The Notebooks - Jean-Michel Basquiat

"Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was one of the most important artists of the 1980s. A key figure in the New York art scene, he inventively explored the interplay between words and images throughout his career, first as a member of SAMO, a graffiti group active on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s, and then as a painter acclaimed for his unmistakable Neoexpressionist style. From 1980 to 1987, he filled numerous working notebooks with drawings and handwritten texts. This facsimile edition reproduces the pages of eight of these fascinating and rarely seen notebooks for the first time. The notebooks are filled with images and words that recur in Basquiat’s paintings and other works. Iconic drawings and pictograms of crowns, teepees, and hatch-marked hearts share space with handwritten texts, including notes, observations, and poems that often touch on culture, race, class, and life in New York. ..."
Princeton University Press
An Intimate Reading of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Poetry
YouTube: The Notebooks

2013 April: Saving Basquiat: Seeing the Art Through the Myth-Making at Gagosian, 2015 February: Now's the Time, 2015 May: Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks

Art Blakey - Paris Jam Session (1959)

"This 1959 concert in Paris by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers has been sporadically available on various labels, but this reissue in Verve's Jazz in Paris series is the best sounding and best packaged of the lot. Blakey's group of this period (Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, and Walter Davis, Jr.) is in great form during an extended workout of Morgan's intense blues 'The Midget,' and Dizzy Gillespie's timeless 'A Night in Tunisia' is kicked off by Blakey's an electrifying solo. But it is the addition of some special guests for the first two numbers that proves to be extra special. Bud Powell, sitting in for Davis, and French saxophonist Barney Wilen, on alto rather than his normal tenor sax, are both added to the band for inspired versions of Powell's 'Dance of the Infidels' and 'Bouncing with Bud.' Morgan's trumpet playing is outstanding throughout the concert. This is one of the essential live dates in Art Blakey's rather extensive discography."
allmusic
W - Paris Jam Session
Discogs
Spotify
YouTube: Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Paris Jam Session (Full Album)

2014 February: Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, 2014 August: A Night at Birdland Vol. 1 - Art Blakey (1954), 2015 August: Moanin' (1958)

Burning Spear - Rockin' Time (1974)

"Winston Rodney is, hands down, one of reggae's (or any other genre's) most prolific artists. His unorthodox singing styles range from subtle whisper, through mystical chant, to painful wailing without warning. In the late '60s, as the popular dance tunes of the rocksteady era began to give way to an influx of Rasta consciousness, Rodney (who adopted the Burning Spear moniker from a Kenyan freedom fighter) cut two records for Studio One's Clement Dodd that were subsequently overshadowed by his more celebrated releases on Island/Mango Records. Studio One has re-released these gems, many of which are being heard for the first time in 30 years. This is cosmic reggae at its rawest, before the sound became super-produced. ..."
allmusic
W - Rockin' Time
BURNING SPEAR ALBUMS AT STUDIO ONE
YouTube: Rocking Time ( full album )studio 1 records 1974

2009 June: Burning Spear, 2010 October: Marcus Garvey / Garvey's Ghost, 2012 March: Burning Spear 1981 - Markthalle Hamburg, 2012 December: Hail H.I.M., 2015 August: Man In The Hills / Dry & Heavy (1976)

The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past

"The Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past presents some 200 photographic prints, a number of vintage photographic albums, and memorabilia that utilized formal portraiture of the shah, the exhibition shows how photographers—many of them engaged by Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848-1896), the longest reigning Shah of the Qajar Dynasty (1785-1925)— ultimately created a portrait of the country's ancient and recent past . Most of the photographs in the exhibition have never been publicly displayed. ..."
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World: Introduction
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World: Highlights
Princeton University (Press Click to enlarge)

Hank Willis Thomas

"Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist living and working in New York City. His work focuses on themes related to perspective identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. He often incorporates recognizable icons into his work, many from well-known advertising and branding campaigns. On advertising, in an interview with Time, Thomas said, 'Part of advertising’s success is based on its ability to reinforce generalizations developed around race, gender and ethnicity which are generally false, but [these generalizations] can sometimes be entertaining, sometimes true, and sometimes horrifying.' After the senseless robbery and murder of his cousin, Songha Willis Thomas in 2000, Hank became known for B®anded, a series of photographs, and Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008, a body of work created from appropriating advertising images. He was thinking about the root of black-on-black violence in the US. ..."
Jack Shainman (Video)
Hank Willis Thomas (Video)
W - Hank Willis Thomas
Hank Willis Thomas | BRANDING USA
YouTube: "Am I Going Too Fast?" a short film by Hank Willis Thomas and Christopher Myers, Hank Willis Thomas: Artists Should Work in Society's Subconscious, Hank Willis Thomas on Race

