Robert Cottingham

Wikipedia - "Robert Cottingham (born 1935 in Brooklyn, New York) is considered to be one of most important original photorealist painters. Cottingham's work focuses on items associated as Americana. He studied art at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. His first solo show was in 1971 at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York. In 1990, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician, and became a full Academician in 1994. A retrospective of Cottingham's work took place at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1998."
Wikipedia
artnet
American Art
YouTube: Robert Cottingham

Michael Rakowitz - The Breakup

"Michael Rakowitz’s admiration for the Beatles began at the age of seven, on the day that John Lennon died, as he conveyed in The Breakup, 2010, a ten-part radio series originally broadcast on Amwaj Radio in Ramallah. Written and narrated by Rakowitz, it is presented as an audio installation in his current exhibition in New York and blends Beatles songs and the band members’ intimate conversations from the shooting of the 1970 documentary Let It Be with international audio and television reports of events leading to the 1967 Six-Day War. In the gallery’s back room, Rakowitz offers a forty-five-minute video, also titled The Breakup, 2010–12. Here the band’s demise is made analogous to the splintering of a nascent pan-Arab nationalism in the Middle East in the wake of the 1967 war."
ARTFORUM
From Invisible Enemy to Enemy Kitchen - Michael Rakowitz in conversation with Anthony Downey
vimeo: The Breakup, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4a, Part 4

Indochine (1992)

Wikipedia - "Indochine is a 1992 French film set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 50s. It is the story of Éliane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, with the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement set as a backdrop. The screenplay was written by novelist Erik Orsenna, script writers Louis Gardel, Catherine Cohen, and Régis Wargnier, who also directed the film. The film stars Catherine Deneuve, Vincent Perez, Linh Dan Pham, Jean Yanne and Dominique Blanc. At the outset of the film, Camille, a young girl from the Nguyen Dynasty (powerless under French colonial rule), is adopted by Éliane Devries after her parents die in a plane crash at the end of the 1910s. Madame Devries owns and operates a large rubber plantation in Indochina that employs many indentured laborers. Unmarried, she raises Camille as her own daughter, where she lives with her father, who oversees the day-to-day operations of the plantation. At an auction bidding on the same painting, Madame Devries meets Jean-Baptiste Le Guen, a lieutenant in the French Navy. This culminates into a brief, torrid love affair. When Camille is sixteen, a French police officer shoots a Vietnamese prisoner who is escaping through the city streets."
Wikipedia
NYT: Indochine (1992)
Vincent Perez
Roger Ebert
YouTube: Indochine Trailer, Indochine 1992 de Regis Wargnier English Sub

Intersection: Brooklyn Heights Vintage

"Irwin Susskind, a Brooklyn Heights resident for 42 years, says he likes antique clothing and gets a lot of his clothes at thrift shops and street sales."
NYT: Intersection: Brooklyn Heights Vintage (Video)

Another Green World - Brian Eno (1975)

Wikipedia - "Another Green World is the third studio album by English musician Brian Eno. Produced by Eno and Rhett Davies, it was originally released by Island Records in September 1975. As he had done with previous solo albums, Eno worked with several guest musicians including Phil Collins, John Cale and Robert Fripp. The album marked a great musical change from Eno's previous albums. Using his instruction cards the Oblique Strategies for guidance, the album contained fewer lyric-based rock songs and had stronger emphasis on instrumental productions; many without the aid of guest musicians. The dark humour of the lyrics also changed to more dreamlike and obscure songs."
Wikipedia
allmusic
YouTube: Arena - Brian Eno - Another Green World, Another Green World(Full album).

Let It Come Down: the Life of Paul Bowles (1998)

"Expatriate American writer Paul Bowles came to the limelight with an adaptation to screen by Bernardo Bertolucci of his first novel The Sheltering Sky. Subsequently, ambitious documentarists from several countries went down to Tangiers, Morocco where Bowles has been living for more than 50 years to capture the last days of an aging artist and composer, who played an important role in shaping the artistic trends of the 20th century along with other celebrities such as Allen Ginsberg, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and William S. Burroughs. In this definitive film biography which took director Jennifer Baichwal more than four years to complete, the 87-year-old Bowles reflects on his life, work and friends while lying in bed at his home in Tangier smoking kif (cannabis) from an elegant black cigarette holder."
NYT - Let It Come Down: the Life of Paul Bowles (1998)
Film Journal
amazon
YouTube: Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles

2007 November: The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site, 2010 February: Paul Bowles (1910-1999), 2011: January: Halfmoon (1996), 2013 July: Tellus #23 - The Voices of Paul Bowles.

