John Coltrane: Afro Blue Impressions (2013)

"There is no such thing as a bad John Coltrane record, but that doesn’t mean that every album is equally good. There are essential records, where he took great strides forward on his personal musical quest; and secondary ones, where the movement is more lateral in nature. Afro Blue Impressions is a one of the latter. It’s a document of Coltrane and his band pausing to reflect on some of those giant steps. Recorded in November of 1963 in Berlin and Stockholm, Afro Blue Impressions captures the John Coltrane quartet at an interesting time. This is the quartet at their most melodic; after the sheets of sound era but before the free-blowing of Ascension, with the influence of recordings with Duke Ellington and Johnny Hartman fresh in ears and minds. ..."
Pop Matters
W - Afro Blue Impressions
Concord Reissues
YouTube: Lonnie's Lament, Naima, Afro Blue, Spiritual, I Want To Talk About You, Impressions, Chasin' The Trane

2011 November: John Coltrane Quartet, Live at Jazz Casual, 1963, 2012 March: John Coltrane 1960 - 1965, 2012 September: "Naima" (1959), 2012 October: Blue Train (1957), 2013 April: The World According to John Coltrane, 2013 November: A Love Supreme (1965), 2014 July: New Photos of John Coltrane Rediscovered 50 Years After They Were Shot, 2014 November: Coltrane’s Free Jazz Wasn’t Just “A Lot of Noise”, 2015 February: Lush Life (1958), 2015 May: An Animated John Coltrane Explains His True Reason for Being: “I Want to Be a Force for Real Good”.

The Art of the Car Chase

"The car chase montage (or supercut, if you will) is not exactly an original concept, but looking for an editing challenge, this one came up. Editing a car chase is no doubt hard and difficult work. Editing 50 of them together does make it easier depending on how strict your standards of continuity are. I tried to have 'sections' of continuity - little scenes, that tell their own little stories, but don't necessarily fit together as such. The most time consuming part of the process is no doubt finding and preparing the clips. It is also the most boring part. The fun part is editing them together in new and interesting ways. This is also the most frustrating part, because the possibilities are almost endless and if you're not careful, the project will simply get stuck in the mud, so to speak. ..."
vimeo: The Art of the Car Chase (Video)

The Best Construction Fence Ever In New York City

"For the past week, I’ve been scouting dozens of construction sites around Brooklyn and Queens, which means I’ve been running into the same boring green fencing pretty much everywhere (specifically, 'hunter green,' as per city requirements). As I was driving around, I was suddenly reminded of the best construction fencing I think I’ve ever seen in New York. It was a number of years ago, and I even took pictures to run on Scouting NY, but for some odd reason, never got around to it. ..."
Scouting NY

¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York

Three New York City venues are looking back at the Puerto Rican nationalist group the Young Lords
"The Bronx Museum of the Arts is organizing a multi-venue artistic and cultural survey of The Young Lords Organization—a radical social activist group founded by Puerto Rican youth in the 1960s that demanded reform in health care, education, housing, employment, and policing. Exhibitions of art and archival materials at three cultural institutions in New York City will explore how the Young Lords’ activities, community-focused initiatives, and their affirmation of Puerto Rican identity inspired artists from the 1960s to the present day, and had a major impact on the City and the social history of the United States. ... The initiative will include public and educational programs across partnering venues to build awareness of the Young Lords’ innovative contributions to the struggle for civil rights and influence on contemporary artists, and to spark conversations about grassroots community activism today. ..."
Bronx Museum
NY Times: When the Young Lords Were Outlaws in New York
aljazeera: Young Lords exhibit a timely salute to Puerto Rican activism
facebook

1816 - The Frozen Vaults (2015)

"1816 is the debut album from modern classical collective The Frozen Vaults. It is thematically based around the year 1816, which recorded one of the coldest years the world has ever seen. At the time, little was known as to why this phenomenally cold year was upon them, which soon become known in history as 'the year with no summer' and 'eighteen hundred froze to death'. Eventually through extensive scientific research, it was discovered that the exceptional cold was more than likely attributed to a violent volcanic eruption by Mount Tambora in the year prior. In recent years we have seen that particularly bad eruptions have had a similar effect, yet rarely to the extent recorded in 1816. ..."
voxxov records
a closer listen (Video)
YouTube: First Moments, A Year Without Summer, Stilled (Excerpt), The Great Thaw

