with the stunning Marcus Garvey in 1975 and encompassing the equally exceptional string of Man in the Hills, Dry & Heavy, Social Living, and Hail H.I.M., the final album in this series of masterpieces, Spear had undergone a continuous evolution. Over this five year period, Spear had truncated from a trio to Winston Rodney alone, grown to include the accompanying Black Disciples aggregate of elite sessionmen, then pared down to a smaller grouping, and had seen Rodney move into self-production."
allmusic
YouTube: Hail H.I.M., Hail H.I.M. in Dub, Columbus, Road Foggy, Jah See And Know, African Teacher, African Postman, Cry Blood Africans, Follow Marcus Garvey

2009 June: Burning Spear
2010 October: Marcus Garvey / Garvey's Ghost
2012 March: Burning Spear 1981 - Markthalle Hamburg

Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language

"Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language is a group exhibition that brings together 12 contemporary artists and artists’ groups working in all mediums including painting, sculpture, film, video, audio, and design, all of whom concentrate on the material qualities of language—visual, aural, and beyond. The work that these artists create belongs to a distinguished history of poem/objects, and concrete language experiments that dates to the beginnings of modernism, and includes both the Dada and Futurist moments as well as the recrudescence of Neo-Dada in the late 1950s, and international literary movements like concrete and sound poetry in Europe, Latin America, and the United States."
MoMA
Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language: Nora Schultz
NYT: Building Blocks of Meaning, Retranslated
Riot of Perfume

Robin Lane & the Chartbusters

Wikipedia - "Robin Lane (born 1947, Los Angeles, California) is an American rock singer and songwriter. Her band, Robin Lane & the Chartbusters, released three albums on Warner Bros. Records in the early 1980s, and was best known for its single 'When Things Go Wrong'. ... In the 1970s, Lane moved to eastern Pennsylvania and then to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her musical interests turned from folk-rock to a harder sound influenced by the growing punk rock and New Wave genres."
Wikipedia
last.fm
YouTuber: When Things Go Wrong - Rat club Boston 1979, Many Years Ago, I Don't Want to Know

Release - Pet Shop Boys

Wikipedia - "Release is the twelfth studio album, the eighth of entirely new music, by the English electronic music duo Pet Shop Boys. It was first released in 2002. ... The album marked a significant departure from previous work, being apparently guitar- and piano-driven. However the album was made like their previous albums with most tracks mainly programmed on computers; however the sampled or synthesised guitars and drum sounds chosen often sound 'real' and the synthesisers always present are sometimes used to sound like guitars (the solo in 'Birthday boy', for instance, or the opening figure of 'Home and dry')."
Wikipedia
amazon: Release
YouTube: Home And Dry, Home And Dry [Live - Cubism In Concert], I get Along 'Live', Birthday Boy, London, I Get Along, E-mail, The Samurai in Autumn, Love is a catastrophe, Here, The night i fell in love, You Choose

Trout Fishing in America - Richard Brautigan

Wikipedia - "Trout Fishing in America is a novella written by Richard Brautigan and published in 1967. It is technically Brautigan's first novel; he wrote it in 1961 before A Confederate General From Big Sur which was published first. Trout Fishing In America is an abstract book without a clear central storyline. Instead, the book contains a series of anecdotes broken into chapters, with the same characters often reappearing from story to story. The settings of most of the chapters occur in three locales: Brautigan's childhood in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.; his day-to-day adult life in San Francisco; and a camping trip in Idaho with his wife and infant daughter during the summer of 1961. Most of the chapters were written during this trip."
Wikipedia
Brautigan: Trout Fishing in America
PDF: Trout Fishing in America
amazon
YouTube: "Trout Fishing in America"

2011 September: Richard Brautigan

Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis

"The blockbuster exhibition that celebrates the reopening of El Museo del Barrio after 17 months of renovations makes a persuasive case for curator Deborah Cullen's argument that because 'life is messy' and 'artists do not work in vacuums' there are rewarding surprises to be found once we move beyond 'the later imposition of curatorial and canonical parameters that attempt to order the chaos of history.' Despite its venue, Nexus New York: Latin/American Artists in the Modern Metropolis isn't an exercise in Latino flag-waving; instead it celebrates the interdependence of artists and a sense of community that today's celebrity-artist world generally tends to ignore."
WSJ
NYT: Art Currents Flow Two Ways in Pan-American City, U.S.A. (Multimedia)
Review: Nexus New York
amazon