Underground Scene: New York’s Subway Back in the Day

Scene on the New York City subway, 1969.
"Culture: 1942-1969. As difficult as it is to believe, the New York City Subway has not always been the paragon of cleanliness, courtesy and efficiency currently enjoyed by several million New Yorkers and out-of-towners each and every day. In fact, for several decades in the middle of the 20th century, what was then the world’s busiest subway system was actually something of a mess. Unlike today’s flawless high-tech marvels, cars back in the day were relatively rickety affairs, and frequently sauna-hot in the summer. Crime on trains and platforms was not unknown. Sharp-eyed travelers might occasionally spot litter. And while contemporary commuters can, and do, set their watches by trains’ arrivals and departures, the old subway’s schedules could often, to the initiated, seem arbitrary — nonexistent, even. Verily, New Yorkers today live in a mass-transit Golden Age."
LIFE

Guillaume Leblon: Under My Shoe

Sand Rise West 2 (2009)
"On view through April 6, 2014, this first solo exhibition of Paris-based sculptor Guillaume Leblon’s work in a U.S. museum will feature a selection of works made over the last decade, in addition to two major new projects created for MASS MoCA. Leblon’s practice is characterized both by its diversity and the artist’s canny manipulation of space. While he creates powerful, discrete objects, he often choreographs his works into a larger spatial narrative within his exhibition venues."
MASS/MoCA
Bureau for Open Culture
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff

Jem Cohen

Wikipedia - "Jem Alan Cohen (born 1962) is a New York City-based American film maker, especially known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats (16mm, Super 8, video) and collaborations with music artists. He is the recipient of the Independent Spirit Award for feature filmmaking. ... Cohen was born in Kabul, Afghanistan where his father was working for the U.S. Agency for Information and Development. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1984, with a concentration in film and photography. Cohen found the mainstream Hollywood film industry incompatible with his sociopolitical and artistic views. By applying the DIY ethos of Punk Rock to his filmmaking approach, he crafted a distinct style in his films through various small gauge formats of Super 8mm, 16mm, and video."
Wikipedia
Jem Cohen Films
NewYorker - Jem Cohen: Punk-Rock Nature
Jem Cohen Explains Why 'Museum Hours' Will Help You Grapple With Art and Life
NYT: Old Masters, Sweet Mysteries (Video)
“There’s Too Much Music in Films”: An Interview With ‘We Have an Anchor’ Filmmaker Jem Cohen (vimeo)
Video Data Bank (Video)
vimeo: Lost Book Found, We Have An Anchor, Occupy #2 (EXCERPT), Vic Chesnutt – Anecdotal Evidence – A short film by Jem Cohen
YouTube: Jem Cohen's Ground-Level Artistry [Museum Hours, Instrument], Free Jem Cohen, Blessed are the dreams of men (2006), Le Bled (Buildings in a field) - Jem Cohen & Luc Sante, 2009, Lucky Three: An Elliott Smith Portrait

The Louvre invites Robert Wilson - Living Rooms

"Some forty years after he first created a sensation on the French theater scene with Deafman Glance, Robert Wilson is the Louvre’s latest guest curator. No mere retrospective or remembrance, this event marks an unprecedented collaboration between the world’s quintessential museum and the artist who, in the words of Louis Aragon, is 'what we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after and go beyond us.' The theme of Wilson’s residency at the Louvre, 'Living Rooms,' reflects his wish to infuse the museum with the spirit of the Watermill Center on Long Island, the artists’ community where he lives, works, shares his personal collection of art and artifacts with the public, and nurtures the creativity of young and emerging artists."
Louvre
Blowing Smoke: Robert Wilson Agog Over Gaga in Louvre Show
Robert Wilson, Living Rooms
Robert Wilson au Louvre, Living Rooms
NYT: Paris Embraces ‘Einstein’ Again
[PDF] Living Rooms
VIDEOS: Robert Wilson on His Career in Theater, Watermill Center

2008 April: Robert Wilson, 2010 January: Einstein on the Beach, 2010 July: The CIVIL warS, 2011 May: Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera , 2011 August: Stations (1982), 2012 February: Absolute Wilson, 2012 August: Einstein on the Blog: Christopher Knowles’ Typings, 2013 March: The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, 2013 April: Death, Destruction and Detroit, 2013 October: crickets audio recording slowed way down, 2013 October: Beached.