James White And The Blacks - Off White (1979)

"For Off White, James Chance, a veteran of New York's avant-garde no wave scene, recast his seminal band the Contortions as a parody of a soul band, albeit one incorporating the rhythms of disco and funk rather than R&B. Thus, Chance became James White (as a nod to James Brown), the Contortions became the Blacks, and his music, previously a twisted, experimental brand of avant-jazz, became a disco/funk/free jazz hybrid. As bizarre as the fusion of Albert Ayler and Giorgio Moroder might sound, Off White works primarily because Chance commits to both sides of the music. ... By carefully constructing his music with such polar opposites, Chance manages to highlight how both of them have more similarities, especially in rhythm, than would appear at first listen. Off White may be an acquired taste, but listeners who dig into it will have their patience rewarded with some of the most challenging, intriguing music to emerge from the post-punk era."
allmusic
W - Off White
BOMB: James White a.k.a. James Chance
Spotify
YouTube: Off White 1:14:58

2009 December: James Chance, 2011 December: No New York, 2014 July: No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980, 2015 January: Buy - James Chance and the Contortions (1979).

Twin Peaks Maps

Charles Ramsey, intwinpeaks.com
"In a town like Twin Peaks, it’s not hard to get lost. Here are all the Twin Peaks maps I’ve collected so far, but please let me know in the comments if you come across any other ones! ... The city roadmap shows almost all the important sites, including The Great Northern Hotel, White Tail Falls, Black Lake Dam, Twin Peaks Town Hall, The Grange (burned), Palmer House, Briggs House, Hayward House, Twin Peaks High School, Black Lake Cemetery, Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, Upper Twin Park, The Gazebo, Lower Twin Park, County Museum, The Bookhouse, Old Railroad Depot, Double R Diner, Roadhouse, Horne’s Department Store, Calhoun Memorial Hospital, to Packard Place, to Packard Sawmill, to Owl Cave, to the Railroad Cemetery, to Ghostwood National Forest, Harold Smith’s Apartment, Dead Dog Farm, Big Ed’s Gas Station, to Unguin’s Field Observatory (U.F.O.), and Old Unguin’s Field."
Twin Peaks Maps

2008 September: Twin Peaks, 2010 March: Twin Peaks: How Laura Palmer's death marked the rebirth of TV drama, 2011 October: Twin Peaks: The Last Days, 2014 October: Welcome to Twin Peaks, 2015 June: David Lynch: ‘I’ve always loved Laura Palmer’.

New York City In Color: The Photography Of Sally Davies

"Color street photography has been around New York City since the very beginning - of color photography, I mean. Early proponents were people like Saul Leiter, Helen Levitt and Joel Meyerowitz. Sally Davies has been carrying on this tradition since the 80's here in New York City. Her work is vivid, fresh, and engaging. Almost like paintings, Sally's storefront images are little self-contained stories. Photo after photo, we read these images as if they were pages from a history book - they capture the spirit, the people, and the cityscape all at once. Sally's photos are good now, but I can only imagine how critical they will become with age. She has created both art and important historical documents in one - a real feat in photography. I recently spoke with Sally about her beginnings in photography, her gear, and being a woman in the art world."
Huffington Post
SALLY DAVIES PHOTO BLOG

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Higgs Boson Blues

"To accompany their 2013 LP, Push the Sky Away, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds have shared a live performance video for the album's Miley Cyrus-referencing track 'Higgs Boson Blues'. It was shot in East London and directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Forsyth and Pollard were also behind the upcoming Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, which will premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival. Days depicts an imagined 24 hours in the life of Cave and explores his creative process. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds just released a live record and announced a North American tour."
Pitchfork
YouTube: Higgs Boson Blues

2008 August: Nick Cave, 2010 November: Henry Lee - Nick Cave & PJ Harvey, 2011 March: The Boatman's Call, 2011 December: B-Sides & Rarities, 2012 January: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - White Lunar, 2013 January: "We No Who U R", 2013 April: No More Shall We Part, 2013 June: The Secret Life Of The Love Song/The Flesh Made Word (1999), 2013 October: The Abattoir Blues Tour (2007), 2014 March: Push the Sky Away (2013), 2014 May: Live from KCRW (2013), 2014 July: I Am the Real Nick Cave, 2014 March: God Is In The House (2001), 2015 June: Nocturama (2003).