Jackson Pollock 51

"Jackson Pollock pioneered Abstract Expressionism with a form known as 'Action Painting,' defining much of what we recognize as modern art. The story of his life has been told in many recently published biographies, but Hans Namuth's documentary video - 'Jackson Pollock 51' - gives us a chance to see the master at work in his studio."
YouTube: Jackson Pollock 51

2011 January: Action painting
2009 August: Abstract expressionism

Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins / sound. at REDCAT

"Found this astonishing video on youtube this morning. Fred Frith and Zeena Parkins taking their instruments to unprecedented heights with help from Ikue Mori . God, these instruments aren't actually built to use in that sense! The accompanying songs are taken from Parkins & Mori's Phantom Orchard project and Death Ambient 's Drunken Forest LP which is composed of Frith, Mori and Kato Hideki."
Elbows
YouTube: Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins / sound. at REDCAT 1/4, REDCAT 2/4, REDCAT 3/4, REDCAT 4/4

Brooklyn

Wikipedia - "Brooklyn ... is the most populous of New York City's five boroughs, with approximately 2.5 million residents, and the second-largest in area. Since 1896, Brooklyn has had the same boundaries as Kings County, which is now the most populous county in New York State and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, after New York County (Manhattan). ... Brooklyn was an independent city until it was annexed by New York City in 1898. It continues to maintain a distinct culture. Many Brooklyn neighborhoods are ethnic enclaves where particular ethnic groups and cultures predominate."
Wikipedia
W - History of Brooklyn
W - List of Brooklyn neighborhoods
vimeo: Jay Z - "Hello Brooklyn"
YouTube: Road To Brooklyn: Down By The Yards, Brooklyn History - Camilla The Bookie, "Brooklyn" - Documentary

23 Skidoo

Wikipedia - "23 Skidoo are a British band playing a fusion of industrial, post-punk, alternative dance, rock, and world music. The group was named after an early 20th-century American slang phrase that later made appearances in the works of Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs, and filmmaker Julian Biggs. Formed in 1979 by Fritz Catlin, Johnny Turnbull and Sam Mills, and later augmented by Alex Turnbull and Tom Heslop, 23 Skidoo had interests in martial arts, Burundi and Kodo drumming, Fela Kuti, The Last Poets, William S. Burroughs, as well as the emerging confluence of industrial, post-punk and funk, heard in artists such as A Certain Ratio, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, The Pop Group and This Heat."
Wikipedia
The Quietus
23 Skidoo remind us that integrity and courage are more exciting than money
amazon: 23 Skidoo
YouTube: Coup, Ethics, Catch 23, Gregouka, The gospel comes to New Guinea, Kundalini
YouTube: 23 Skidoo "Home Movies"directed by Richard Heslop 29:49, 23 Skidoo '7 Songs' directed by Richard Heslop 30:49

The Wrinkles of the City / La Havana / 2012

Leda Antonia Machado
"In May 2012, JR collaborates with Cuban-American artist José Parlá on the latest iteration of The Wrinkles of the City: a huge mural installation in Havana, undertaken for the Havana Biennale, for which JR and Parlá photographed and recorded 25 senior citizens who had lived through the Cuban revolution, creating portraits which Parlá, who is of Cuban descent, interlaced with palimpsestic calligraphic writings and paintings. Parlá’s markings echo the distressed surfaces of the walls he inscribes, and offer commentary on the lives of Cuba’s elders; together, JR and Parlá’s murals marvelously animate a city whose walls are otherwise adorned only by images of its leaders."
JR
'Wrinkles Of The City, Havana, Cuba': JR And Jose Parlá's Giant Portraits Of Island's Seniors (Photos)
Introducing the Latest Book from Standard Press
amazon - JR & José Parlá: Wrinkles of the City, Havana, Cuba

Words from the Front - Tom Verlaine

"January 23rd
There's no road.
It's been raining now for three days
We're in mud up to our knees.
If luck prevails and I'm given leave
I should be home by the 17th.
One word I hear all the time
This word I hear
Blind..."
Wikipedia
amazon: Words from the Front
YouTube: Words From The Front, Clear It Away (Live), Days on the Mountain, Present Arrived, Postcard from Waterloo, True Story, Coming Apart