Existential Comics

"It's about some of the basic problems in epistemology and the foundations of absolute knowledge."
Existential Comics

Hendrick Avercamp

Winter landscape with iceskaters, Hendrick Avercamp, ± 1609.
"... The winter landscapes by Hendrick Avercamp (Amsterdam 1585-1634 Kampen) are some of the most characteristic Dutch panoramas of the 17th century. It was shortly after 1600 that he developed his vistas of frozen rivers and canals into an independent genre of Dutch art. His paintings and drawings convey a timeless atmosphere that continues to strike a familiar chord to this day. They demonstrate to perfection the passion that natural ice has aroused in the Dutch soul for centuries: when the water freezes over, everyone takes to the ice - young and old, rich and poor. The Mute, as Avercamp was known by contemporaries due to his inability to speak, had a sharp eye for a visual anecdote. There are always new details to be discovered in his theatrical settings: couples skating about elegantly, finely-dressed gentlemen playing kolf, children sledding, or a sailing-boat flitting past on skates."
artdaily
W - Hendrick Avercamp
YouTube: Winter Landscapes [Art of 17th Century]

"Colonial Mentality" - Fela Kuti (1977)

"... 'Colonial Mentality' returns to a more seething and slinky musicality. The dark and brooding bassline undulates beneath a brass-intensive Africa 70. Rarely has Kuti's musical arrangements so perfectly imaged James Brown's J.B.'s or Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra. The message is delivered as a fable, demonstrating that it is the individuals who live in a stifling 'Colonial Mentality' who are the slaves. His preface, stating that the colonial man had released them yet they refuse to release themselves, sets out to prove that slavery is a continual and concurrent state of mind for Africans."
allmusic
YouTube: Fela Kuti on Colonial mentality, Colonial Mentality

Entrée des médiums : Spiritisme et art d'Hugo à Breton

Charles Hugo, Marine Terrace, 1853-54
"It is a very odd way to make art without pretending to do so. From 1853 till the early 1930s, it was the golden age of spiritism. This form of spirituality helps in solving certain great questions of the century and responds to spiritual needs, in a strangely atheistic and democratic manner which also agrees with scientism. It is quite astounding, and involves many phenomenons, including what we know as table-turning or talking boards, 'talking' tables that deliver a message. Besides these vocal phenomenons, often of highly political content, there are also artistic phenomenons, mostly drawings and some paintings, mixed with poetry."
Fascineshion (Video)

Prints: Snapshots, Postcards, Messages and Miniatures, 1987-2001 - Fred Frith

"The short story: Prints is Fred Frith's first album of songs in 20 years. The long story: it is actually a collection of compilation tracks and unreleased studio sessions recorded between 1987 and 2001. No matter if you already own a few of these, a pop album by this man is a rarity -- and that is truly a shame. Of course, as a respected improviser, serious composer, and educator, anything lighter from this pillar of modern music will meet with severe criticism from people who take themselves too seriously. Lighten up! Cheap at Half the Price was the best tongue-in-cheek take at the New Wave. ..."
allmusic
W - Prints
YouTube: Stones, Fingerprints, Life of a detective, The Ballad Of Melody Nelson, True Love & I Want It to Be Over, Trocosi, Reduce me

Jules de Balincourt, Paintings 2004–2013

Boys’ Club, 2011
"The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is inviting the artist Jules de Balincourt to present his first solo exhibition in a major North American museum. This show, Jules de Balincourt, Paintings 2004–2013, will run from November 28, 2013, to April 6, 2014, in the Contemporary Art Square. ... American soldiers, men’s clubs, masked groups, fairytale landscapes, public demonstrations, imaginary maps and social admonitions: the subjects of the works shown in Montreal are exemplary illustrations of the remarkable open-mindedness of de Balincourt’s pictorial approach."
e-flux: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Jules de Balincourt
W - Jules de Balincourt
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Art Frame - MMFA 2013: Jules de Balincourt
Victoria Miro
YouTube: GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC | Paris | 2011, "Unknowing Man's Nature" at ZACH FEUER, Interview: Jules de Balincourt

