Blues Masters, Vol. 1: Urban Blues

"While more horn-driven and less guitar reliant than other forms of blues, the urban style nonetheless provides its own spectacular highlights, some of the best of which are right here. The first volume in this 15 volume series features classic performances by Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson, Dinah Washington, T-Bone Walker, Charles Brown, Joe Turner, and Jimmy Witherspoon. Where the blues meets the jazz and heads uptown for a party."
allmusic
amazon: Blues Masters, Vol. 1: Urban Blues
YouTube: Blues Masters - Urban Blues Volume 1. After Hours - Erskine Hawkins & His Orchestra, Kidney Stew Blues - Eddie Vinson, Ain't Nobody's Business - Jimmy Witherspoon, Baby, Get Lost - Dinah Washington, Double Crossing Blues - Johnny Otis Quintette, Blues After Hours - Pee Wee Crayton, Black Night - Charles Brown, Chains Of Love - Joe Turner, The Things That I Used To Do - Guitar Slim, I Feel So Bad - Chuck Willis, Reconsider Baby - Lowell Fulson, Farther Up The Road - Bobby 'Blue' Bland, I Can't Quit You Baby - Otis Rush, T-Bone Blues - T-Bone Walker, Drivin' Wheel - Junior Parker, Part Time Love - Little Johnny Taylor, Laundromat Blues - Albert King.

Abayomy Afrobeat Orchestra

"Abayomy Afrobeat Orchestra are a brilliant outfit from Rio de Janeiro who need your support to release their debut album that promises to be nothing short of a legendary recording! An expansive afrobeat orchestra consisting of numerous talented musicians who originally got together for a tribute to Fela on Fela Day but soon evolved the sound with many latin influences of course plus special guests like Oghene Kologbo (Fela Kuti’s guitarist) and Tony Allen (jazz/funk drum legend!) and also Duke Amayo (Antibalas!), Abayomy is indeed a happy meeting!"
The Imported Goods
Soundcloud: Abayomy Afrobeat Orquestra (Video)
YouTube: Eru, Som em 4 Tempos, Malunguinho

Radical Middle

John Constable, A View at Hampstead with Stormy Weather, ca. 1930.
"July 2 is the midpoint of the year—we’re 182 days into 2014 with 182 to go. This is obscurely depressing, although there is something neat about its falling on a Wednesday. It’s all downhill from here, you might say—although sometimes people use that expression as a positive, meaning smooth sailing, so take it as you will. Everyone finds New Year’s Day dreary. But summer, for all its promise of leisure and romance and ease, has an urgency that is sad in its own way. From the moment it starts, it’s on the wane—days ever shorter, relentlessly shifting sands in a Wizard of Oz–style hourglass. Outside my window, someone is actually playing 'Summertime' on a saxophone. He’s probably thinking that we are in New York in hot weather, and it is iconic. The pressure is immense. The high-pressure weather is stifling. Ashbery touched on it. 'Soonest Mended' is about much more than the mundane, although it conjures the mundane vividly. ..."
The Paris Review
Poetry Foundation: "Soonest Mended" By John Ashbery
Re-reading John Ashbery ("Soonest Mended")

Ambient Genius - The working life of Brian Eno

"In January, 1975, the musician Brian Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt released a set of flash cards they called 'Oblique Strategies.' Friends since meeting at art school, in the late sixties, they had long shared guidelines that could pry apart an intellectual logjam, providing options when they couldn’t figure out how to move forward. The first edition consisted of a hundred and fifteen cards. They were black on one side with an aphorism or an instruction printed on the reverse. Eno’s first rule was 'Honour thy error as a hidden intention.' Others included 'Use non-musicians' and 'Tape your mouth.'”
New Yorker

Coney Island - Directors: Steve Siegel and Phil Buehler (1973)

"'Made by two teen filmmakers in the early 1970s, Coney Island is an ode to Coney Island’s appeal and history as an urban summer refuge begins onboard a crowded F subway train. The fishing pier, the beach and Astroland arcade and amusement park rides, including the famous Cyclone rollercoaster, are explored to the accompaniment of a lively jazz soundtrack, sounds of summer and insights from locals and lovers of Coney Island. Historical photographs are used to illustrate remembrances of Coney Island’s exuberant past.' —NYPL"
92Y
YouTube: Coney Island, 1973

2009 April: Coney Island, 2010 July: Nathan's Famous, 2011 March: "An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders", Owen Smith, 2013 August: Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze, 2013 October: Last Days of Summer at Coney Island.