Skeleton Crew

Wikipedia - "Skeleton Crew was a United States experimental rock and jazz group from 1982 to 1986, comprising core members Fred Frith (guitar) and Tom Cora (cello), with Zeena Parkins (harp) joining later. Best known for their live improvisation performances where they played various instruments simultaneously, they also recorded two studio albums Learn to Talk (1984) and The Country of Blinds (1986). Skeleton Crew originally began in 1982 as an unnamed quartet, but before their first performance, two of the band members (Fred Maher and Tim Schellenbaum) suffered collapsed lungs within two weeks of each other, leaving ex-Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith and improvisational cellist Tom Cora from Curlew with the choice of continuing or abandoning the project. They chose to continue, agreeing to play all the instruments on stage themselves. Frith played guitar, violin, keyboards, bass drum and hi-hat while Cora played cello, bass guitar, homemade drums and other contraptions enabling him to play instruments with his feet. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Learn to Talk
W - The Country of Blinds
W - Learn to Talk / Country of Blinds
YouTube: Factory song, We're Still Free, Learn to talk, The Hand That Bites, You may find a bed, The Border, Bingo, Safety in numbers

2010 June: Tom Cora, 2012 February: Fred Frith & Tom Cora, 2012 April: The Ex + Tom Cora, 2011 January: Zeena Parkins, 2012 November: News from Babel, 2012 December: Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins / sound. at REDCAT, 2013 October: Art Bears Songbook - 2010-09-19 - Rock In Opposition Festival, 2014 October: Janene Higgins & Zeena Parkins (2000), 2015 March: Phantom Orchard: Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori

Véhicule Press

Wikipedia - "Since 1973, Véhicule Press has published poetry, fiction, translations, and social history by Canadian authors, with a commitment to publishing first-time authors—a third of its list. It publishes books of interest to Canadians and an international audience, in addition to titles that document Quebec culture in its Dossier Québec series (histories of the Irish, Scots, Jewish, Japanese, and black communities). ... Véhicule Press began in 1973 on the premises of Véhicule Art Inc. – one of Canada’s first artist-run galleries located in what was once the legendary night club Café Montmartre – using equipment inherited from Kenneth Hertz’s Ingluvin Publications, and an ancient printing press that had been abandoned by a member-artist of the gallery. In 1975 the press became Quebec’s only cooperatively-owned printing and publishing company. Simon Dardick and Guy Lavoie were general editors; Ken Norris, Artie Gold, and Endre Farkas were the poetry editors. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Artie Gold
Véhicule Press
the véhicule press blog
Exploring four decades of Véhicule Press

Procol Harum - A Salty Dog (1969)

"This album, the group's third, was where they showed just how far their talents extended across the musical landscape, from blues to R&B to classical rock. In contrast to their hastily recorded debut, or its successor, done to stretch their performance and composition range, A Salty Dog was recorded in a reasonable amount of time, giving the band a chance to fully develop their ideas. The title track is one of the finest songs ever to come from Procol Harum and one of the best pieces of progressive rock ever heard, and a very succinct example at that at under five minutes running time -- the lyric and the music combine to form a perfect mood piece, and the performance is bold and subtle at once, in the playing and the singing, respectively. ..."
allmusic
W - A Salty Dog
Spotify
YouTube: A Salty Dog (Live), Pilgrim's Progress / Quite Rightly So / Magdalene, The Devil Came From Kansas, Still There'll Be More
YouTube: A Salty Dog [Full album, 1969]

2009 July: Procol Harum, 2011 December: Broken Barricades, 2013 April: "Homburg", 2013 June: Procol Harum (1967), Home (1970).