William S. Burroughs - Destroy All Rational Thought

"There is a point during one of the last recorded interviews with William S Burroughs — which features on this occasionally mildly interesting, but mostly infuriating, DVD—where he laments the passing of so many of the 20th century’s ‘great minds’. His fear is that there will be no-one to take their place; no new innovators, no literary outlaws, no risk takers. Ostensibly this comment refers in particular to his deceased friend, the artist Brion Gysin, who along with Burroughs is the subject of this ‘celebration’. Yet when you consider the ongoing fascination with the mid-century decadents of the Beat generation that has lead to a DVD release for this nebulous, amateurish, though no doubt well intended documentary (merely because it has the name of Burroughs attached to it), you can perhaps see his point. ..."
pop matters
YouTube: Destroy All Rational Thought 48:12

2009 May: Cut-up technique - 1, 2010 March: Cut-up technique, 2010 December: The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag, 2012 August: The Nova Trilogy, 2014 February: William Burroughs at 100, 2014 September: The Ticket That Exploded, 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2015 June: The Electronic Revolution (1971), 2015 August: Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914 – 2014.

The Delights and Perils of Navigating New York City With a Guidebook From 1899

"A century before the travel guide shelves at bookstores were bursting with Lonely Planets, Fodor’s, and Frommer’s, there was just one book for the discerning solo explorer: the Baedeker guide. Established in 1835 in Germany by Karl Baedeker, these pocket-sized books were intended for the well-to-do gentleman traveler. With their maps, restaurant recommendations, and practical information on international cities, Baedeker guides proved hugely popular among independent travelers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But could an adventurer use one today? To find out, I spent a weekend exploring New York City, directed solely by the fourth edition of the 1899 Baedeker guide to the United States. ..."
Atlas Obscura

To Pimp a Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar (2015)

"The sentiment is universal, but the viewpoint on his second LP is inner-city and African-American, as radio regulars like the Isley Brothers (sampled to perfection during the key track 'I'), George Clinton (who helps make 'Wesley's Theory' a cross between 'Atomic Dog' and Dante's Inferno), and Dr. Dre (who literally phones his appearance in) put the listener in Lamar's era of Compton, just as well as Lou Reed took us to New York and Brecht took us to Weimar Republic Berlin. These G-funky moments are incredibly seductive, which helps usher the listener through the album's 80-minute runtime, plus its constant mutating (Pharrell productions, spoken word, soul power anthems, and sound collages all fly by, with few tracks ending as they began), much of it influenced, and sometimes assisted by, producer Flying Lotus and his frequent collaborator Thundercat. ... Free your mind, and your ass will follow, and at the end of this beautiful black berry, there's a miraculous 'talk' between Kendrick and the legendary 2Pac, as the brutalist trailblazer mentors this profound populist. To Pimp a Butterfly is as dark, intense, complicated, and violent as Picasso's Guernica, and should hold the same importance for its genre and the same beauty for its intended audience."
allmusic
W - To Pimp a Butterfly (Video)
Pitchfork
Why Did Everyone Claim to Enjoy Kendrick Lamar's 'To Pimp a Butterfly'?
Spotify
YouTube: Alright, King Kunta, i, For Free? (Interlude), These Walls (Live on Ellen) ft. Bilal, Anna Wise, Thundercat, Wesley's Theory (con George Clinton & Thundercat) [Subtitulado al Español] | TPAB
YouTube: To Pimp a Butterfly (16 Video)

Stacy Doris, 1962-2012

"We at Harriet are deeply saddened to report the loss of poet and translator Stacy Doris, who died on January 31 at the age of 49 after a battle with cancer. We discussed Doris’s book-length poem The Cake Part (Publication Studio, 2011) just recently. This work, which acts as 'an eruption of all the repressed joy and terror of [the] 18th century revolution, back into our time, into the 21st century,' was released with a series of video adaptations of the book, in which many of Doris’s poets and friends in the Bay area and beyond enacted their parts or songs with a rather plucky and loving spirit. It’s clear that Doris 'begins with complexity and mixture and continues with complexity and mixture.' ..."
Poetry Foundation (Video)
Electronic Poetry Center
W - Stacy Doris
PennSound (Video)
[PDF] Violence of the White Page