Mudd Club Memories

"On a January night in 1979 in the upstairs of the legendary Lower Manhattan venue, the Mudd Club, filmmaker Nick Taylor met Jean-Michel Basquiat for the first time. Immortalized in Taylor's shots that are seen fleetingly in Dutch director Joppe Rog's short I Met Him at the Mudd Club, the union proved a fateful rendezvous: the pair formed the band Gray—named after Basquiat’s favorite creative source material, Gray’s Anatomy—and played in the center of New York’s fertile post-punk scene. Taylor has kept Gray alive, and the short is soundtracked by their hauntingly evocative 2011 track 'Eight Hour Religion.' The band is considered an almost documentarian reflection of no-wave era New York, when artists and musicians cross-pollinated: actor Vincent Gallo was also a member of the group."
NOWNESS (Video)
W - Mudd Club
CLASSIC NEW YORK: THE MUDD CLUB
The Mudd Club and “Beyond Words”
Nightclubbing: DNA at Mudd Club, 1979

Digital Dubliners

"Digital Dubliners: Free, 21st Century Ways to Read Joyce’s Great Story Collection on its 100th Anniversary. Read nearly any critical commentary on James Joyce’s Dubliners, his 1914 collection of short stories that chronicle the lives of ordinary Irish residents of the title city, and you’re sure to come across the word 'epiphany.' This is not some academic jargon, but the word Joyce himself used to describe the way that each story builds to a shock of recognition—often in the form of painful self-awareness—for key characters. Short-circuiting the typical climax-resolution-dénouement of conventional narrative, Joyce’s epiphanies give his stories a verisimilitude that can still feel very unsettling, given our typical expectations that realist fiction still obey the rules of fiction. Dramatic moments in our lives rarely have neat and tidy endings."
Open Culture (Video)

2011 March: Passages from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1965-67), 2010 March: Ulysses Seen, 2013 February: ULYSSES “SEEN” is moving to Dublin!, 2013: Dubliners, 2014 May: The Dead (1987 film), 2014 May: “Have I Ever Left It?” by Mark O'Connell.

Yearning For Impossible Escape: Sun Ra, Afro-Futurist Godfather

"Born 100 years ago today, though he claimed to have arrived here from the planet Saturn, Sun Ra provoked a range of emotions in his extraordinary lifetime - from anger, indifference, confusion and oblivion, to astonishment, awestruck, cultic devotion and elation. He was, in his own mind, the first black man in outer space decades before they even built rocket ships. Unacknowledged and overlooked, ploughing a lonely cosmic furrow, he blasted open the portals to a notional future for jazz and post-jazz in an era when racist legislation held brutal sway, not least in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabamba."
The Quietus (Video)

Bobby Womack

"A veteran who paid his dues for over a decade before getting his shot at solo stardom, Bobby Womack persevered through tragedy and addiction to emerge as one of soul music's great survivors. Able to shine in the spotlight as a singer or behind the scenes as an instrumentalist and songwriter, Womack never got his due from pop audiences, but during the late '60s and much of the '70s, he was a consistent hitmaker on the R&B charts, with a high standard of quality control. His records were quintessential soul, with a bag of tricks learned from the likes of Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, and Sly Stone, all of whom Womack worked closely with at one time or another. Yet often, they also bore the stamp of Womack's own idiosyncratic personality, whether through a lengthy spoken philosophical monologue or a radical reinterpretation of a pop standard."
allmusic
Wikipedia
Pitchfork: The Bravest Man in the Universe (Video)
YouTube: The Valentinos - It's all over now, The Valentinos - I'm Gonna Forget About You, When the Weekend Comes (live), Forever Love, Tried and Convicted, I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much, If You Think You're Lonely Now, Across 110th Street, I Can Understanding It, Check It Out, Daylight (live)

