W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn (1999)

"Early on in W.G. Sebald‘s strange and beautiful novel The Rings of Saturn, the erudite narrator (seemingly) offhandedly alludes to Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I. Rings is larded with such references, stuffed to the gills with analysis of history and literature and art (and so much more), but the quick allusion to Melencolia I seems a particularly informative way of interpreting–or at least comprehending–Sebald’s grand, glorious book. Before we begin though, it will be useful to quickly summarize the plot: In 1992, a German intellectual named W.G. Sebald takes a walking tour of the east coast of England. He visits old English manors, the homes of dead writers, decaying seaside resorts, abandoned islands, and many other melancholy spots."
biblioklept
Guardian: The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald – walking through history (Video)
W - The Rings of Saturn
NYT: In the Company of Ghosts
A SHORT WALK THROUGH THE RINGS OF SATURN
amazon

2015 February: ‘Drowned in a sea of salt’ Blake Morrison on the literature of the east coast, 2015 April: Patience (After Sebald) - (2010)

The Middle East Friendship Chart

"With overlapping civil wars in Syria and Iraq, a new flare-up of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, and tense nuclear talks with Iran, Middle Eastern politics are more volatile than ever and longtime alliances are shifting. Here's a guide to who's on whose side in the escalating chaos. Click a cell to learn more information."
Slate

Sleepy John Estes

Wikipedia - "John Adam Estes (January 25, 1899 – June 5, 1977), best known as Sleepy John Estes or Sleepy John, was an American blues guitarist, songwriter and vocalist, born in Ripley, Lauderdale County, Tennessee. In 1915, Estes' father, a sharecropper who also played some guitar, moved the family to Brownsville, Tennessee. Not long after, Estes accidentally lost the sight in his right eye when a friend threw a rock at him. At the age of 19, while working as a field hand, he began to perform professionally. ..."
Wikipedia
allmusic
American Music
YouTube: Drop Down Mama, Diving Duck Blues, Liquor Store Blues, Floating Bridge, Someday Baby Blues, Mailman Blues (Live), The Girl I love, She Got Long Curly Hair, Broken-Hearted, Ragged And Dirty Too, Street Car Blues, Lawyer Clark Blues, Watcha Doin, Everybody Oughta Make A Change, Fire Department Blues (Martha Hardin), I Ain't Gonna Be Worried No More, Stop That Thing, Death Valley Blues, Broke And Hungry, Jailhouse Blues

Bob Dylan - "Positively 4th Street" / "From a Buick 6" (1965)

Wikipedia - "'Positively 4th Street' is a song written and performed by Bob Dylan, first recorded by Dylan in New York City on July 29, 1965. ... The song, like most of Dylan's, is composed of a simple harmonic, or chordal, and melodic structure; the verse has a I-ii-IV-I progression followed by I-V-IV-vi-V. Dylan begins by telling the unspecified second-person target of the song that they have a lot of nerve to say that they are his friend and then goes on to list a multitude of examples of their backstabbing duplicity. While the lyrics are distinctly negative, the organ-dominated backing music is that of care-free folk-rock. ... The lyrics of 'Positively 4th Street' are bitter and derisive, which caused many, at the time of the song's release, to draw a comparison with Dylan's similarly toned previous single 'Like a Rolling Stone'. ..."
Wikipedia
amazon: Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña
NY Times: CHAPTER ONE - Positively 4th Street By DAVID HAJDU
NY Times: Protest and Soap Opera for 4 Singers of the 60's
YouTube: Positively 4th Street, From a Buick 6