Wagner Collection at the Whitney, 25 Years of Astute Buying

"More collectors of contemporary art should follow the lead of Thea Westreich Wagner and her husband, Ethan Wagner. They are neither building a private museum to house their holdings nor sending their trove off to auction hoping for headline-grabbing profits, although this is partly because their purchases have not especially encompassed the so-called trophy art that earns such profits. Instead, Ms. Westreich Wagner and Mr. Wagner are doing something that is, unfortunately, beginning to feel old-fashioned. They are giving a great deal of a strong collection with an independent bent to two museums historically committed to new art. All told, some 850 works amassed mostly during, and mostly dating from, the last quarter-century will move house (but not quite yet — the majority are promised gifts)...."
NY Times

A Brief History of ISIS

Members loyal to ISIS wave their flag during a parade in June 2014.
"In the wake of the November 13 attacks in Paris, much of the Left has linked the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to the deepening imperialist violence in the Middle East. War and imperialism, on one side, and the growing reach of jihadist terrorism, on the other, are said to be locked together in a mutually reinforcing embrace of violence and destruction. 'Imperialist cruelty and Islamist cruelty feed each other,' the French Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) argued shortly after the Paris attacks. In order to break this nihilistic death grip, we need to oppose foreign intervention, put an end to imperialist violence, and halt the ongoing plunder of wealth from countries in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. The basic logic of this argument is undoubtedly sound. But in terms of explanatory value, this kind of analysis does not go far enough. ..."
Jacobin
The Atlantic: What ISIS Really Wants (2015 March)

2014 August: The Islamic State, 2014 September: How ISIS Works, 2015 February: The Political Scene: The Evolution of Islamic Extremism, 2015 May: Zakaria: How ISIS shook the world, 2015 August: ISIS Blows Up Ancient Temple at Syria’s Palmyra Ruins, 2015 November: Times Insider: Reporting Europe's Refugee Crisis, 2015 November: Three Teams of Coordinated Attackers Carried Out Assault on Paris, Officials Say; Hollande Blames ISIS, 2015 November: The French Emergency.

Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken-World Albums: A Sublime Union of Beat Literature and 1950s Jazz

"At the epicenter of three explosive forces in 1950s America—the birth of Bebop, the spread of Buddhism through the counterculture, and Beat revolutionizing of poetry and prose—sat Jack Kerouac, though I don’t picture him ever sitting for very long. The rhythms that moved through him, through his verse and prose, are too fluid to come to rest. At the end of his life he sat… and drank, a mostly spent force. But in his prime, Kerouac was always on the move, over highways on those legendary road trips, or his fingers flying over the typewriter’s keys as he banged out the scroll manuscript of On the Road in three feverish weeks (so he said). After the publication of On the Road, Kerouac 'became a celebrity,' says Steve Allen in introduction to the Beat writer on a 1959 appearance above, 'partly because he’d written a powerful and successful book, but partly because he seemed to be the embodiment of this new generation.' ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2009 November: Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut, 2010 July: Kerouac's Copies of Floating Bear, 2011 March: Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show, 2013 September: On the Road - Jack Kerouac, 2014 May: “Walker Evans and Robert Frank – An Essay on Influence by Tod Papageorge” (1981), 2015 March: Pull My Daisy (1959).

Robin Rimbaud (Scanner)

Wikipedia - "Robin Rimbaud (born 1964) is an electronic musician who works under the name Scanner due to his use of cell phone and police scanners in live performance. He is also a member of the band Githead with Wire's Colin Newman and Malka Spigel and Max Franken from Minimal Compact. Rimbaud is also a writer and media critic, multi-media artist and record producer. He borrowed his stage name from the device he used in his early recordings, picking up indeterminate radio and mobile phone signals in the airwaves and using them as an instrument in his compositions. ... Born in Southfields, London, Scanner was interested in avant garde literature, cinema and music while growing up. When he was a teenager his family was bereaved when his father was killed in a motorcycle accident. ..."
Wikipedia
Scanner (Video)
Soundcloud: Scanner
The world of scanner... (Video)
YouTube: Scanner