2013 September: Across 110th Street (1972)

FROM STREET TO ART to Open Tomorrow, June 20, at Italian Cultural Institute of New York with BR1, Agostino Iacurci, Sten&Lex and more

Sten&Lex
"Opening tomorrow evening, June 20, at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, 686 Park Avenue, is an exhibit of artwork by 10 of Italy’s best contemporary artists who, also, maintain a huge presence on the streets. Curated by Simone Pallotta, it is the first collective exhibit of work by Italian street artists here in NYC."
Street Art NYC

Umbrella

Francesco Maglia - Umbrella
Wikipedia - "An umbrella or parasol is a canopy designed to protect against rain or sunlight. The word parasol usually refers to an item designed to protect from the sun; umbrella refers to a device more suited to protect from rain. Often the difference is the material; some parasols are not waterproof. Umbrellas and parasols are primarily hand-held portable devices designed to shield an individual from sun or rain, and are sized for personal use. Today, larger parasols are often used as fixed or semi-fixed devices, used with patio tables or other outdoor furniture, or as points of shade on a sunny beach. The collapsible (or folding) umbrella may have first been used in China and had sliding levers similar to those in use today."
Wikipedia
Francesco Maglia: The Umbrella Maker Of Milan
YouTube: Ombrellificio Maglia

Past and Present: The Evolution of 265 Livingston Street in Downtown Brooklyn

"A look at Brooklyn, then and now. Before Downtown Brooklyn was the shopping mecca of Brooklyn, it was a residential neighborhood. In the 1860s and ‘70s, many of the most commercially developed thoroughfares, like Fulton, Schermerhorn, Livingston and Willoughby were residential. In the mid-19th century, all of these streets were lined with wood framed, and later, masonry row houses. There were even a few free standing homes as well. But as Brooklyn’s commercial core spread out from what is now Dumbo, the homes began to disappear or were renovated to include store fronts. Gage and Tollner, one of Downtown’s most famous restaurants, was once a home."
Brownstoner

Do the Right Thing - Spike Lee (1989)

Wikipedia - "Do the Right Thing is a 1989 American comedy-drama film produced, written, and directed by Spike Lee, who also played the part of 'Mookie' in the film. Other members of the cast include Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, and Samuel L. Jackson. It is also notably the feature film debuts of Martin Lawrence and Rosie Perez. The movie tells the story of a neighborhood's simmering racial tension, which comes to a head and culminates in tragedy on the hottest day of the summer. The film was a commercial success and received numerous accolades and awards, including an Academy Award nomination for Lee for Best Original Screenplay and one for Best Supporting Actor for Aiello's portrayal of Sal the pizzeria owner. It is often listed among the greatest films of all time."
Wikipedia
Criterion Collection
Do The Right Thing 25th Anniversary
The Inside Story of Do The Right Thing
Roger Ebert (June 1989)
Rolling Stone (June 1989)
New York (June 1989)
NYT: Spike Lee Tackles Racism In 'Do the Right Thing' (June 1989)
The Atlantic: When Spike Lee Became Scary (Video)
YouTube: DO THE RIGHT THING - Trailer, Fight The Power (Full Version) - Public Enemy, Take 6 ~ Don't Shoot Me, Do The Right Thing - Moe 'n Joe Black

Dark Waters

Marcel Broodthaers, Chère petite soeur (La Tempête), 1972.
"June 12, 2014 - July 26, 2014. Rasheed Araeen, Marcel Broodthaers, David Douard, Jack Goldstein, Édouard Manet, Jean-Luc Moulène, Gabriel Orozco, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., José María Sicilia, Wolfgang Tillmans, Danh Vo, WOLS.
'Reverie begins before a brook’s running water,
the still water of a pond, the unpredictable water of the sea,
it ends in a gloomy water that imparts strange and funerary murmurs.'
Armelle Barguillet-Hauteloire, Proust et le miroir des eaux, Éditions De Paris, 2006."
Galerie - Chantal Crousel