Lloyd Parks

Wikipedia - "Parks' interest in music was fuelled by his uncle Dourie Bryan, who played in a calypso band, and Parks became the band's singer. In the late 1960s, he performed with the Invincibles band (whose members also included Ansell Collins, Sly Dunbar and Ranchie McLean) before teaming up with Wentworth Vernal in The Termites. In 1967, they recorded their first single, 'Have Mercy Mr. Percy', and then an album Do the Rocksteady for Coxsone Dodd's Studio One label. After recording 'Rub Up Push Up' for the Dampa label, Parks and Vernal split up. Parks then briefly joined The Techniques as a replacement for Pat Kelly, recording tracks such as 'Say You Love Me', before embarking on a solo career and later starting his own label, Parks. His second single was the classic 'Slaving', a moving song about the struggles of a working man. ..."
Wikipedia
allmusic
LLOYD PARKS INTERVIEWED BY JIM DOOLEY
YouTube: We'll Get Over It (Discomix), Mafia Remastered, Into the Night, LLoyd Parks and U Brown Reach Out And Dub It Deh, Slaving Remastered, A little better, Stop the War Now

Rudy Burckhardt

Wikipedia - "Rudy Burckhardt (1914, Basel – 1999) was a Swiss-American filmmaker, and photographer, known for his photographs of hand-painted billboards which began to dominate the American landscape in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Burckhardt discovered photography as a medical student in London. He left medicine to pursue photography in the 1930s. He immigrated to New York City in 1935. Between 1934 and 1939, he traveled to Paris, New York and Haiti making photographs mostly of city streets and experimenting with short 16mm films. While stationed in Trinidad in the Signal Corps from 1941-1944, he filmed the island's residents. In 1947, he joined the Photo League in New York City. Burckhardt married painter Yvonne Jacquette whom he collaborated with throughout their 40 year marriage. He taught filmmaking and painting at the University of Pennsylvania from 1967 to 1975. On his 85th birthday, Burckhardt committed suicide by drowning in the lake on his property."
Wikipedia
NYSS: Rudy Burckhardt's Maine
VOICE: The Met Shares a Sublime New York Photo Album by Rudy Burckhardt
Jacket 21: The Cinema of Looking - Rudy Burckhardt and Edwin Denby
Rudy Burckhardt and Friends: New York Artists of the 1950s and '60s
Met: New York, N. Why?: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt, 1937–1940
FANDOR: Rudy Burckhardt
PennSound: Central Park in the Dark, New York City, NY, 1985; The Automotive Story, 1954
vimeo: Haiti (1938)
YouTube: Rudy Burckhardt & Edwin Denby: The Climate of New York, Rudy Burckhardt: Man In the Woods

Sketchbook

Wikipedia - "A sketchbook is a book or pad with blank pages for sketching and is frequently used by artists for drawing or painting as a part of their creative process. The exhibition of sketchbooks at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in 2006 suggested that there were two broad categories for classifying sketches. Observation: this focuses on the documentation of the external world and includes many such travel and nature studies and sketches recording an artist's travels. Invention: this follows the artists' digressions and internal journeys as they develop compositional ideas."
Wikipedia
amazon: Sketch Book, Moleskine Classic Sketch

Wiesenland - Pina Bausch (2000)

"... The last show in the sequence was created with Central Europe, specifically Hungary, in mind. Wiesenland (meaning something like 'state of meadows': the French, by whom Bausch is much treasured, translate it as 'terre verte', green earth), is on balance one of the tenderest and now a personal favourite of mine; but that’s to state only a position of subjectivity. Bausch is all about personal favourites. ... If there’s an overriding law to emerge from this global mishmash it is that Bausch archly defeats criticism. Against an enormous, vertical-standing backdrop of jungly vegetation, which leaks water, the ensemble enacts little dramas of desire and rejection. There are tropes of gypsy matrimony (the Romanian band Taraf de Haidouks, amongst others, are credited in the track listing), two wedding dresses tossed about in the air like ghostly shuttlecocks. Dancers, still smoking, are doused in water from buckets, perhaps in some ritual of barmy baptism - a return from striving adulthood to a cleansing innocence...?"
the arts desk
Laurent Paillier - Dance photographer
London Dance
PINA BAUSCH: LOCK, STOCK AND BARREL
YOUKU: Wiesenland
facebook: Diaporama Wiesenland