Tenderloin

John Sloan, The Haymarket, 1907.
Wikipedia - "The Tenderloin was the name given to an entertainment and red-light district in the heart of the New York City borough of Manhattan during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The area originally ran from 23rd Street to 42nd Street and from Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue. By the turn of the 20th century, it had expanded northward to 57th or 62nd Street and west to Eighth Avenue, encompassing parts of what is now the Flatiron District, NoMad, Chelsea, Hell's Kitchen, the Garment District and the Theater District. ... By the 1880s, the Tenderloin encompassed the largest number of nightclubs, saloons, bordellos, gambling casinos, dance halls, and 'clip joints' in New York City, to the extent that one estimate made in 1885 was that half of the buildings in the district were connected with vice. ..."
Wikipedia
Untapped Cities Tour: The Remnants of Manhattan’s Tenderloin Red Light District
Ephemeral New York: A Chelsea block lined with brothels in the 1870s
Ephemeral New York: The “loud and lurid” Haymarket on 30th Street
Friday Night Fever: Haymarket, New York’s Moulin Rouge

Laurie Spiegel: Grassroots Technologist

"People often speak about computers and technology as though these things are completely antithetical to nature and tradition, though this is largely a false dichotomy. Electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel began her musical life as a folk guitar player and has never abandoned that music. But she fell in love with machines the first time she saw a mainframe tape-operated computer at Purdue University on a field trip there with her high school physics class and has been finding ways to humanize them in her own musical compositions and software development ever since. She sees a lot of common ground between the seemingly oppositional aesthetics of folk traditions and the digital realm. In fact, when we met up with her last month in her Lower Manhattan loft crammed full of computers, musical instruments, and toys of all sorts, she frequently spoke about how in her world view the computer is actually a folk instrument."
New Music Box (Video)

2011 May: Laurie Spiegel, 2012 November: Laurie Spiegel - The Expanding Universe, 2014 February: The Interstellar Contract, 2015 September: Resident Visitor: Laurie Spiegel's Machine Music.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles – a cautionary tale for tourists

"As travellers go, I am an inexcusably snobby one. Not about places or cultures, but about the concept of travel itself: tourists are awful. Wherever I go, I gleefully scorn the straggles of tour groups lumbering around town, with their bumbags and schedules, trapped in someone else’s snapshot of a place. From my lofty pedestal of AirBnb sofa mattresses and activity-free itineraries, I spend most of my holidays feeling comparatively local. Which is, of course, complete rubbish."
Guardian - Journeys in literature

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, 2014 January: Let It Come Down: the Life of Paul Bowles (1998), 2014 March: The Sheltering Sky (1949), 2015 January: Things Gone & Things Still Here.

Spool's Out: October's Tapes Reviewed By Tristan Bath

"David Birchall/ Andrew Cheetham/ Colin Webster/ Otto Willberg - Night Streets of Madness. Recorded at the Islington Mill in Salford, this tape on Tombed Visions captures four of the best improvisers in the UK at what sounds like a revelatory moment. Drummer Andrew Cheetham, guitarist David Birchall, and double bassist Otto Willberg all play or have played in explosive free rock band (and basically greatest fucking guitar band in the world right now) Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, while saxophonist Webster has been carving out his place as leading voice in UK free jazz."
The Quietus (Video)
The Quietus: Spool's Out

In Grain: Contemporary Work in Wood

"Wood, readily available throughout the world and easier to shape than metal or stone, is one of the oldest sculptural mediums. Yet artists still find inspiration in this humble material, whether looking back to traditional forms and techniques, or employing it in strikingly innovative ways. With the exhibition, In Grain: Contemporary Work in Wood, the Fleming presents a diverse group of international artists, many of whom are working in Vermont, a place with a long history of wood carving in craft and art."
Fleming Museum
Art Review: 'In Grain: Contemporary Work in Wood' at Fleming Museum