Rockaway! - Janet Cardiff, Adrián Villar Rojas and Patti Smith

"The 'Rockaway!' festival, which kicks off June 29 with a free Patti Smith concert, has announced its slate of exhibits for the summerlong event series. Artists Adrián Villar Rojas and Janet Cardiff will have solo projects featured at Fort TIlden, as will Smith, who has a house on the peninsula. Her large-scale installation, entitled 'The Resilience of the Dreamer,' is inspired by her experience with Hurricane Sandy, according to MoMA PS 1."
Patti Smith Bringing Hurricane-Inspired Bed Exhibit to Rockaway
MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! Festival to Include Janet Cardiff, Patti Smith

Zeppelin Took My Blues Away

"... Those looking to make up their own minds about the relevant issues of musical authorship here can look to Zeppelin Took My Blues Away, an 'illustrated history of copyright indiscretions,' created in trading card format, and featuring clips for the purposes of comparison and contrast. In this post, we have the card and clips documenting the resemblances between 'Stairway to Heaven' and 'Taurus,' Randy California’s 1968 song. The series comes to 19 cards in total, including such perhaps excessively Zeppelin-borrowed tunes as Bert Jansch’s 'Blackwaterside', Ritchie Valens’ 'Ohh, My Head,' Willie Dixon’s 'You Need Love,' and Jake Holmes’ 'Dazed and Confused.'”
Open Culture (Video)
Willards Wormholes (Video)

Public Enemy - "Prophets of Rage" (2011)

"In the late 1980s Public Enemy were the biggest rap group on the planet. Their mission: to raise the consciousness of a generation. With a rebellious attitude to match their militant image they sold millions of records preaching pro-black politics to fans of all races, all done through a groundbreaking wall of noise that changed the sound of hip hop. White, middle Americans were outraged, but their kids loved it. Not surprisingly, this confrontational approach attracted controversy. Critics claimed the group themselves were racist, exposing racial divides rather than promoting equality. They were banned from some TV and radio stations and when one member reportedly made anti-Semitic remarks in a newspaper interview the resulting media-storm threatened to end their career. Tensions were running high and arguments within the band ended in violence. Could they keep it together long enough to get their message across?"
BBC
YouTube: Public Enemy "Prophets of Rage"

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, 2012 December: A Dozen Pivotal Moments in the 30 Year Career of Public Enemy

Alexander Chen

"Alexander Chen (b. 1981) is a Creative Director at Google Creative Lab in New York. In 2011, Chen launched MTA.ME, which transformed a New York subway map into a string instrument. This personal work led to the conception of the Les Paul Doodle, a Google doodle with generated 5.1 years worth of shared music around the world. Chen continued with a visualization of the Bach Cello Suites based on string physics. In 2012, Chen led the creative team behind the Project Glass concept video and has continued to collaborate closely with the Glass team, both on marketing and the interface design. As a musician, Chen is a violist who has released music under the musical monikers The Consulate General and Boy in Static. Chen is currently living in Brooklyn, NY."
Alexander Chen (Video)

Museum Hours - Jem Cohen (2012)

Wikipedia - "Museum Hours is a 2012 Austrian-American drama film written and directed by Jem Cohen. The film is set in and around Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. When a Vienna museum guard befriends an enigmatic visitor, the grand Kunsthistorisches Museum becomes a mysterious crossroads which sparks explorations of their lives, the city, and the ways artworks reflect and shape the world. Vienna, winter. Johan, a guard at the grand Kunsthistorisches Museum encounters Anne, a foreign visitor called to Austria because of a medical emergency. Never having been to Austria and with little money, she wanders the city in limbo, taking the museum as her refuge. Johann, initially wary, offers help, and they're drawn into each other's worlds. Their meeting spark an unexpected series of explorations – of their own lives and the life of the city, and of the way artworks can reflect and shape daily experience."
Wikipedia
Museum Hours (vimeo: Video)
NY Times: Old Masters, Sweet Mysteries
Voice: Museum Hours Makes Art of Waiting
NPR: In Vienna, A Gallery Of Hours That Add Up To Art
Ebertfest: Roger Ebert's Film Festival
Wandering in Vienna: Jem Cohen and the Adventure of Museum Hours
YouTube: Museum Hours Official Trailer 1 (2013), Trailer 2