Renzo Piano: how to build the perfect sandcastle

"My career started when I was a child and I built my first sandcastle on the beach in Genoa, where I grew up. Making things has always been a pleasure for me – happy hands, happy mind – and making sandcastles was my training in fantasy. Now, as an architect constructing buildings like the Shard, I have to think about the final result, but as a child making castles of sand I didn’t, they were ephemeral. I have four children; the oldest is 50 and the youngest 16, so I have been making sandcastles for a long time. There is no age limit – you can enjoy making a sandcastle however old you are, although it helps to think like a child. Here’s how to do it. ..."
Guardian

Dolce Vita? From the Liberty to Italian Design (1900-1940)

"In Italy in the early twentieth century the decorative arts were used to interpret the desire for progress of a nation that had only just found its unity. Cabinetmakers, ceramicists and glass-makers all worked together with the leading artists, creating a veritable 'Italian style'. This period of extraordinary creativity is recalled through around a hundred works in a chronological display. The 'Liberty' style, which came into its own at the turn of the century, is recalled with designs by Carlo Bugatti, Eugenio Quarti and Federico Tesio mixed with works by the Divisionist painters. A second section is devoted to Futurism, its esthetic inspired by progress and speed extending to every aspect of life. ..."
Musée d'Orsay
Artsy

Watch Stewart Brand’s 6-Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno

"Stewart Brand came onto the cultural scene during the 1960s, helping to stage the Acid Tests made famous by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and later launching the influential Whole Earth Catalog (something Steve Jobs described as 'Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along'). He also vigorously campaigned in 1966 to have NASA release a photograph showing the entirety of Earth from space — something we take for granted now, but fired humanity’s imagination back then. ... Above you can watch How Buildings Learn, Brand’s six-part BBC TV series from 1997, which comes complete with music by Brian Eno. Based on his illustrated book sharing the same title, the TV series offers a critique of modernist approaches to architecture (think Buckminster Fuller, Frank Gehry, and Le Corbusier) and instead argues for 'an organic kind of building, based on four walls, which is easy to change and expand and grow as the ideal form of building.'”
Open Culture (Video)

2009 April: CoEvolution Quarterly, 2010 April: The Whole Earth Catalog, 2013 December: THE WHOLE EARTH: California and The Disappearance of The Outside, 2010 May: Ken Kesey, 2013 April: Sometimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey (1964)

Rip Rig + Panic ‎– Bob Hope Takes Risks (1981)

"Most people'll tell you that Rip Rig + Panic were a noisier version of Pigbabg. Not that 'most people' have the slightest inkling who Pigbag actually were of course, let alone Rip Rig + Panic. RR+P stumbled stinking, blinking, scratching their heads & (I imagine) hitching up their britches, out of the mangled wreckage of The Pop Group sometime in 1981. Initially a loose knit experimental musical collective fronted by The Group's avant garde jazzbo Gareth Sager (with drummer Bruce Smith in tow), they released a succession of irreverent singles & albums on Virgin Records that seemed commercially unorthodox at the time &, even with 20-odd years hindsight, still sound singularly radical & anarchic. ..."
I Love Total Destruction
Spotify
YouTube: Bob Hope Takes Risks, Hey Mr E! A Gran Grin With a Shake of Smile, Peel Session 1981 1. Symphony In Dave's Flat (0:07) 2. A Grand Grin And A Shaky Smile Please Mr Barman (5:11) 3. Pullover No Sox (10:09)

2010 December: Rip Rig and Panic, 2015 February: "You're My Kind of Climate" 12 inch mix

"It Hurts Me Too"

Wikipedia - "'It Hurts Me Too' is a blues standard that is 'one of the most interpreted blues [songs]'. First recorded in 1940 by American blues musician Tampa Red, the song is a mid-tempo eight-bar blues that features slide guitar. It borrows from earlier blues songs and has been recorded by many blues and other artists. 'It Hurts Me Too' is based on 'Things 'Bout Comin' My Way', recorded by Tampa Red in 1931 (OKeh 1637). The melody lines are nearly identical and instrumentally they are similar, although the latter has an extra bar in the turnaround, giving it nine bars. ... Several versions of 'It Hurts Me Too' were recorded in the 1940s and 1950s, including those by Stick McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy. When Elmore James recorded it in 1957 (Chief 7004), he (or Chief's owner, Mel London, who is credited on the release) supplied some of the lyrics that are most familiar today. ..."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Tampa Red, Elmore James, Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band, Big Bill Broonzy, Joe Carter