Nathaniel Dorsky

“The Return” (2011)
Wikipedia - "Nathaniel Dorsky, born in New York City in 1943, is an experimental filmmaker and film editor who has been making films since 1963. He has resided in San Francisco since 1971. 'The major part of my work is both silent and paced to be projected at silent speed (18 frames per second). Silence in cinema is undoubtedly an acquired taste, but the delicacy and intimacy it reveals has many rich rewards. In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting them. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, curiosity, the sense of stepping into the world, sudden murky disruptions and undercurrents, expansion, pulling back, contraction, relaxation, sublime revelation. In my work, the screen is transformed into a 'speaking character', and the images function as pure energy rather than acting as secondary symbol or as a source for information or storytelling. I put shots together to create a revelation of wisdom through delicate surprise.' ..."
Wikipedia
about Nathaniel Dorsky
NY Times: Unseen Guide’s Silent Journeys to Lyric Nature
Interview: Nathaniel Dorsky
Interviews | The Inmost Leaf: An Interview with Nathaniel Dorsky
vimeo: Nathaniel Dorsky
YouTube: Super 8 Abstract Film, 18 FPS, Station Blue

Fabulous '40s and '50s Fashions for Femme Fatales of Film Noir Paper Dolls

"As a little boy growing up in Ohio, David was fascinated by his older cousin's collection of movie star paper dolls from the 1940s and 50s. The glamour of fashion and film resonated with the artistic, bookish child and set him on a path that would lead to a highly successful career in the fashion industry. ... Having ended his career as a fashion illustrator long ago, David is happy that paper dolls allow him to again create glamorous artwork. His recognizable style is a very deliberate re-creation of the lush, lavish technique employed by artists during the 1940s and '50s, the golden years of paper dolls."
amazon: Fabulous '40s and '50s Fashions for Femme Fatales of Film Noir Paper Dolls

The Clash - "Straight to Hell" / "Should I Stay or Should I Go"

Wikipedia - "... Like many songs by the Clash, the lyrics of 'Straight to Hell' decry injustice. The first verse refers to the shutting down of steel mills in Northern England and unemployment spanning generations, it also considers the alienation of non English speaking immigrants in British society. The second verse concerns the abandonment of children in Vietnam who were fathered by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The third verse contrasts the American Dream as seen through the eyes of an Amerasian child with a dystopian vision of American reality. The final verse broadly considers the life of immigrants throughout the world. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Should I Stay or Should I Go
The Story of The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” Spanish Lyrics (Video)
YouTube: "Straight to Hell", "Should I Stay or Should I Go" (Live)

History of the Acadians

Wikipedia - "The Acadians (French: Acadiens) are the descendants of the original French settlers and often Métis, of parts of Acadia (French: Acadie) in the northeastern region of North America comprising what is now the Canadian Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, Gaspé, in Quebec, and to the Kennebec River in southern Maine. The history of the Acadians was significantly influenced by the six colonial wars that took place in Acadia during the 17th and 18th century (see the four French and Indian Wars, Father Rale's War and Father Le Loutre's War). Eventually, the last of the colonial wars—the French and Indian War—resulted in the British Expulsion of the Acadians from the region. After the war, many Acadians came out of hiding or returned to Acadia from the British Colonies. ..."
W - History of the Acadians
Ethnic Cleansing of the Acadians – Prompted by Greed
History of the Acadians
ACADIAN - CAJUN Genealogy, History, & Culture
YouTube: Acadian Driftwood - The Band

Walker Evans’ “lineup of faces” on the subway

"Walker Evans might be best known for his stark, intimate photographs of Depression-era sharecroppers across a Deep South landscape of roadside cafes and churches. But Evans also has an extensive history as a New York City street photographer. A St. Louis native, he settled into a Bohemian life in Manhattan in the 1920s, first intending to be a writer before discovering a different kind of poetry in photography. He captured glimpses of everyday city street life, taking pictures of people on tenement stoops and inside lunchrooms. And from 1938 to 1941, he took his camera underground and shot closeups of anonymous New Yorkers on the subway. He shot these unsentimental subway portraits secretly, hiding the camera lens between the buttons of his coat, waiting for just the right moment to click the shutter hidden in his coat sleeve. ... Viewing these naked, powerful images today, they demonstrate that subway riding in 1938 was pretty similar to today: a dance of looking away, getting lost in dreams or worries, busying yourself with a newspaper, or finding yourself the object of an off-putting subway stare."
Ephemeral New York
NY Times: Review/Photography; What Walker Evans Saw on His Subway Rides">
NGA: Walker Evans - Subway Photographs and Other Recent Acquisitions

2011 June: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 2011 May: A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now, 2013 June: Cotton Tenants: Three Families, 2014 May: “Walker Evans and Robert Frank – An Essay on Influence by Tod Papageorge” (1981), 2014 October: Walker Evans: The Magazine Work, 2014 December: Walker Evans: Decade by Decade, 2015 August: Walker Evans: A Life's Work.