2008 May: Pina Bausch, 2009 June: Pina Bausch 1940-2009, 2012 August: Pina Bausch Costumes.

Tetsu Inoue and Carl Stone - pict.soul (2001)

"pict.soul documents the first meeting between two giants in the experimental, ambient, and post-ambient world. The ten pieces here present a variety of approaches and ways of organizing sound that intermingle in ways guaranteed to vex and delight the serious trainspotter for either of the two artists, and – like any good collaboration – ventures to places where the individual artists might not visit while travelling solo."
C74
YouTube: _.healthy, %.disk, ?.digit, ^.error, &.restart, _.digit, !.tuning

2010 August: Carl Stone, 2011 April: Ear Meal with Carl Stone, 2012 September: Carl Stone' DARDA performance Super Deluxe Tokyo

Alphabet City

Wikipedia - "Alphabet City is a neighborhood located within the East Village in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Its name comes from Avenues A, B, C, and D, the only avenues in Manhattan to have single-letter names. It is bordered by Houston Street to the south and by 14th Street to the north, along the traditional northern border of the East Village and south of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. Some famous landmarks include Tompkins Square Park and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. The neighborhood has a long history, serving as a cultural center and ethnic enclave for Manhattan's German, Polish, Hispanic, and Jewish populations."
Wikipedia
airbnb: Alphabet City
#1: Alphabet City
WSJ: Contrasts Grow as Alphabet City Evolves
YouTube: The Gentrification of Alphabet City

2011 July: East Village, 2011 September: Tompkins Square Park.

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Donates Shunk-Kender Photo Trove

Jacques Villeglé working, Montparnasse, Paris, 1961
"... The collaboration of Shunk-Kender (Harry Shunk and János Kender), based first in Paris and later in New York, took the core group of photographs from 1958 to 1973. The collections also include photographs taken by Shunk alone in earlier and later years. These images offer a sometimes intimate and sometimes formal view of more than 400 prominent artists in their studios, at events such as openings and in the midst of their performances. They provide an historic document of the artworks of the period in the context in which they were first shown and are often irreplaceable as the only existing record of ephemeral artworks and actions."
Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Donates Shunk-Kender Photo Trove
NYT: Art-Scene Glimpses, Lost Then Found
Two Photographers Emerge from the Shadows with Over 400 Artist Portraits

The Academic and the Avant Garde: Artists of the 1913 Armory Show

Marine Garden Peacocks
"... The 1913 Armory Show became legendary for signaling a break from the traditions and constraints of the French art academies and for paving the way for avant garde artists in America. The Academic and the Avant Garde gathers objects and archival materials to illustrate how these artists served as a bridge between past and present. The exhibition also sheds light on the eclectic taste that shaped Vizcaya and, more generally, early twentieth-century architecture and design in America."
Vizcaya
[PDF] The Academic and the Avant Garde

Meredith Monk - Double Fiesta (video remix by kurtigghiu)

"Meredith Monk composer, singer, dancer, film-maker, choreographer, performance artist. 'Double Fiesta' is extract 'Do you be' (masterpiece album 1987). The remix was created in 2004 by kurtigghiu. Video is from performances extract at the Almeida Theatre Islington, London (1983).The video-remix by kurtigghiu (2010)"
YouTube: Meredith Monk - Double Fiesta (video remix by kurtigghiu)

Transatlantic Sessions - Programme One, Programme Two (1995)

