Eric B. & Rakim

Wikipedia - "Eric B. & Rakim were a hip-hop duo composed of DJ Eric Barrier (born November 8, 1965) and MC Rakim (born William Michael Griffin Jr. on January 28, 1968). Hailing from Long Island, New York, the pair are generally considered by hip hop enthusiasts to be one of the most influential and innovative groups in the genre. During hip hop's 'golden age' of the mid 1980s to the early 1990s, the duo was almost universally regarded as the premier MC/DJ combo in hip hop. The two had a potent chemistry; the duo's beats built on the hard-hitting sound of Run-D.M.C. by adding James Brown samples and Eric B's scratching, setting the stage for hip hop's late-1980s/early-1990s infatuation with samples from Brown."
Wikipedia
Eric B. & Rakim
GLOBAL DARKNESS
YouTube: Paid In Full, I Ain't No Joke, Follow The Leader, Don't Sweat The Technique, Microphone Fiend, Juice (Know The Ledge), Move The Crowd

The Art of Guarding Art: Russia’s Lady Museum Guards

Kugach's Before the Dance, State Tretyakov Gallery
"When most people go to museums, they visit to take in the art—not the people who are guarding it. But photographer Andy Freeberg became fascinated not with what the museums in Russia display, but who was displayed along with it. In his 'Guardians' series, he captures the unexpected world of female Russian museum guards. Unlike their American counterparts, the Russian guards are not uniformed, they are seated, and almost all are older women. They in effect become part of the scenery itself."
Slate
Andy Freeberg: Guardians

Closing the Door on 2012

John Elliot, Spectrum Spools LP
"In this edition of The Out Door, we talk with Gabriel Saloman about his many ventures since the demise of his duo Yellow Swans, trace Nathan Bowles' musical journey from Spiral Joy Band to Black Twig Pickers to Pelt to his new solo album, and offer an exclusive premiere stream of the new Cultus Sabbati album. But first, we explore the motivations and machinations behind our favorite record labels of 2012."
Pitchfork (Video)

Delaney & Bonnie with Eric Clapton - I Don't Know Why (1969)

"Denmark, Copenhagen. Friends are: Delaney Bramlet (guitar),George Harrison (guitar), Dave Mason (guitar), Jim Gordon (drums), Carl Radle (bass), Bobby Whitlock ( organ), Jim Price (trumpet), Bobby Keys (sax), Tex Johnson (percussion). Rita Coolidge & Bonnie (backing vocals)."
YouTube: I Don't Know Why

2010 September: Delaney & Bonnie

Gustavo Santaolalla

Wikipedia - "Gustavo Alfredo Santaolalla (born 19 August 1951) is an Argentine musician, film composer and producer. ... Santaolalla aided the development of rock en español by acting as producer for Mexican acts ((Neón)), Maldita Vecindad, Fobia, Molotov, Café Tacuba, Julieta Venegas, the Colombian singer Juanes, Chilean rock trio Los Prisioneros, Argentine rock bands Divididos and Bersuit Vergarabat and León Gieco's 'De Ushuaia a La Quiaca' (1 and 2), among many others. Santaolalla transferred his efforts to film soundtracks in the late 1990s, producing albums for the films Amores Perros, 21 Grams and The Motorcycle Diaries."
Wikipedia
amazon: Gustavo Santaolalla
YouTube: Motorcycle Diaries - De Usuahia a la Quiaca, Babel - Soundtrack, 21 Grams - Can Light be Found in the Darkness to Can Things be Better, Biutiful - Lait, Babel - Iguazu, The Motorcycle Diaries - Apertura, Lela, 21 Grams - Do We Lose, Biutiful - Raval, Sopranos - Pampa

Ivan Turgenev - First Love (1860)

Wikipedia - "First Love ... is a novella by Ivan Turgenev, first published in 1860. It is one of his most popular pieces of short fiction. First Love is an example of a frame story. The beginning starts with the protagonist, Vladimir Petrovich, in a party. The party guests are taking turns recounting the stories of their first loves. When Vladimir's turn comes to tell his story, he suggests that he write down the story in a notebook because it is a rather long, unusual tale. The story within the story then continues from his notebook, which recounts the memory of his first love."
Wikipedia
amazon

"Paddy's Lamentation" - Linda Thompson

"Well it's by the hush, me boys, and sure that's to hold your noise
And listen to poor Paddy's lamentation
Oh I was by hunger pressed, and in poverty distressed
So I took a thought I'd leave the Irish nation"
YouTube: "Paddy's Lamentation"

2008 January: Linda Thompson
2011 July: Shoot Out the Lights - Richard and Linda Thompson
2011 November: Linda Thompson - Fashionably Late
2012 February: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight - Richard and Linda Thompson