Fred Frith & John Zorn - The Art of Memory (1994), The Art of Memory II (2006)

"Based upon the ancient Roman methodology for remembering architectural sites and the meanings built into their structures, guitarist Fred Frith and saxophonist John Zorn pull out all the stops in creating a body of improvisation that does not rely on symbolic invitations or responses, but is instead a collaboration that builds an imposing musical structure from forgotten trends, hidden sonic languages, and metaphorical tonal construction. ... By the time you reach "The Fountain and the Mirror," the players have switched roles many times, each playing support and leader, turning what were merely notions for collaborating along a certain path into audible bodies with their own pulses, minds, and blood. This is a revelatory album, and a near matchless collaboration."
allmusic - The Art of Memory
allmusic - The Art of Memory II
W - The Art of Memory, W - The Art of Memory II
YouTube: The Art Of Memory Track 1, Track 2, Track 3, Track 4, Track 5, Track 6, Track 7, Track 8, The Wood

Darkside EP - Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington (2011)

"Nicolas Jaar creates slow, strange, cloistered songs with keyboards and field recordings, breath, and drums. He makes synthesizers feel like natural elements, mingled with running waters, murmuring voices, and sighing winds. Jaar called his breakthrough record Space Is Only Noise, expanded on a key track to 'Space Is Only Noise if You Can See'. Titles are often red herrings, but this is the rare case where we might pause and come to understand something essential about Jaar's perspective. No one has found a good box for him yet, likely because he doesn't make a kind of music, but a way of music. ... Jaar's new EP as Darkside, a collaboration with guitarist and bassist Dave Harrington, clarifies things further, but we've got to unpack a little before we come to it. ..."
Pitchfork
W - Darkside
Darkside interview: “What are you gonna argue about if you make good music together?”
Soundcloud: A1 (Ft. Dave Harrington), Golden Arrow, Paper Trails
YouTube: A1, A2, A3

2013 September: Nicolas Jaar, 2014 January: Other People, 2015 May: Nicolas Jaar Soundtracks Short Film About Police Brutality and #BlackLivesMatter, 2015 July: Space Is Only Noise (2010), 2015 August: Boiler Room NYC DJ Set at Clown & Sunset Takeove, 2015 September: Work It (Bluewave edit)

Samuel Palmer

The Gleaning Field, c.1833
Wikipedia - "Samuel Palmer (27 January 1805 – 24 May 1881) was a British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker. He was also a prolific writer. Palmer was a key figure in Romanticism in Britain and produced visionary pastoral paintings. ... He sketched in Devonshire and Wales around this time. His peaceful vision of rural England had been disillusioned by the violent rural discontent of the early 1830s. His small financial legacy was running out and he decided to produce work more in line with public taste if he was to earn an income for himself and his wife. He was following the advice of his father-in-law. Linnell, who had earlier shown remarkable understanding of the uniqueness of William Blake's genius, was not as generous with his son-in-law, towards whom his attitude was authoritarian and often harsh. Palmer turned more to watercolour which was gaining popularity in England. ..."
Wikipedia
Tate
BBC
Guardian - Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Tom Clark