Wikipedia - "Transatlantic Sessions is the collective title for a series of musical productions by Glasgow-based Pelicula Films Ltd, funded by - and produced for BBC Scotland, BBC Four and RTE of Ireland. The productions comprise collaborative live performances by various leading folk and country musicians from both sides of the North Atlantic, playing music from Scotland, Ireland, England and North America, who congregate under the musical direction of Aly Bain and Jerry Douglas to record and film a set of half-hour TV episodes."
Wikipedia
Programme One: Wheels of Love (Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris and Mary Black), MacIlmoyle (Aly Bain, Jay Ungar, Russ Barnberg, Molly Mason, Jim Sutherland), Ready for the Storm (Kathy Mattea, Dougie MacLean), Spencer the Rover (John Martyn, Danny Thompson), Big Bug Shuffle (Russ Barenberg with Jerry Douglas), Black Diamond Strings (Guy Clark & Emmylou Harris), Guitar Talk (Michelle Williams and Karen Matheson).
Programme Two: May You Never (John Martyn, Kathy Mattea), Big Scioty (Jay Ungar, Aly Bain, Molly Mason, Russ Barenberg, Jerry Douglas), Ta Mo Chleamhnas Deanta, (Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Donal Lunny), Grey Eagle (Mark O'Connor), Talk to Me of Mendocino (Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Karen Matheson), Mexican Monterey (Savourna Stevenson, Aly Bain, Danny Thompson), By The Time It Gets Dark (Mary Black, Emmylou Harris, Declan Sinnot), Auld Lang Syne (Rod Paterson, Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh, Martyn Bennett).

All the Buildings in New York

"James Gulliver Hancock is one of those people who set impossible tasks for themselves that evolve into blogs and then into books. For Mr. Hancock, a 35-year-old Australian artist and illustrator, the task has been to draw every building in New York. He started in April 2010, while living in Brooklyn. Now back home in Sydney with his wife and year-old son, he returns to the scene of his ambition from time to time and otherwise works from photographs and Google Maps. The drawings are posted on his Web site, allthebuildingsinnewyork.com, where they often inspire commissions, leading Mr. Hancock’s pen on an erratic course from Staten Island to the Bronx and from squat warehouses to soaring landmarks."
NYT: New York as a Work in Progress
All the Buildings in New York
amazon: All the Buildings in New York
YouTube: All the Buildings in New York

Connecting Seas

"Connecting Seas draws on the Getty Research Institute's extensive special collections to reveal how adventures on other continents and discoveries of different cultures were perceived, represented, and transmitted in the past, when ocean travel was the primary means by which people and knowledge circulated. Featuring rare books and maps, photographs and panoramic vues d'optique, prints, and even Napoleon's monumental folios on Egypt, the exhibition traces the fascinating course of scholarly investigation and comprehension of cultures in Africa, Asia, and the Americas."
Connecting Seas (Video)
[PDF] Connecting Seas
“Connecting Seas” at the Getty Research Institute

Guide to the Musee D'Orsay

"One of the world's most-visited museums, the Musee d'Orsay houses the largest collection of painting, sculpture, and decorative objects produced between 1848-1914, showcasing many of the most remarkable works of the early modern era. Giving visitors a detailed and breathtaking look at the birth of modern painting, sculpture, design, and even photography, the Musee d'Orsay's permanent collection spans from neoclassicism and romanticism to impressionism, expressionism, and art nouveau design."
Go Paris
amazon: Guide to the Musee D'Orsay

Christmas Beyond the Blue - David McGee

"... Thus is the tone set for Death Might Be Your Santa Claus, Legacy’s 18-track collection of Christmas tunes and Yuletide sermons that are about as far from being merry and bright as you could imagine. In these tunes, people don’t imbibe Christmas cheer, they drink either to forget to simply get through the season in one piece (check out Bessie Smith’s groundbreaking Yuletide blues recording, 'At the Christmas Ball,' a 1925 session with Fletcher Henderson on piano and Freddie Green delivering a terrific, moaning trumpet solo that mirrors Bessie’s tipsy mood); the great Rev. J.M, Gates rails against materialism and counsels getting right with God lest 'The Coffin Be Your Santa Claus'; and for women alone, Christmas morning means getting a letter from a male paramour in stir and in so deep 'even a white man can’t get him freed,' as Victoria Spivey wails in 'Christmas Morning Blues,' accompanied by Porter Granger on piano and Lonnie Johnson on guitar; a bonus track of the same song features a less tortured reading by Kansas City Kitty but does offer the treat of Georgia Tom Dorsey’s rather hilarious piano support in which he seems to mock the singer’s feelings at times—this was before Tom had his eureka moment and became the father of modern gospel music, Thomas A. Dorsey). ..."
Deep Roots Magazine (Video)
amazon: Death Might Be Your Santa Claus, Blues Blues Christmas 1 1925-1955, Blues Blues Christmas 2 1926-1958, Blues Blues Christmas, Vol. 3, 1927-1962
YouTube: Reverend J.M. Gates - Death Might Be Your Santa Claus, Bessie Smith - At the Christmas Ball, Lil McClintock - Don't Think I'm Santa Claus, December 1930, Bo Carter - Santa Claus, Tampa Red - Christmas & New Year Blues, Kansas City Kitty - Christmas Morning, Victoria Spivey - Christmas Morning Blues, Oscar Woods & Black Ace - Christmas Time Blues Beggin' Santa Claus, Hep Cats' Holiday-The Cats and the Fiddle, Duke Ellington - Sugar Rum Cherry, The Davis Sisters - The Christmas Boogie, Cordell Jackson - Rock And Roll Christmas