2012 October: Scanner

Sasha Waltz & Guests

Gezeiten (2015)
Wikipedia - "Sasha Alexandra Waltz (born 8 March 1963, Karlsruhe) is a German choreographer, dancer and leader of the dance company Sasha Waltz and Guests. Waltz is the daughter of an architect and a curator. At five years old she had her first dance lesson in Karlsruhe with Waltraud Kornhass, a student of Mary Wigman. From 1983 until 1986, Waltz studied at the School For New Dance Development in Amsterdam. Between 1986 and 1987, she did further training in New York. During that period she was a dancer for Pooh Kaye, Yoshiko Chuma & School of Hard Knocks and Lisa Kraus. After that she collaborated intensely with choreographers, visual artists and musicians such as Tristan Honsinger, Frans Poelstra, Mark N Tompkins, David Zambrano. ... Once her 5-year period with the Schaubühne finished she reactivitated Sasha Waltz & Guests as an independent company again, with a base in Berlin. It was established as an international project with 25 permanent and 40 associate collaborators."
Wikipedia
Sasha Waltz & Guests (Video)
Arts Journal
Guardian: Sasha Waltz & Guests review – savage rites marshal wild energies (Video)
Berlin (Video)
vimeo: etc., Dialoge 09 – Neues Museum, Gezeigt, Impromptus
YouTube: Sasha Waltz & Guests feat. Robyn Schulkowsky, noBody, SACRE

The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert

"Often referred to as 'The Royal Albert Hall Concert' this live bootleg had a mythical status surrounding it, I remember when I was heavily into the Band I looked for as much footage and recordings from that tour as I could find. I was completely mesmerised by what little I saw, the sound was brutal, raw rock and roll at it's finest, unlike anything people had heard at that time. ... Even though it seemed Dylan was now offering no compromise on his journey he did divide each show into two segments, the first was Dylan in acoustic mode, perhaps a farewell to his past, before bringing The Hawks out for the second electric set. It's pretty well documented that as soon as the band showed up the audience went into uproar and a cacaphony of boos and slow handclapping ensued. Dylan seemingly unperturbed and quite possibly stoned out out of his mind ploughed onwards leaving a bewildered and upset audience in his wake."
nighthawk music
W - The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert
allmusic
YouTube: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert

The County: the story of America's deadliest police

Sgt Brian Holcombe is a 10-year veteran of Bakersfield Police Department and has patrolled higher-crime sectors on the east side for most of his career.
"Seventy-five years after Kern County’s leaders banned The Grapes of Wrath from their schools and libraries, complaining that John Steinbeck’s new book portrayed their policemen as 'divested of sympathy or human decency or understanding', officer Aaron Stringer placed his hands on the body of James De La Rosa without permission. De La Rosa had just been shot dead by police officers in Bakersfield, the biggest city in this central California county, after crashing his car when they tried to pull him over. He was unarmed. Now the 22-year-old oilfield worker lay on a gurney in the successor to the coroner’s office where Tom Joad’s granma awaited a pauper’s funeral in the 1939 novel."Guardian (Video), The County: where deputies dole out rough justice (Video)
Guardian: The Counted

Black Artists and the March Into the Museum

Norman Lewis
"The painter Norman Lewis rarely complained in public about the singular struggles of being a black artist in America. ... In the last few years alone, his work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. This month the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts opened the first extensive survey of Lewis, an important but overlooked figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement — and a man who might well have been predicting history’s arc for several generations of African-American artists in overcoming institutional neglect. ..."
NY Times (Video)

Welcome to Smarter Basketball

"On Thursday, 60 of basketball’s most talented prospects will realize a lifelong dream when the NBA conducts its annual draft. Karl-Anthony Towns, the Kentucky University center, has been heavily rumored to be the number one pick, but after that, it’s a bit up in the air. Among the potential picks: Jahlil Okafor, D’Angelo Russell, Emmanuel Mudiay, and Kristaps Porzingis, a versatile 7 foot 1, 19-year-old Latvian who’s as lean as he is skilled. Regardless of who ends up where, this high-potential group will be entering a league that’s undergone a major transformation in the past few years. And it’s a revolution that’s indisputably linked to the NBA’s growing, but controversial, reliance on data to measure a team’s likelihood of winning—a phenomenon vaguely defined as 'analytics.'”
The Atlantic