"Thomas Willard Clark was born on March 1, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois. While growing up in Chicago as a young man, he served as an usher at Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park, where he saw such renowned figures of the era as Joe DiMaggio, Bobby Hull, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Harry S. Truman. His experiences among these figures are reflected in his poems, which frequently feature these and other prominent figures from the 1950s and ’60s. ... During this time, Clark began writing and publishing poetry in earnest; he cites Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams as influences. While in England, he also hitchhiked across the country with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg."
Poets
Poetry Foundation
W - Tom Clark
Tom Clark: Beyond the Pale
Jacket#9
Jacket#35
The Great One by Tom Clark
amazon: Tom Clark

Leap Before You Look - Black Mountain College 1933 - 1957

Jacob Lawrence, Watchmaker, 1946
"In 1933, John Rice founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina as an experiment in making artistic experience central to learning. Though it operated for only 24 years, this pioneering school played a significant role in fostering avant-garde art, music, dance, and poetry, and an astonishing number of important artists taught or studied there. Among the instructors were Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Karen Karnes, M. C. Richards, and Willem de Kooning, and students included Ruth Asawa, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly. Leap Before You Look is a singular exploration of this legendary school and of the work of the artists who spent time there."
Yale
Sneak peek: Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957
WSJ: Return to Black Mountain College
ICA Boston to Survey Black Mountain College
YouTube: Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 | ICA/Boston

2010 June: Black Mountain poets, 2010 April: Letters from Camp

In a Brooklyn Chinatown, One Chance to get the Shot

"Yunghi Kim often pretended she wasn’t taking photographs when she started documenting Sunset Park’s Chinatown. She got in the habit of shooting from the hip rather than raising the camera to her eye in the bustling, if camera-shy, Brooklyn neighborhood. 'I’ve been all over the world,' said Ms. Kim, who herself lives in Brooklyn. 'I’ve traveled to 40 countries, and of all the places I’ve gone into, this one was one of the hardest.' The Chinatown in Sunset Park is in fact just one of many Chinatowns in Brooklyn. It has the distinction of being the first, with a direct connection to Manhattan’s Chinatown via the N and D express trains. ..."
New York Times

Places, Strange and Quiet - Wim Wenders

"It was while shooting his breakthrough 1984 film Paris, Texas that landmark German director Wim Wenders first felt compelled to take up photography; 27 years later, a penchant for documenting his films’ environs has fostered a canon of sparse panoramic landscapes captured on location at such far-flung locales as Brazil, Italy, Japan, Australia and Germany. Next month’s exhibition at London's Haunch of Venison Gallery, Places, Strange and Quiet, presents 40 of Wenders’s large-scale images spanning from 1983 to 2011, which we preview in the slideshow above. The product of an artistic method the filmmaker sums up as 'turning left at junctions where others turn right,' the collection features everything from a set of polka-dotted sun loungers in Palermo to a washed out seascape in Japanese island town Naoshima––all happened upon by chance, and each imbued with a feeling of profound solitude."
NOWNESS
Guardian: Wim Wenders: Places, Strange And Quiet – in pictures
amazon
YouTube: Places, Strange and Quiet

2009 November: Wings of Desire (1987), 2010 April: New German Cinema, 2010 November: The American Friend (1977), 2012 March: Paris, Texas (1984)

Nas - Illmatic (1994)

"Two decades since it hit the Earth like a comet (invasion), what more can possibly be left to say about Illmatic? Nas's debut was widely and correctly acclaimed at the time as one of the finest albums ever made, in any genre; and its lustre has only been burnished since. Boasting a concise 39-minute track listing bursting with ideas, the album arrived just as every other rapper seemed convinced the 74-minute upper limit on a CD's duration was a 'fill to here' mark that had to be reached, rather than a capacity they didn't need to get near if they had insufficient material ready to include. It has gone way beyond the impact its relatively modest sales might seem to imply: it wasn't certified platinum in the United States until a shade under eight years after its release, yet Illmatic has always been seen as something rather more than a classic rap LP. The perform-the-whole-album tour (2012), the 10th anniversary 'platinum' edition with extra tracks (2004), and this month's 20th anniversary double-disc release, finally uniting the original LP with the remixed singles, are just the tip of an iceberg of the kind of deep and broad acclaim that fills a good swathe of the distance between 'sublime' and 'ridiculous'. ..."
The Quietus - Back Down Memory Lane: Illmatic By Nas Revisited (Video)
W - Illmatic
How Filmmaker Erik Parker Is Reigniting Nas's Illmatic On Its 20th Anniversary (Video)
allmusic: Illmatic [10th Anniversary Platinum Edition]
amazon: Illmatic 10th Anniversary Platinum Edition, Illmatic XX
YouTube: Illmatic (Full Album), Illmatic XX (Full Album, Remastered) Disc: 1 [HD], Illmatic XX (Full Album, Demos, Remixes & Live Radio) Disc: 2 [HD]