The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965

"W. Eugene Smith sits at the fourth-floor window of his dilapidated loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, New York City, near the corner of Twenty-eighth Street, the heart of Manhattan’s wholesale flower district. He peers out at the street below, several cameras at hand loaded with different lenses and film speeds. His window faces east from the west side of Sixth Avenue. The dawn light begins to rise behind the Empire State Building and other Midtown skyscrapers looming over the modest neighborhood. Three musicians stand together on the sidewalk below talking and laughing. One holds an upright bass in its case, another has a saxophone case slung over his shoulder, and the other is smoking a cigarette. It is six o’clock in the morning; the temperature is a moderate thirty degrees. The musicians are going home after a night-long jam session. Smith snaps a few pictures."
Jazz Loft Project
Jazz Loft Project: Radio (Video)
amazon
Nasher
NPR - Tales Of The Tape: Introducing The Jazz Loft (Video)
YouTube:The Jazz Loft Project: An Interview with Sam Stephenson

LAttitudes

"This literary and cartographic exploration of Los Angeles reorients our understanding of the city in highly imaginative ways. Illuminated by boldly conceived and artfully rendered maps and infographics, nineteen essays by LA’s most exciting writers reveal complex histories and perspectives of a place notorious for superficiality. This chorus of voices explores wildly different subjects: Cindi Alvitre unveils the indigenous Tongva presence of the Los Angeles Basin; Michael Jaime-Becerra takes us into the smoky, spicy kitchens of a family taquero business in El Monte; Steve Graves traces the cowboy-and-spacemen-themed landscapes of the San Fernando Valley. Overlooked sites and phenomena become apparent: LGBT churches and synagogues, a fabled ‘Cycleway,’ mustachioed golden carp, urban forests, lost buildings, ugly buildings. What has been ignored, such as environmental and social injustice, is addressed with powerful anger and elegiac sadness, and what has been maligned is reexamined with a sense of pride: the city’s freeways, for example, take the shape of a dove when viewed from midair and pulsate with wailing blues, surf rock, and brassy banda."
Abandon All Despair Ye Who Enter Here (Video)
Heyday
LA Mag
LA Times: LAtitudes navigates the histories and cultures of L.A.

Nicolas Jaar - Space Is Only Noise (2010)

"Strange can exist anywhere, but we have a habit of thinking only the maximal and unhinged-- Captain Beefheart, Basement Jaxx, R. Kelly-- are truly weird. How bizarre can the music of Philip Glass or Wolfgang Voigt really be? It seems contained, planned; the curio is the choice to be so on-keel in the first place. One of my favorite aspects of Nicolas Jaar's debut full-length, Space Is Only Noise, is how thoroughly it scatters this misconception. Space is leftfield electro-pop, far-flung and without reserve, but it is also patient, quiet, and small. Jaar is a Providence via New York via Chile producer. He is 21, he attends Brown University, and he already has several well regarded singles and EPs to his name in addition to running the Clown & Sunset imprint. Requisite hot remixes: check. ..."
Pitchfork (Video)
allmusic
Nicolas Jaar interview: “Ghosts that appear inside the silence.” (Video)
YouTube: Space Is Only Noise (2010) 45:57

2013 September: Nicolas Jaar, 2014 January: Other People, 2015 May: Nicolas Jaar Soundtracks Short Film About Police Brutality and #BlackLivesMatter

Stowaways and Crimes Aboard a Scofflaw Ship

"CHIOS, Greece — The rickety raft made of empty oil drums and a wooden tabletop rolled and pitched with the waves while tied to the side of the Dona Liberta, a 370-foot cargo ship anchored far from land in the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa. 'Go down!' yelled a knife-wielding crew member, forcing two Tanzanian stowaways overboard and onto the raft. As angry clouds gathered on the horizon, he cut the line. Gambling on a better life, the stowaways had run out of luck. They had already spent nine days at sea, most of the time hiding in the Dona Liberta’s engine room, crouched deep in oily water. But as they climbed down onto the slick raft, the men, neither of whom knew how to swim, nearly slid into the ocean before lashing themselves together to the raft with a rope."
NY Times (Video)
Ninety Percent of Everything
The Disorder Of Things
Ghostly Ship Graveyards from Around the World