2011 June: American Basketball Association, 2012 July: Doin’ It In The Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC, 2012 November: Your Guide to the Brooklyn Nets, 2013 March: March Madness 2013, 2013 October: Rucker Park, 2014 January: History of the high five, 2015 February: Dean Smith (February 28, 1931 – February 7, 2015), 2015 June: Basketball’s Obtuse Triangle, 2015 September: SLAM Magazine, 2015 September: Joint Ventures: How sneakers became high fashion and big business, 2015 October: Loose Balls - Terry Pluto (2007), 2015 November: The Sounds of Memphis.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad – a trip into inner space

"Conrad’s famous novella is based on a real journey the author took up the Congo in 1890, during King Leopold II of Belgium’s horrific rule. It is a fantastic, imaginative journey to find a man named Kurtz who has lost his mind in the African jungle. It is a journey into inner space; a metaphorical investigation into the turbid waters of the human soul. It is a political journey into the dark heart of European colonialism. It is a nightmare journey, into horror. It is a journey to nowhere, set on a boat lying motionless and at anchor on the river Thames, which also 'has been one of the dark places on the earth'. ..."
Guardian

2011 November: Heart of Darkness, 2013 August: Victory (1915), 2014 May: Nostromo (1904).

St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street - Ada Calhoun

"... St. Marks bohemians—those who were Beats in the fifties, hippies in the sixties, punks in the seventies, or anarchists in the eighties—often say that the East Village is dead now, with only the time of death a matter of debate. New Yorkers are street-proud, and every neighborhood invites its share of good-old-days lamenting. But just as St. Marks Place has long been an amplified corner of the city—louder, drunker, more garish than its neighbors—today it seems to evoke a more intense nostalgia. Of course, the sentimentalists are right: I did miss a lot. My parents have lived in their top-floor walk-up on St. Marks Place since 1973. By the time I was born, in 1976, many of the street’s most defining eras had passed. Gone were the days of Thelonious Monk playing the Five Spot jazz club, Andy Warhol hosting the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and the New York Dolls ambling down the street in hot pants. ..."
New Yorker: The Many Lives of St. Marks Place
Ada Calhoun - St. Marks Is Dead
Guardian - St Marks Place: is this America's coolest street?
Atlantic: St. Marks Is Dead and the Complexity of Gentrification
amazon
YouTube: St. Marks Is Dead Book Launch Party

Alexander Hammid

"Born in Austria, he grew up in Prague, making his first silent experimental film, Bezucelna Prochazka/ Aimless Walk in 1930. Working as a cinematographer for the leftist American documentarian Herbert Kline, he fled Czechoslovakia in 1939 to the US where he met and married Eleonora Derenkowskaya who took the name, perhaps with his advice, of Maya Deren, much as he too took a new name. With her he collaborated on the classic avant-garde film Meshes in the Afternoon (1943) that established her reputation that survived their divorce. In the 1960s, Hammid began collaborating with the sometime painter Francis Thompson on multi-screen films: To Be Alive (1964), which knocked me out at the Montreal World's Fair, both of which remain in my mind as masterpieces of the under-developed genre. Later Hammid and Thompson, among the great collaborations in modern film, produced To Fly! (1976), which remains the pioneering classic in the -- Richard Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant Gardes"
UbuWeb (Video)
Wikipedia
NY Times: Alexander Hammid, 96, Filmmaker Known for Many Styles
Aimless Walk - Alexander Hammid

Little Walter - "Juke" / "Can't Hold On Much Longer" (1952)

Wikipedia - "'Juke' is a harmonica instrumental recorded by then 22-year-old Chicago bluesman Little Walter Jacobs in 1952. Although Little Walter had been recording sporadically for small Chicago labels over the previous five years, and had appeared on Muddy Waters' records for the Chess label since 1950, 'Juke' was Little Walter's first hit, and it was the most important of his career. Due to the influence of Little Walter on blues harmonica, 'Juke' is now considered a blues harmonica standard. In May 1952, Little Walter had been a regular member of the Muddy Waters Band for at least three years. ..."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Juke, "Can't Hold On Much Longer"