Gasoline - Snap Your Neck Back (2005)

"Abstract hip hop. That’s the realm of France’s Yoann Letard b.k.a. Gasoline. Drawn into hip hop in the late 80s with the hardcaroe groups of the day such as Public Enemy and LL Cool J, Gasoline actually became inspired by the British hardcore rap scene. He may have been more in line to be the French answer to the Bomb Squad if it had not been for a meeting with Alain, owner of Pamplemousse Productions, a label known to cater more to techno and house DJs. But Alain introduced abstract hip hop to Gasoline and he took off from there. Often comapred to Japan’s DJ Krush, Gasoline emphasizes atmospheric instrumentals and crazy turntable performances."
World Hip Hop Market
amazon
facebook
BATTLE WEAPONS
YouTube: Snap Your Neck Back [FULL ALBUM]

2015 August: Gasoline - A Journey Into Abstract Hip-Hop (1998)

Mother Jones

Wikipedia - "Mother Jones (abbreviated MoJo) is an American magazine featuring investigative and breaking news reporting on politics, the environment, human rights, and culture. ... The magazine caters to the left side of politics. The magazine was named after Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, an Irish-American trade union activist and ardent opponent of child labor. The stated mission of Mother Jones is to produce revelatory journalism that in its power and reach informs and inspires a more just and democratic world. ..."
Wikipedia
Mother Jones
W - Mary Harris Jones
amazon, facebook

Abraham Cruzvillegas

The Simulteneous Promise, 2011
"The evolving and social nature of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which has been the stage for protest, art and recently dancing, can be compared with many of the interests of Abraham Cruzvillegas (b1968), who on 13 October 2015 will unveil the first Hyundai Commission. He predominantly creates sculptures in a process of improvisation out of an eclectic variety of materials (previous works have included wood, plastics, human hair, glass, screws, plants, ceramic, bone, cement, feathers) that result in forms that appear to be caught in a moment of suspended transformation. The pieces are interwoven with references from across the history of art, but also from social and communal creative practices. ..."
TATE: An interview with Abraham Cruzvillegas
W - Abraham Cruzvillegas
BOMB Magazine
Open Systems: Q+A with Abraham Cruzvillegas
YouTube: TateShots, The Autoconstrucción Suites
Blouin: Mexico's Abraham Cruzvillegas at The Walker

Boijeot + Renauld Update : Rain, Wind, & Inquisitive Upper West Side

"The French duo Boijeot & Renauld have logged one full week and three days of crossing Manhattan via Broadway. As you know they are embarking on an ambitious project where they intend to cross Manhattan with their living room, breakfast room and bedroom in tow. They started in Harlem on 125th Street and the last time we caught up with them they were moving down the Upper West Side and running into the inquisition of friendly and sometimes oddly parochial locals. The first few days they enjoyed typical NYC Autumn weather with crisp air and sunny days. Then things turned for the worse with the prickly hurricane season wrecking havoc somewhere offshore in The Atlantic bringing heavy winds and downpours. ..."
Brooklyn Street Art

Big League Poets - Mikhail Horowitz (1978), Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life - Richard Grossinger, Lisa Conrad (1992)