Old New York

John Sloan. The City from Greenwich Village, 1922
"The Sixth Avenue El train has just cleared the steep bend off Third Street. It is now picking up speed and will, any moment now, bolt uptown. Next stop, Eighth Street, then past Jefferson Market, Fourteenth Street, then all the way north till it reaches Fifty-Ninth Street. But perhaps it is not racing up at all but grinding to a stop after that notoriously difficult curve before Bleeker Street. It’s hard to tell. The blue lettering on the train’s marker light must spell something, but it’s hard to decipher this as well. Under the el two vehicles seem to know where they’re headed. To the left of the train, on the corner of Sixth and Cornelia, a scrawny, wedge-shaped, twelve-story high-rise strains to look taller than it is. Its numberless lighted windows suggest that, despite darkness everywhere, this is by no means nighttime, but evening, maybe early evening. The building’s residents are probably preparing dinner, some just walking in after work, others listening to the radio, the children are doing homework. This is 1922, and this is Sloan country."
The Paris Review
amazon: New York Then and Now

2009 August: John Sloan
2011 November: American realism

African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde

"This exhibition highlights the specific African artifacts acquired by the New York avant-garde and its most influential patrons during the 1910s and 1920s. Reflecting on the dynamism of New York's art scene during the years that followed the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition brings together African works from the collections of many key individuals of the period such as Alfred Stieglitz, Marius de Zayas, John Quinn, Louise and Walter Arensberg, Alain LeRoy Locke, and Eugene and Agnes Meyer."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Exhibition Objects
NYT: When Artifact ‘Became’ Art

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker - Rosas Danst Rosas (1983)

"The Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker launched her company, Rosas, in 1983, and won immediate attention for her musicality and her austere, pure dance minimalism. Fase, her first piece, used repetition to almost hallucinatory effect, as she and another female dancer whirled and spun in interlocking patterns to a shimmering score by Steve Reich. Fase was followed the same year by Rosas Danst Rosas, which applied the same repetitive, minimalist style to music by Thierry de May and Peter Vermeersch. De Keersmaeker and her company have revived both pieces many times in the quarter century since their creation, but Rosas Danst Rosas remains the more confrontational of the two, retaining its considerable power to baffle, frustrate and intrigue."
UbuWeb (Video 57:15)

2009 July: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker

"Decoration Day" - Charles Ives

"... Ives’s experiments in ‘Decoration’ Day set off some explosive reactions, even among the musicians who attempted to perform his pieces. Typical was that of Paul Eisler, Assistant Conductor of the Metropolitan Opera, as we see in a letter he wrote to Ives in 1920: 'After reading over your score carefully, I have come to the conclusion that it is absolutely impossible for us to play this composition at our rehearsal, as it is much too difficult to read at sight, and inasmuch as the time limit for our rehearsal period would not allow more than a reading. I trust, however, that the opportunity for us to play it will present itself in the future.'”
Keeping Score
W - A Symphony: New England Holidays
Anglican Curmudgeon
Pandemonium: Charles Ives by Alex Ross, The New Yorker, June 7, 2004
vimeo: "Decoration Day"

2008 September: Charles Ives
2010 December: Holidays Symphony
2011 November: Three Places in New England
2012 August: Symphony No. 2

The Melker Project

Wikipedia - "The Melker Project AKA Johnny Cashin' Out, Skeetwood Mac, Booty Huxtable, Skeevie Tricks, A$AP Scotty and Ricky Exit-Row-Zay is the brainchild of world-renowned DJ and remixer Scott Melker. Known for being among the first DJs to champion the mashup style using vinyl – long before the advent of Serato and digital DJing – Melker is known for his mashups and remixes many of which have reached No. 1 on the Hype Machine Popular Chart."
Wikipedia
The Melker Project (Video)
YouTube: The Melker Project
Brooklyn Radio: Weekly Digest 8 (Video)
Soundcloud (Video)

Icaro Zorbar

"Icaro Zorbar's ingenious jury-rigged sculptures exploit the physical characteristics of vinyl records to create instant audio collages through the use of multiple needles on a single LP. Works like The Golden Triangle (2006), evoke two layers of antiquated technology: the music box and the record player. Like a number of other artists in this exhibition, including Mark Essen and Cory Arcangel, Zorbar's reincarnation of obsolete technologies is done with affection and a bit of nostalgia for a technological moment that his generation might barely be able to remember. The stumbling, haunted lilt of the snippet of Bolero also evokes a distinct melancholy, as if the voices echo out from the past."
G:Class
Icaro Zorbar
YouTube: The Golden Triangle, 2006 at the New Museum in NYC, Ventila dor, Ensayos con un recuerdo, poco a poco, solista # 6/soloist # 6