I still love Kierkegaard

"I fell for Søren Kierkegaard as a teenager, and he has accompanied me on my intellectual travels ever since, not so much side by side as always a few steps ahead or lurking out of sight just behind me. Perhaps that’s because he does not mix well with the other companions I’ve kept. I studied in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy, where the literary flourishes and wilful paradoxes of continental existentialists are viewed with anything from suspicion to outright disdain. In Paris, Roland Barthes might have proclaimed the death of the author, but in London the philosopher had been lifeless for years, as anonymous as possible so that the arguments could speak for themselves. Discovering that your childhood idols are now virtually ancient is usually a disturbing reminder of your own mortality."
aeon

2011 July: Søren Kierkegaard, 2013 April: Repetition (1843), 2013 December: The Quotable Kierkegaard, 2014 October: Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard (1843), 2014 December: The Dark Knight of Faith - Existential Comics.

The Feelies - Crazy Rhythms (1980)

"Even the cover is a winner, with a washed-out look that screams new wave via horn-rimmed glasses, even more so than contemporaneous pictures of either Elvis Costello or the Embarrassment. But if it was all look and no brain, Crazy Rhythms would long ago have been dismissed as an early-'80s relic. That's exactly what this album is not, right from the soft, haunting hints of percussion that preface the suddenly energetic jump of the appropriately titled 'The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness.' From there the band delivers seven more originals plus a striking cover of the Beatles' 'Everybody's Got Something to Hide' that rips along even more quickly than the original. The guitar team of Mercer and Million smokes throughout, whether it's soft, rhythmic chiming with a mysterious, distanced air or blasting, angular solos. But Fier is the band's secret weapon, able to play straight-up beats but aiming at a rumbling, strange punch that updates Velvet Underground/Krautrock trance into giddier realms."
allmusic
W - Crazy Rhythms
Pitchfork
YouTube: Crazy Rhythms (Live)
YouTube: Crazy Rhythms (Full Album || 1980, Stiff Records)

Roma Street Art Tribes as Captured by Dioniso Punk

"Disorderly, discordant, and richly chaotic, these two videos are centered around the Italian street art paintings and artists whom you will recognize from our earlier postings on community/gallery organized urban art programming – but within the context of historical art publicly displayed, peoples movements, patronage, fascism, the classics. Dioniso Punk allows everyone to talk – neighbors, artists, organizers, curators, public philosophers, elected officials, psychologists, sociologists, entrepreneurs, posers, professors, historians, students, an opera singer, the petite bourgeoisie, international visitors and hapless puzzled opinionated locals. ..."
Brooklyn Street Art (Video)

Reflections on a Marine Venus - Lawrence Durrell (1953)

"Reflections on a Marine Venus, a very personal memoir by leading 20th century novelist Lawrence Durrell, explores life on a magical and enchanting island (Rhodes) right after World War II. It is about Greece when it was a demiparadise. But it is also about the distillation of life and experience, the savoring of all the exquisite pleasures, physical, sensual, and intellectual, available on one lovely island at one time, and that might still be there for us to discover in our own time."
Axios Institute
amazon - Reflections on a Marine Venus
Lawrence Durrell on Love, Life and No Escape
Where the Tigers Were: Travels Through Literary Landscapes

2011 December: The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell, 2013 September: Villa that inspired Lawrence Durrell faces demolition, as Egypt allows heritage to crumble, 2014 August: Prospero’s Cell (1945), 2015 April: Bitter Lemons (1953–1956), 2015 May: Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence.