Big League Poets - Mikhail Horowitz
"Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life - This book includes Donald Hall, Jack Kerouac, Robert Kelly, Bill Lee, Paul Metcalf, Anne Waldman, Tom Clark, and Bernadette Mayer. The quality of the work in this anthology varies widely, but the sheer unlikeliness of a volume of neo-beat baseball poetry and new-age-inflected essays cannot help but inspire generosity. The photography is remarkable, and the photo essays of baseball stars of the 1950s and 1960s have this awe-inspiring sense of the mundane about them."
amazon
Google: Baseball, I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life
W - Mikhail Horowitz
amazon: Big League Poets - Mikhail Horowitz (1978 - City Lights Books)

The Palestinian Museum

Wikipedia - "The Palestinian Museum is a flagship project of the Welfare Association, a non-profit organization for developing humanitarian projects in Palestine. The Museum is currently under construction in Birzeit (25 km north of Jerusalem) and will be opened in Spring 2016. ... The Palestinian Museum was conceived as an institution capable of transcending political and geographical borders, and as such it aims to resist the restrictions to mobility imposed by the Israeli occupation and overcome the divisions currently threatening its body politic. Through local, regional and international partnerships and affiliate centers, the Museum will connect Palestinians from all over the world, and thus bring together a people that has been fragmented for decades. An extensive network of partnerships within historic Palestine will also allow it to act as a hub for cultural activity there. In this sense, it is one among a number of cultural projects aiming to resist the ghettoization and fragmentation of the Palestinian people."
Wikipedia
The Palestinian Museum (Video)
Organizers Prepare Palestinian Museum For 2015 Opening
“Museum without borders” to open in Palestine
YouTube: The Palestinian Museum

The Golden Palominos - The Golden Palominos (1983)

Wikipedia - "The Golden Palominos is an American musical group headed by drummer and composer Anton Fier, first formed in 1981. Aside from Fier, the Palominos membership has been wildly elastic, with only bassist Bill Laswell and guitarist Nicky Skopelitis appearing on every album. ... The group first featured Fier, singer-guitarist Arto Lindsay, saxophonist John Zorn, bass guitarist Bill Laswell and violinist/guitarist Fred Frith. Their self-titled debut album was released on New York's Celluloid Records in 1983, and featured guest appearances by bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, percussionist David Moss, turntablist M.E. Miller and others. The album has some of the first recorded turntable scratching outside of rap music, courtesy of Laswell and M.E. Miller. ..."
Wikipedia
W - The Golden Palominos (album)
YouTube: The Golden Palominos (1983) full album 43:04

William Kentridge - “More Sweetly Play the Dance” (2015)

Notes Towards a Model Opera, 2014–2015, three-channel video installation, 11 minutes 14 seconds
"Dance has always been aware of death: it lingers just off to the side of the stage, waiting for the performance to end. William Dunbar’s 1508 poem 'Lament for the Makers' describes two 'state[s] of man': 'Now dansand mirry, now like to die.' In other words, you’re either dancing or dead. Death in the poem is personified as a sort of efficient businessman, doing his best to knock people out of the dance. The more familiar character of Death—the cloaked, scythe-bearing skeleton who fulfills his duties like an overworked godly employee—was around even before Dunbar, an invention of the medieval period, which remains the most productive time in human history for imagining deathly personifications. People then seemed less resistant to death than they are now, perhaps because the threat was omnipresent: one could die from the plague, childbirth, decapitation, infection, or even of indigestion, as Martin of Aragon did at a feast in 1410. The danse macabre, or death dance, another medieval invention, was an allegorical way of resisting as well as respecting the force of death. ..."
The Paris Review: More Sweetly Play the Dance
Elephant
artforum
Marian Goodman Gallery
YouTube: More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), If We Ever Get to Heaven (EYE 25/4/2015 - 30/8/2015)