Marshall Allen

Wikipedia - "Marshall Belford Allen (born May 25, 1924) is an American free jazz and avant-garde jazz alto saxophone player. He also performs on flute, oboe, piccolo, and EVI (an electronic valve instrument made by the Akai company). Allen is best known for his work with eccentric keyboardist/bandleader Sun Ra, having recorded and performed mostly in this context since the late 1950s, and having led Sun Ra's Arkestra since 1993. Critic Jason Ankeny describes Marshall as 'one of the most distinctive and original saxophonists of the postwar era'."
Wikipedia
Marshall Allen
all aboit jazz - Sibylle Zerr: Picture Infinity - Marshall Allen & The Sun Ra Arkestra
YouTube: Interviews with Marshall Allen and Art Jenkins, Sun Ra Arkestra - Nancy Jazz Pulsations Live (2009) 1:02:09

30th São Paulo Biennial 2012

Pavilhao Ciccille Matarazzo, 2012
"The São Paulo Biennial was founded in 1951. It’s the second oldest art biennial in the world after the Biennale di Venezia, which was founded in 1895. In 2012, 110 artists are participating in the Bienal de São Paulo. Among them: Absalon, Bas Jan Ader, Charlotte Posenenske, Fernando Ortega, Kriwet, Robert Filliou, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, and Yuki Kimura. The title of this year’s São Paulo Biennial is A Iminência Das Poéticas (The Imminence of Poetics)."
vernissage: 30th São Paulo Biennial 2012 (Video)
Guardian: São Paulo Bienal/ArtRio – review
Art In America: Top 10 from the Sao Paolo Bienal

Trench Town

Wikipedia - "Trench Town is a neighborhood located in the parish of St. Andrew which shares municipality with Kingston, the capital and largest city of Jamaica. In the 1960s Trench Town was known as the Hollywood of Jamaica. Today Trench Town boasts the Trench Town Culture Yard Museum, a visitor friendly National Heritage Site presenting the unique history and contribution of Trench Town to Jamaica. Trench Town is the birthplace of rocksteady and reggae music, as well as the home of reggae and Rastafari ambassador Bob Marley. The neighborhood gets its name from its previous designation as Trench Pen, 400 acres of land once used for livestock by Daniel Power Trench, an Irish immigrant of the 18th century (descendants of the Earls of Clancarty). The Trench family abandoned the land in the late 19th century."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Trench Town [Documentary]

The Internationale

"Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don't cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all "
Wikipedia
amazon
YouTube: The Internationale (Billy Bragg)

A Dozen Pivotal Moments in the 30 Year Career of Public Enemy

"Hard to believe, but Public Enemy--which headlines Irving Plaza tonight as part of the 'Hip-Hop Gods Tour'--is celebrating 30 years of existence this year. As the late Adam Yauch once wrote of the rap icons: 'I put them on a level with Bob Marley and a handful of other artists--the rare artist who can make great music and also deliver a political and social message. But where Marley's music sweetly lures you in, then sneaks in the message, Chuck D grabs you by the collar and makes you listen.' In honor of tonight's show, and PE's 30th anniversary, here are a dozen pivotal moments from the group's illustrious history."
Village Voice (Video)

2009 May: Public Enemy
2011 July: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
2012 February: Fear of a Black Planet
2012 August: Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black

Three Interpretations of Charles Bukowski’s Melancholy Poem “Nirvana”

"I’ve ridden a lot of busses–back and forth from city to city, taking the cheapest tickets, which meant traveling overnight, and eating cheap and greasy food at hurried stops along the way. I remember thinking sometimes that I might never come back, that I might lose myself in some small southern town and disappear. I remember those times now as I read Charles Bukowski’s poem 'Nirvana,' a poem about a lost young man who finds in the quaint strangeness of a diner in North Carolina a respite from the confusion of his life."
Open Culture (Video)

Jade

"Jade recently completed yet another new mural on the streets of Chorillos, Lima, Peru. As usual with the Peruvian artist, he delivers a sweet piece featuring one of his signature characters. Stay tuned for more by Jade soon..."
StreetArtNews
Google - Jade New Mural In Lima, Peru