Ramparts

Wikipedia - "Ramparts was a glossy illustrated American political and literary magazine, published from 1962 through 1975. Unlike most radical magazines of the day, Ramparts was expensively produced and graphically sophisticated, effectively reaching an audience that may have been put off by the grittier "movement" publications of the time. ... The early magazine included notable pieces by Thomas Merton and John Howard Griffin, but one observer compared its design to 'the poetry annual of a Midwestern girls school.' Change was in the wind, however. Located as it was on the outskirts of San Francisco, the West Coast epicenter of 1960s explosion of opposition to the Vietnam War and anti-establishment counterculture, the magazine's orientation radically changed along with the world around it. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: Back When Ramparts Did the Storming
NY Times: Scoop
NY Times: ‘A Bomb in Every Issue’
amazon: A Bomb in Every Issue
The Ramparts I Watched
YouTube: Team Video: Ramparts Magazine

Unfinished Stories: Snapshots from the Peter J. Cohen Collection

"Spanning the 20th century, the almost 300 found photographs in 'Unfinished Stories' depict a century of image-making by private photographers. 'A quick shot fired by a hunter without deliberate aim,' reads the original definition of a snapshot from the early 19th century. The term 'snapshot,' popularized shortly after the invention of Kodak’s box camera in the 1880s, came to describe photographs of everyday life using a handheld camera. Speedy new technology boosted the ability to create a visual diary, commemorating events and personal moments, road trips and holidays. Now, more than a century later, these once ubiquitous and now historic, silver gelatin photographs are rapidly being replaced by Instagram and other digital forms of photography, hence a new appreciation for such photographs. ..."
MFA
Google

A Guide to the French Revolution

Henry Singleton, "The Storming of the Bastille."
"Today people all over the world celebrate the 1789 storming of the Bastille Saint-Antoine — a dramatic popular rebellion that sparked the French Revolution. But what was the French Revolution, how did it reshape Europe and the world, and what relevance does it have to the workers’ movement today? Here’s a short primer, lovingly compiled by Jacobin to mark the occasion."
Jacobin

2014 February: French Revolution Digital Archive

Barrington Levy - Love Your Brother Man: The Early Years

"Since acquiring Trojan's deep catalog, Sanctuary has done a very good to excellent job with the seminal reggae label when it comes to single-artist collections. With vibrant and informative packaging, a crucial track list, and some 12" mixes that are truly stunning, Love Your Brother Man falls into the 'excellent' category. Covering Barrington Levy's early years, what you have here is the blueprint for dancehall singing that held on strong up until the gruff badmen made things much more frantic in the mid-'80s. Levy took the standard roots croon and added a bouncy hiccup to it that emphasizes emotion and allowed singers a totally new, less mannered way to show off their skills. Levy made delivery much more important than pitch control; here, you can listen to how it happened. Slang-filled, feel-good numbers intermingle with righteous spiritual tracks with Levy's effervescence holding it all together. ..."
allmusic
YouTube: Love Your Brother Man - The Early Years (Full Album)

Leviathan - Andrey Zvyagintsev (2014)

Wikipedia - "Leviathan ... is a 2014 Russian drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, co-written by Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin, and starring Aleksei Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, and Vladimir Vdovichenkov. ... Set in fictional town of Pribrezhny (shot in the coastal town of Teriberka, Murmansk Oblast), Russia, the plot follows the tragic series of events that affect Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov), a hotheaded car mechanic, his second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and his teenage son, Roma (Sergey Pokhodyaev). The town's crooked mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) has undertaken a legal plot to expropriate the land on which Kolya's house is built. Kolya attempts to fight back with the help of an old army friend turned lawyer, Dima (Vladimir Vdovichenkov). The narrative offers a grim outlook on dark and icy aspects of human nature and on modern fissures in social contracts, particularly ones found in the abuses of modern law. The film attempts to unmask the truth behind moral aspects of superficial friendliness, blind love and undeserved trust."
Wikipedia
Roger Ebert
Guardian: Cannes 2014 review: Leviathan - a new Russian masterpiece
NY Times: Champion of the Lone Russian Everyman
YouTube: A film by Andrey Zvyagintsev, Andrey Zvyagintsev Russian Drama

Gentleman - Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1973)