City Lights, LA Light, NightFall - Colin Rich

"'City Lights' is the final chapter from my "Trilogy of Light" series that began a couple years ago with 'LA Light' and then followed up with 'Nightfall'. It was an nightly adventure that took me to almost every angle of Los Angeles. It was an exercise in patience. A lesson in light. An understanding of what it is to live amongst each other and to understand the system and order of a city, the seemingly complex organics that make it up and the life form that the city truly is. A visualization of sonder. It was a daily jaunt to watch the arterial freeway systems pump car cells through its body and channel them to the capillaric avenues that are our neighborhoods and homes. It was a chance to break away from the 70mph freeway perspective and to observe the sun slip from view and watch the electric dance of nightfall begin. It was challenging. It was frustrating. Definitely dangerous at times. ..."
vimeo: City Lights, LA Light, NightFall

Raw Havana

"Trapped under tropical socialism, Havana is a city of numerous contradictions and paradoxes. Havana juxtaposes cultural richness and necessity, colonial splendor and dilapidated beauty. It’s a vibrant place where joie de vivre collides with hopelessness, and where resourcefulness hide out the flagrant lack of infrastructures. I’ve spent 7 days in La Havana and this is the result..."
Charles le Brigand
flickr
Animal NY

Hassan Khan: "Superstructure"

"The Egyptian artist and musician Hassan Khan, one of the protagonists of the exhibition 'Voice of Images' at Palazzo Grassi will perform in a concert entitled 'Superstructure' organized in collaboration with the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove in Venice. Employing his signature melding of precomposed structures and live performance Khan will trawl through his back catalogue to select segments from his various and varied sets. The evening will begin with the layered strings, modulated percussions and minimal electronica of ‘a short story based on a distant memory’ and conclude with the massive constantly morphing beats of ‘superstructure: the ammunition of the nation’. In the middle revisiting the hysterical new-wave shaabi and hard core electronica of ‘The Big One’ as well as the delicate piano figures of ‘12 pieces for piano and electronica’."
Venice Connected
vimeo: SALT: Concert by Hassan Khan 39:46
Galerie Chantal Crousel - Hassan Khan
Hassan Khan at dOCUMENTA (13)
YouTube: Jewel (2010), The Big One, The Queens Museum of Art, part 1 (2009), part 2. Hassan Khan discusses his show The Hidden Location at The Queens Museum of Art

The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti

"Urban art is very much alive and goes well beyond Banksy's recent stint in New York City. 'The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti' by Rafael Schacter profiles more than 100 of today's best street artists from all over the world and the environments in which they perform. 'World Atlas' aims to capture 'the spontaneous creativity that is inherently connected to the city.' Basically, it is the definitive survey of international street art. The author shared some works with us."
Forget Banksy — These Are The Greatest Street Artists In The World
NYC Book Launch
amazon
vimeo: The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti

Dom Svobode - Thierry De Mey

"This film is a true technical feat since the dancers (and camera) defy the laws of gravity by moving along the sheer cliff face thanks to a rigging system holding them by the waist. The choreography turns the spectator’s points of reference upside down, supported in this vertiginous enterprise by the choice of viewpoints. But very quickly, the rapid editing leaves the acrobatic performance and attaches itself to the movements of a choreography as rigorous as it is inventive."
charleroi danses (Video)
EN-KNAP

2011 July: Anne Theresa De Keersmaeker FASE at Walker Art Center