Eric Baudelaire

The Anabasis…, 2011. 66 minutes, Super 8 and HD video
"Just as silence can suggest as much as words do, images can effect as much in their absence as in their presence. Exploring the spaces both within and without images, Eric Baudelaire’s practice has circled around the question of representation, of what can be entrusted to an image, for more than a decade."
frieze
Eric Baudelaire (vimeo)
YouTube: TAIPEI BIENNIAL 2012 - Eric Baudelaire, Intervista a Eric Baudelaire regista di THE ANABASIS, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images

King Harvest- The Band

"Filmed in 1970 at Robbie Robertsons studio in Woodstock, King Harvest is a song written by Robbie Robertson and is from the album 'The Band' (also called 'The brown album')"
YouTube: King Harvest

2009 July: The Band
2011 June: Music from Big Pink
2011 September: The Last Waltz

Karel Martens

"Upon publication in 1996, printed matter was labeled an instant classic in the world of design publishing. This beautifully designed visual survey of the career of Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens is a tactile distillation of Martens’s unique and personal approach to design. Projects—ranging from postage stamps to books to signs on buildings—are arranged in layouts that fully explore the print process."
grain edit
typotheque
Google
vimeo: Karel Martens

Impressionism and Fashion

Dans la serre by Albert Bartholomé
"Anxious to account for contemporary life, Impressionism favoured the representation of human figures in their daily surroundings and captured the 'modern' man in his routine activities, both in cities and in the countryside. Although they did not strive to render scrupulously the physiognomy, costume or habit, the Impressionists nevertheless accounted for the fashions and attitudes of their times. They achieved this through their keenness to consider the portrait as a snapshot of a person in his/her familiar settings, through their ability to renew the genre works from the double point of view of typology and topography and above all through their attention to the 'daily metamorphosis of exterior things', as Baudelaire put it."
Musée d'Orsay (Video)
Impressionism and Fashion, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, review
NYT: The Fashion Show From the Belle Époque
WWD: Musée d'Orsay Fetes 'Impressionism and Fashion' (Slideshow)
jn1: Musee d’Orsay hosts runway of impressionist paintings (Video)

Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras Meet The Congos

"RVNG Intl.’s FRKWYS releases have been a serial investigation into the reverberations of influence to be found between emerging artists in the areas of experimental psychedelic, electronic, and ambient musics and some of their key influences, capturing collaborations between the young Turks and the old guard both through music and video recordings. This ninth entry in the series pairs Cameron Stallones’ Sun Araw project with legendary dub artists The Congos. Bringing producer/mixer M Geddes Gengras along with him to St. Catherine, Jamaica, Stallones set about a 10-day-long session of sonic exploration and mystical connection with some of the key players in the legendary Black Ark sound of the 1970s, and the results, perhaps unsurprisingly, are blissfully irie."
TinyMixTapes: Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras Meet The Congos, Icon Give Thank (Video)
dublab: Happy Song (Video)
Soundcloud: icon give thank & icon eye, Sunshine
amazon
YouTube: FRKWYS Vol. 9: Icon Give Thank (2012) [Full Album]

Joseph Cornell's Manual of Marvels

"Classified as a Surrealist, American artist Joesph Cornell is best known not for his abilities as a painter or a sculptor but as a collector. Cornell took pleasure in the hunt and liked to spend his time scouring secondhand shops for books, faded photographs and other small treasures—which he then used to construct whimsical tableaus. While these collages of curiosities dominated the majority of Cornell's work, they were not the only medium with which the artist toyed."
Cool Hunting
NYT: Cornell’s Almanac
amazon: Joseph Cornell's Manual of Marvels

2007 November: Joseph Cornell
2010 September: Stan Brakhage, Joseph Cornell - The Wonder Ring, 1955
2011 April: Rose Hobart (1936)
2012 June: "Bookstalls" - Joseph Cornell

Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York City That Changed Music Forever

"In the summer of 1975, scenes started to cohere around sounds emanating from lower Manhattan. Local musicians and critics sat up and took note. With a massive festival of unsigned bands, CBGB, a dank little Bowery club, confirmed its status as ground zero for New York’s rock and roll underground. Just a few months earlier, Patti Smith, cult poet and fledgling improvisational rocker, had kicked off a seven–week run there with another favorite local band, Television, by signing a seven–album, $750,000 contract. The summer CBGB festival included dozens of hopefuls competing to follow her lead."
LA Review of Books
NYT: The CBGB Effect
Will Hermes - Village Voice cartoon journalist Mark Alan Stamaty
Dangerous Minds: ‘Five Years In New York That Changed Music Forever’ (Video)
Must-Read Books by Will Hermes, Lydia Millet, and Stuart Nadler
npr: When New York Was 'On Fire': A Mid-'70s Musical Revolution (Video)
amazon