"Gentleman is both an Africa 70 and Afro-beat masterpiece. High marks go to the scathing commentary that Fela Anikulapo Kuti lets loose but also to the instrumentation and the overall arrangements, as they prove to be some of the most interesting and innovative of Fela's '70s material. When the great tenor saxophone player Igo Chico left the Africa 70 organization in 1973, Fela Kuti declared he would be the replacement. So in addition to bandleader, soothsayer, and organ player, Fela picked up the horn and learned to play it quite quickly -- even developing a certain personal voice with it. To show off that fact, 'Gentleman' gets rolling with a loose improvisatory solo saxophone performance that Tony Allen eventually pats along with before the entire band drops in with classic Afro-beat magnificence. 'Gentleman' is also a great example of Fela's directed wit at the post-colonial West African sociopolitical state of affairs. His focus is on the Africans that still had a colonial mentality after the Brits were gone and then parallels that life with his own."
allmusicZ
W - Gentleman
Fela Kuti: Music, Politics and Women
Spotify
YouTube: Gentleman, Expensive Shit, Fefe Naa Efe

V. S. Naipaul - Guerrillas (1975)

Paul Theroux: "It is hard for the reviewer of a wonderful author to keep the obituarist's assured hyperbole in check, but let me say that if the silting-up of the Thames coincided with a freak monsoon, causing massive flooding in all parts of South London, the first book I would rescue from my library would be 'A House for Mr. Biswas,' by V. S. Naipaul. Apart from anything else, it would be immensely helpful when the water subsided, since it is one of the century's best fictional examples of a householder struggling against unfriendly conditions in a village--'a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world.' The island is Trinidad, where Naipaul was born in 1932, and he has written about it with insight and compassion in many of his thirteen books."
NY Times
Wikipedia
Naipaul's Guerrillas..."
amazon

2012 February: V. S. Naipaul, 2013 February: A Bend in the River (1979).

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

An Out-of-Doors Study, 1889
"Throughout his career, the celebrated American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) created portraits of artists, writers, actors, and musicians, many of whom were his close friends. Because these works were rarely commissioned, he was free to create images that were more radical than those he made for paying clients. He often posed these sitters informally—in the act of painting, singing, or performing, for example. Together, the portraits constitute a group of experimental paintings and drawings—some of them highly charged, others sensual, and some of them intimate, witty, or idiosyncratic. The exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, which opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 30, brings together about 90 of these distinctive portraits, including numerous loans from private collections. It will also explore in depth the friendships between Sargent and those who posed for him as well as the significance of these relationships to his life and art. ..."
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art: About the Exhibition
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Audio Guide
NY Times: Highlights From 'Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends' at the Met
Guardian - Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends review – invention, sex and sadness
amazon - Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends

Playing The (Baker's) Dozens: George Clinton's Favourite Albums

"Born in 1941, I expected that George Clinton's choices for his Baker's Dozen would span the decades and his own musical life; from his mother's taste in blues, to his formative years spent loving Motown and writing at the Brill Building, through to his psychedelic awakening and subsequent (and continued) genre experimentation. And although all of these periods come up during the duration of our chat, it is one single trip to the record store that characterises nearly half of his choices. At around the age of '29, maybe 30', Clinton purchased his sacred audio library, including records by Sly And The Family Stone, The Beatles, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream. ..."
The Quietus

2009 January: George Clinton, 2010 December: Mothership Connection - Houston 1976, 2011 October: Funkadelic - One Nation Under A Groove, 2011 October: "Do Fries Go With That Shake?", 2012 August: Tales Of Dr. Funkenstein – The Story Of George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic.

Young Composers Series: John Adams, Michael Nyman, Paul Dresher, Ingram Marshall - February 5, 1979

Ingram Marshall – Fog Tropes/Gradual Requiem
"My head is still swimming from all the music I confronted at the New International Young Composers Concerts Series, sponsored by the Reich Music Foundation. At least half of the time the compositional level was extremely high, and many of the works reached into areas of musical style that have never been encountered by New York concertgoers. I don’t think it’s possible to fully process that much information in only a few days, but I can at least offer a few generalities and a few basic observations on four composers who were represented on these three concerts at the Guggenheim Museum, January 16-18. ..."
Tom Johnson: The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972–1982

2010 June: John Adams - Nixon in China (1987), 2012 September: Obscure No. 2: Ensemble Pieces – Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, Gavin Bryars (1975), 2008 April: Michael Nyman, 2010 August: Decay Music, 2010 December: After Extra Time, 2011 March: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2011 August: Michael Nyman Band, 2011 December: The Draughtsman's Contract - Peter Greenaway, 2012 March: Time Lapse, 2013 July: Composer in Progress, In Concert (2010).