2009 November: William Kentridge, 2011 April: The Insolent Eye: Jarry in Art, 2013 August: Stereoscope (1999)

Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917

"Between 1897 and 1917, six painters, none native to the city they so provocatively and energetically portrayed, challenged the standards for suitable artistic subject matter when they took to the streets of New York and seized on images full of motion and life. Their 'prophet' was Walt Whitman, and their achievements create a vibrant record of urban growth and artistic evolution. George Bellows, William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan were friends and collaborators, each developing their own distinct style, each capturing different slices of New York life. There are scenes of poverty and wealth, work and play, sensuality and despair. Zurier and her coauthors, Robert Snyder and Virginia Mecklenburg, bring expertise in art, social, and cultural history to this lively volume. They profile each artist and analyze his works, establishing a visual context with photographs and graphic arts of the time. Most of the paintings, which are beautifully reproduced, are rarely seen in books, and some, especially Shinn's exceptional pastels and watercolors, are a revelation. - Booklist"
amazon: Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917
Google

The Map of Literature combines centuries of books and poems in one gorgeous illustration

"Romanticism serves as the bridge between realism, enlightenment, and fantasy in 17-year-old Martin Vargic's meticulously comprehensive Map of Literature. Vargic is a self-appointed illustrator of brilliant worlds made out of our own ideas. The Map of Literature, which reviews writers of drama, poetry, nonfiction, and prose works, is one of 64 and infographics featured in his new book Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps: Mapping Out the Modern World (Available in US/UK). ..."
Vox

The Blue Mask - Lou Reed (1982)

"In 1982, 12 years after he left the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed released The Blue Mask, the first album where he lived up to the potential he displayed in the most groundbreaking of all American rock bands. The Blue Mask was Reed's first album after he overcame a long-standing addiction to alcohol and drugs, and it reveals a renewed focus and dedication to craft -- for the first time in years, Reed had written an entire album's worth of moving, compelling songs, and was performing them with keen skill and genuine emotional commitment. Reed was also playing electric guitar again, and with the edgy genius he summoned up on White Light/White Heat. Just as importantly, he brought Robert Quine on board as his second guitarist, giving Reed a worthy foil who at once brought great musical ideas to the table, and encouraged the bandleader to make the most of his own guitar work. ..."
allmusic
Wikipedia
Graded on a Curve:
Lou Reed, The Blue Mask
Spotify
YouTube: The Blue Mask (Live), Average Guy, The day John Kennedy died, Women, Underneath The Bottle, Waves of Fear
YouTube: The Blue Mask (Full Album)

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), 2014 June: The Bells (1979), 2014 August: New York (1989), 2015 June: Capitol Theatre Passaic, NJ 9/25/1984.

Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1981 - Riad Sattouf

"In October, Metropolitan Books will publish the English translation of the acclaimed French graphic memoir, Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1981. The grim but funny three-volume work by Riad Sattouf, about growing up under bleak political regimes in Syria and Libya, will also, Metropolitan hopes, be the kind of breakout hit in the States that it has turned into in Europe. Sattouf is a bestselling cartoonist in France and an award-winning filmmaker. Arab of the Future, named best book of the year at the Angouleme Festival, is also delivering sales—the first volume has moved more than 200,000 copies since its release in France last May. (Volume two in will be released shortly in France.) ..."
Breakout Graphic Memoir ‘Arab of the Future’ Coming to U.S.
The Middle East Monitor
W - Riad Sattouf
amazon
Google: Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1981 - Riad Sattouf

Bob Williams - My Goose Is Cooked / Talk To Me (1958)

"Two contrasting R&B killers from this fantastic but little known vocalist! Recorded for RCA in the early '50s as the rock 'n roll era was about to dawn, 'Talk to Me' is a wicked, driving Jump Blues with cool horn riffs and even cooler jangling guitar accompaniment. The flipside 'My Goose Is Cooked' is a greasy piece of twisting Black Rock & Roll which surfaced on two obscure independents near the end of the same decade. Both are sure-fire dance floor sure-shots and very hard to source on their original issues."
Discogs
Spotify
YouTube: My Goose Is Cooked, Talk To Me