The Lost Tribes of New York City

"As someone who has an intense love-hate relationship with New York, this sweetly animated film from Andy and Carolyn London tugged hard on my heartstrings. It’s a simple concept: Interview New Yorkers and then animate objects in the city to match their personalities. The result is a compelling short that helps me see the city—and its people—in a new light. If you like this, you might also like Aardman’s candidly charming Creature Discomfort animations."
vimeo: The Lost Tribes of New York City

Estampas de la Raza

"This survey of Mexican American and Latino printmakers chronicles the late 1960s at the outset of the Chicano Movement to the confident expressions of the 2000s. Estampas de la Raza introduces recent gifts to the McNay from San Antonio collectors Harriett and Ricardo Romo. More than 60 prints by 44 artists reveal the richness of a mixed cultural heritage, with depictions of Frida Kahlo, lowriders, the Statue of Liberty, tattoos, and the Virgin of Guadalupe."
McNay Art Museum
Pinterest
Art made an impression on UTSA's Romos
amazon: Estampas de la Raza: Contemporary Mexican American Prints from the Romo Collection
vimeo: Harriett and Ricardo Romo discuss "Estampas de la Raza" with curator Lyle Williams

Village Vanguard

Wikipedia - "The Village Vanguard is a jazz club located at 178 7th Avenue South in Greenwich Village, New York City. The club was opened on February 22, 1935, by Max Gordon. At first, it featured many forms of music, such as folk music and beat poetry, but it switched to an all-jazz format in 1957."
Wikipedia
After 70 Years, The Village Vanguard Is Still in the Jazz Swing
npr: Live At The Village Vanguard (Video)
W - Live at the Village Vanguard
vimeo: Alive at the Village Vanguard
YouTube: Village Vanguard 1930s: The Very Early Years, John Coltrane - Live at the Village Vanguard Again, Bill Evans Trio at the Village Vanguard 1961, Sonny Rollins Trio at the Village Vanguard - Softly As in a Morning Sunrise, Art Pepper Valse Triste - Village Vanguard Sessions

Janis Joplin - "Little Girl Blue"

"Queen Janis sings an amazing version of this song, way back in 1969. I put this video up because it's rarely shown elsewhere, it's such a vulnerable performance and unlike anything else she ever recorded."
YouTube: "Little Girl Blue"

2008 May: Janis Joplin
2010 October: Janis Joplin: 1962-1965

Snowy

Wikipedia - "Snowy (French: Milou) is a fictional character in The Adventures of Tintin, the series of comic albums written and illustrated by Belgian artist Hergé. Snowy is a white Fox Terrier companion to the series' protagonist Tintin, and appears as a central character in all albums. He debuted in the first sequence of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, published in Le Petit Vingtième on 10 January 1929."
Wikipedia
Snowy | Tintin
Tintin Wiki

2008 May: Georges Remi, 1907-1983
2010 July: The Adventures of Tintin: Breaking Free
2011 December: Prisoners of the Sun
2012 January: Tintin: the Complete Companion

Negativland - No Other Possibility (1989)

"...In fact, from their first surrealist works on alienated concrète to their later sample-based beat palimpsests, Negativland paved the way for much of today's collage-centered pop culture as seen, for instance, in the increasingly common televised montages of political events and commercial samples for critical or humorous purposes."
UbuWeb (Video)
Negativland’s “Helter Stupid” 20 Years Later (YouTube)

2009 March: Negativland
2012 January: Negativland (sound collage)

Slim Smith

Wikipedia - "Slim Smith (born Keith Smith, 1948, Kingston, Jamaica, died 1973) was a ska, rocksteady and reggae singer. ... Smith first came to prominence as a member of the Victors Youth Band, who were highly praised at the 1964 Jamaican Festival. He subsequently became a founding member and lead vocalist of The Techniques, who recorded primarily with Duke Reid for his Treasure Isle label."
Wikipedia
Trojan Records
Discogs
YouTube: Little did you know, Keep That Light, Turning Point, Blinded By Love, Born To Love, My Conversation