The Clash: Westway to the World

"The Grammy-winning 2000 film, The Clash: Westway to the World, is a fascinating look at the rise and fall of one of history’s greatest rock bands. The Clash didn’t invent punk rock–bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols preceded them–but they did their best to reinvent it, moving beyond the self-absorbed nihilism of the Pistols to embrace a more global, politically engaged ethos that moshed together a riot of musical and cultural influences, including reggae and rap. Perhaps no one was more responsible for injecting those influences into the punk subculture than the man who made this movie, Don Letts."
Open Culture (YouTube - 1:19:56)
W - The Clash: Westway to the World
amazon

Michael Frimkess and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess

"A selection of works Magdalena recently showed at South Willard, Los Angeles as part of their regular shop exhibit in store exhibitions. The horses are really great, made with a simple series of hand rolled tubes, Magdalena has been making variations on this horse form for over a decade. All these works 2010-2011 and all solo pieces with the exception of the large vase at the bottom which is a collaboration between Michael and Magdalena."
Magdalena Frimkess
South Willard
Google

Mantra Percussion

"... By commissioning and performing new, significant works for large percussion ensemble by both prominent and emerging composers, Mantra Percussion is committed to breathing new life into the art and engaging in cross-discipline collaborations to produce evening-length events that look toward a grander artistic vision."
Mantra Percussion
NYT: The Wonders of Wood, Soaring From the Rhythms of Six Planks
YouTube: Michael Gordon's Timber, Mantra Percussion: Michael Gordon's Timber, Mantra at Lowe's Hardware Store: NPR Music Field Recordings

Blue Beat Records

Wikipedia - "Blue Beat Records was a record label that released Jamaican rhythm and blues and ska music in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. It led to the use of the word bluebeat as a generic term to describe all styles of early Jamaican music from R&B to ska, rocksteady and early reggae, including music not associated with the record label."
Wikipedia
Guardian - Label of Love: Blue Beat Records
YouTube: Derrick & Patsy - Burnette - Blue Beat, Prince Buster - One Step Beyond, Theo Beckford - Jack & Jill Shuffle, theophilus beckford - little lady, Eric Humpty Dumpty Morris - Humpty Dumpty, Ska Champions - My Tears

Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler

"In 1972 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) aired a half-hour documentary that conveyed the message that traditional Scottish-style fiddle music in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, was in decline and would soon die out. The film, Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, argued that modern music was more popular with the young generation of the 1960s and 1970s and that, as a result, transmission of the style and tunes handed down from 19th-century Scottish immigrants to Cape Breton would be broken."
The Myth of the Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler
YouTube: Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler 1, 1971s Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler w Rankin Family

2011 July: Cape Breton Island
2011 June" The Lost Salt Gift of Blood - Alistair MacLeod

UNCLE TUPELO Part – Thoughts On An Artist / Looking For A Way Out

"Uncle Tupelo was a short-lived but influential indie/country/rock band from Belleville, Illinois in the early ‘90s consisting of Jay Farrar (vocals, guitar & other stringed instruments), Jeff Tweedy (vocals, bass & acoustic guitar) and Mike Heidorn (drums). I didn’t become aware of them until 1995, after they split up, and they formed two successful groups: Son Volt (Farrar) and Wilco (Tweedy), both of which released their debut albums that year. In the early ‘90s, my musical universe was vastly expanding, as I was a few years out of college, working a full-time job and spending most of my wages on records & CDs. A genre that was just gaining traction at the time went by various names: alt-country, Americana and roots-rock among them."
Thoughts On An Artist / Looking For A Way Out - Part 1 (Video), Part 2 (Video)

2011 July: Uncle Tupelo

Writers’ Houses Gives You a Virtual Tour of Famous Authors’ Homes

"I’ve always been somewhat amused by the accounts of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s brief bohemian affair. The older, married, and internally tortured Catholic Verlaine’s pining for the self-destructive and precocious young Rimbaud always presents a ridiculous picture in prose. But it’s a picture that takes on much clearer contours when, for the first time, I get to see the house they occupied on 8 Great College St. in Westminster (above). The image of the house, with its forbidding brick façade, gives their really pretty unpleasant story a gravitas that literary history can’t approach."
Open Culture
Writers’ Houses

StenLex New Mural In Roma, Italy

"After their recent solo show at Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris, StenLex are now back home where they just completed this brilliant new piece in Roma, Italy. Using their signature 'Stencil Poster' technique for this new mural, they pasted up the stencil cut on paper and then painted over it before destroying the matrix. If you wish to see that one, you will have to reach the Covent De Montana."
StreetArtNews
W - Sten Lex

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