2014 January: Jem Cohen

In Which We Begin To Roar With Laughter At Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud

"The Crossing Over of Paul Verlaine by Enid Starkie. One day Paul Verlaine at the end of his tether, broke away, feeling that he could not endure the torture any longer. After a quarrel - not more violent than the others, but merely the futile culmination of much previous irritation - he walked out of the house, without any luggage and without saying where he was going. At his cross-examination in Brussels Arthur Rimbaud stated that Verlaine had become angry because he had reproached him with being lazy and treating badly some of their friends."
This Recording

2008 May: Arthur Rimbaud, 2010 November: Arthur Rimbaud - 1, 2012 October: Patti Smith: Poem about Arthur Rimbaud (Subtitulado), 2012 December: Writers’ Houses Gives You a Virtual Tour of Famous Authors’ Homes, 2013 August: Arthur Rimbaud Documentary, 2013 November: julian peters comics - The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud.

Tellus #26 - Jewel Box (1992)

"Harvestworks’ Artist-In-Residence program allowed edible artists using sound to benefit from a New York professionally equiped studio called Studio PASS, whose technicians in 1992 were Alex Noyes and Brian Karl. This is were the pieces on this CD were conceived, some making full use of the studio facilities (rerecording, sampler), so that the ‘Jewel Box’ of the title might as well be the studio itself."
Continuo
Harvestworks (Video)
UbuWeb: Tellus #26 (Video)

A Book of Glyphs - Edward Sanders

"A Book of Glyphs is a facsimile reproduction of legendary author, musician and Fugs founder Ed Sanders’ first book-length work of glyphs, which he created in Florence, Italy in 2008, using colored pencils and a small sketchbook. Though each piece stands on its own, collectively the 72 glyphs convey, with characteristic humility and humor, many of the themes explored by Sanders over his long and diverse career, including history, myth, activism and pacifism."
Granary Books
amazon
YouTube: Ed Sanders - "Glyphs" Portfolio

Archibald Motley

Nightlife – 1943
Wikipedia - "Archibald John Motley, Junior (October 7, 1891, New Orleans, Louisiana – January 16, 1981, Chicago, Illinois) was an African-American painter. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918. He is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America. He specialized in portraiture and saw it 'as a means of affirming racial respect and race pride.'”
Wikipedia
Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (Video)
Area of Design
NEH: Block Party

Bob Dylan - "Oh, Sister", "Tangled Up in Blue" (September 10, 1975)

"Oh, sister, when I come to lie in your arms
You should not treat me like a stranger
Our Father would not like the way that you act
And you must realize the danger

Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you
And one deserving of affection?
And is our purpose not the same on this earth
To love and follow His direction?"
PBS Soundstage WTTW-TV Studios. Chicago, Illinois, USA. "Oh, Sister", "Tangled Up in Blue".
YouTube: time is an ocean but it ends at the shore, you may not see me tomorrow

Insane Record Collections and the People Who Own Them

Joe Bussard
"Photographer Eilon Paz left Israel in 2008 to try his luck in New York. 'It was the worst time to try your luck. It was the beginning of the recession. There were no jobs to be found so I just found myself in record stores spending my money on records and nothing much more than that,' he said. All that time spent around records gave Paz the idea to do a project on the people who collect them. After meeting African record collector and DJ Frank Gossner in Brooklyn, he became introduced to other collectors around the city and started posting photos and stories about them on his blog, Dust and Grooves."
Slate

Effi Briest (1974) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder

"... Although I believe Effi Briest is one of [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder's most intricate masterpieces, as discussed below, in many ways it is also one of his most accessible films. On its most basic level, it features an engrossing melodrama about adultery, albeit one purposefully shorn of histrionics. Set in the closed, repressive Prussian society of the Bismarck era, it shows what happens when seventeen-year-old Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla, who appeared in twenty of Fassbinder's films), with prodding from her parents, makes an expedient marriage to a rising politician twice her age, Baron Geert von Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck), and later has an affair with the charming Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel)."
Jim's Reviews - The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Wikipedia
NY Times
senses of cinema - Effi Briest: Beyond Adultery
film comment - Fassbinder Adapts: Effi Briest
ZIMBIO: Effi Briest (Video)

2014 May: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Suena Pacífico Mixtape

"This brand new, totally jamming mix of Afro-Colombian music comes to our ears from SoundGoods, the blog of a German DJ/Producer named Wolfram Lange. It primarily features two styles of Afro-Colombian music: Currulao and Chirimía. Accordions chug, drums roll, horns blast, and singers wail. Shake your tail feather to this..."
World Music Productions (Video)
Neo-Griot (Video)

Marina at Midnight: Serpentine Diaries

"At the end of each day of her performance 512 Hours, Marina Abramović closes the door to visitors and records a summary of the past eight hours. Spoken directly to camera, this eloquent and moving record is a testament to 'one of the most difficult things she has ever done.' The short daily films will trace the fluctuations and developments of her performance piece, which begins with an empty space and unlimited possibilities. Marina at Midnight launched on Friday 13 June with The Space, a new creative online platform dedicated to new digital art."
Serpentine Galleries (Video)
The Space (Video)

2010 January: Marina Abramović

Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza

Wikipedia - "Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza (also known as The Group or Il Gruppo) was an avant-garde free improvisation group considered the first experimental composers collective. The collective was formed by Italian composer Franco Evangelisti in Rome in 1964. Drawing on jazz, serialism, musique concrete, and other avant-garde techniques developed by contemporary classical music composers such as Luigi Nono and Giacinto Scelsi, the group was dedicated to the development of new music techniques by improvisation, noise-techniques, and anti-musical systems. The group members and frequent guests made use of extended techniques on traditional classical instruments, as well as prepared piano, tape music and electronic music. During the 1970s the music continued to evolve to embrace techniques and genres such as guitar feedback and funk."
Wikipedia
allmusic
Ennio Morricone’s noise ensemble: Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza (Video)
Die Schachte
WFMU: The Quietly Lasting Impact of Ennio Morricone and Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza (Video)
Dusted Magazine (Video)
YouTube: Niente, Schema 1, The Feed-Back, Bali, NIENTE

Terry Riley - Solo piano works, Moscow Conservatory. April 18th, 2000

"Solo piano works, recorded live in Moscow Conservatory on April 18th, 2000. Russian-only release on the Long Arms label. Pieces include: 'Arica', 'Havana Man', 'Negro Hall', 'The Ecstasy', 'Missigono', 'Requiem For Wally'. 'The following pieces appear without any editing of the performance. Large sections of these pieces are improvised and I have attempted to preserve the spontaneity of this special evening by presenting my first concert in Moscow exactly as it was played. I hope in some way my offering of this evenings music reflects the deep respect I hold for the great musical traditions of Russia and the Masters who have reached for the stars before me with their awesome genius.' -- Terry Riley."
Leo Records
YouTube: Moscow Conservatory Solo Piano Concert April 18th, 2000

December 2007: Terry Riley, March 2010: In C, December 2010: Terry Riley & Gyan Riley, April 2011: Terry Riley - Shri Camel: Morning Corona, Terry Riley rare footage, live in the 70s, 2014 March: Kronos Quartet Plays Terry Riley: Salome Dances for Peace (1989).

House of Games (1987)

Wikipedia - "House of Games is David Mamet's 1987 directorial debut. He also wrote the screenplay, based on a story he wrote with Jonathan Katz. The film's cast includes Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay, and J. T. Walsh. Margaret Ford (Crouse) is a psychiatrist. She has published a book, Driven: Compulsion and Obsession in Everyday Life, which has made her financially well off. One day, she's in a session with Billy, a compulsive gambler who informs her that his life is in danger. He owes $25,000 to a criminal figure — money he doesn't have — and if he doesn't pay, he will be killed. Margaret visits a pool hall and bar called the House of Games and confronts the man Billy owes, Mike (Mantegna). After a brief conversation, Margaret sizes Mike up as a tough talker, but not a violent gangster. Mike reveals that Billy's debt is only eight hundred dollars. He is willing to forgive the debt if Margaret accompanies him to a high-stakes poker game as his girlfriend, using her to help spot the tell of another gambler (Jay)."
Wikipedia
Roger Ebert
YouTube: House of Games (David Mamet, 1987) Theatrical Trailer, Short Con - Western Union Scene

Lou Reed - The Bells (1979)

Lester Bangs: "... The Bells isn't merely Lou Reed's best solo LP, it's great art. Everybody made a fuss over Street Hassle, but too many reviewers overlooked the fact that it was basically a sound album: brilliant layers of live and studio work in a deep wash of bass-obsessive noise. Most of the songs were old, and not very good, with a lot of the same old cheap shots. The first indication that we've got something very different here is the no-bullshit cover art; the second, a cursory listening to the lyrics. Immediately, one notes the absence of mirror shades, needles and S&M. Lou Reed is walking naked for once, in a way that invites comparison with people like Charles Mingus, the Van Morrison of 'T.B. Sheets' and Astral Weeks, and the Rolling Stones of Exile on Main Street."
Rolling Stone
W - The Bells
allmusic
YouTube: The Bells 40:59

2010 August: Heroin, 2011 June: All Tomorrow's Parties - The Velvet Underground, 2011 June: The Velvet Underground, 2012 November: Songs for Drella - Lou Reed and John Cale, 2013 October: Lou Reed (1942 - 2013)

Pizza

Wikipedia - "Pizza ... is an oven-baked flat bread typically topped with a tomato sauce, cheese and various toppings. The modern pizza was invented in Naples, Italy, and the dish has since become popular in many parts of the world. An establishment that makes and sells pizzas is called a 'pizzeria'. Many varieties of pizza exist worldwide, along with several dish variants based upon pizza. Pizza is cooked in various types of ovens, and a diverse variety of ingredients and toppings are utilized. In 2009, upon Italy's request, Neapolitan pizza was safeguarded in the European Union as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed dish."
Wikipedia

Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988

"The Museum of Modern Art presents a major retrospective devoted to the art of Lygia Clark (Brazilian, 1920–1988), the first comprehensive exhibition in North America of her work. Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 comprises nearly 300 works made between the late 1940s and her death in 1988. Drawn from public and private collections, including MoMA’s own, this survey is organized around three key themes: abstraction, Neo-Concretism, and the 'abandonment' of art."
MoMA
YouTube: Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948 - 1988, Lygia Clark
The Brooklyn Rail
W - Lygia Clark
NY Times: See Me. Feel Me. Maybe Drool on Me., Pensamento Mudo

Gospel According to Al Green (1984)

"LEAD: ONE night after a concert at Disneyland, the soul singer Al Green had a conversion experience. He woke up in his hotel room, feeling as he never had before or since, shouting 'Hallelujah!' Over the next two years, he vacillated between what he calls 'a million-dollar career' and his calling to sing gospel music. One night after a concert at Disneyland, the soul singer Al Green had a conversion experience. He woke up in his hotel room, feeling as he never had before or since, shouting 'Hallelujah!' Over the next two years, he vacillated between what he calls 'a million-dollar career' and his calling to sing gospel music. After a spurned lover dumped boiling grits on him and then shot herself, Mr. Green bought himself the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Memphis, gave up his secular love songs and turned to the gospel full-time."
NY Times
YouTube: Gospel According To Al Green 1987 1:35:37

July 2008: Wikipedia, Al Green, 2011 April: Al Green