The 20 Greatest Films Directed By Women

Lost in Translation (2003) - Sofia Coppola
"I recently asked fifty of the most passionate cinephiles and brilliant critics to name their ten favorite films directed by women. The following video is a collection of the twenty titles that received the most votes from participants. Lists of this sort have been going around lately and for that we can be grateful. The little celebrations we can throw for female genius goes a little way towards making up for the shameful underrepresentation of their work in canonical surveys and the horrific treatment women experience in film industries all over the world. For many women in the film industry, criticism is harsher and money is scarcer than for their male counterparts, and unless we make noise we'll allow it to continue. ..."
Fandor (Video)

George Bellows, "Cliff Dwellers," 1913

Cliff Dwellers, 1913.
"... The term 'cliff dwellers' refers to the Native Americans of the Southwest who lived in stratified cave dwellings cut into the sides of steep cliffs. Here, multistory tenement buildings on the Lower East Side are overcrowded to the point of bursting. Residents spill onto the streets and hang out of windows to get some relief from the summer heat. Penned in by walls of brick, they seem unable to escape their circumstances. As one New York City official lamented, 'It is simply impossible to pack human beings into these hives . . . and not have them suffer in health and morals.' While the picture appears to have a political agenda, [George] Bellows professed his commitment only to personal and artistic freedom. These drawings for Bellows's oil painting Cliff Dwellers illustrate how the artist spent a fair amount of time thinking about the narrative details and compositional arrangements of his large oil paintings. ..."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art"
Wikipedia
A Working-Class Painter

Marc Ribot Ceramic Dog (2014)

"... Ribot has held down straight gigs since then, but his work has tended toward the avant-garde. That's much less true on the song-oriented second album by the trio he calls Ceramic Dog. Where Ceramic Dog's first album was what you might expect from a Marc Ribot power trio, long on experiment and short on tune, Your Turn is a straight rock album sonically and structurally, except that it's half instrumentals. And the six lyrics are doozies. My favorite is 'Masters of the Internet.' If you're one of those people who download music without paying for it, you pop up in the very first words you'll hear. Marc Ribot is a political guy — he's long been a union activist on behalf of independent musicians. ..."
NPR (Video)
YouTube: Marc Ribot Ceramic Dog - Cully Jazz Festival 2014 1:16:32

2011 February: Selling Water By the Side of the River - Evan Lurie, 2012 September: Marc Ribot, 2013 February: Silent Movies, 2013 November: The Nearness Of You, 2014 January: Full Concert Jazz in Marciac (2010), 2014 May: Gig Alert: Marc Ribot Trio, 2014 September: Marc Ribot Trio with Mary Halvorson at The Stone, 2015 September: Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos - The Prosthetic Cubans (1998).

Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners (2015)

"... John Wieners was on the periphery of many of the twentieth century’s most important avant-garde poetry scenes, from Black Mountain and the Boston Renaissance to the New York School and the SF Renaissance. Having achieved cult status among poets, Wieners has also become known for the compelling nature of his journals, a mixture of early drafts of poems, prose fragments, lists, and other fascinating minutiae of the poet’s imagination. Stars Seen in Person: Selected Journals of John Wieners collects four of his previously unpublished journals from the period between 1955 and 1969. These journals capture a post-war bohemian world that no longer exists, depicted through the prism of Wieners’ sense of glamour. ..."
City Lights Blog
City Lights
Drunk on the Poetry of a New Friend: John Wieners and Frank O’Hara
A Queer Excess: the Supplication of John Wieners
Poetry Clips of the Week: Robert Dewhurst, Michael Seth Stewart on John Wieners (Video)

2008 July: John Wieners, 2009 December: John Wieners - 1, 2011 May: John Wieners: June 21, 1959, 2012 May: Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike, 2012 August: John Wieners - 707 Scott Street, 2013 January: Mass: John Wieners, 2013 October: Measure (1957-1962).

Everybody Street - A Street Photography Documentary (2013)

"Everybody Street is a new documentary featuring iconic street photographers such as Ricky Powell, Martha Cooper, Jamel Shabazz, and Jamel Freedman - all of whom managed to capture the raw essence of New York City through its artists, graffiti writers, junkies, and street people. The film is directed by Cheryl Dunn, a photographer who has been documenting NYC for over two decades herself. 'It is pure and uncontrollable and it takes an intense commitment,' she says when speaking to the New Yorker. 'I feel it reveals a thread in humanity that is random and true and hard to capture.' Everybody Street premiered this year at Hot Docs International Film Festival in Canada and is set for release this Autumn."
HUH
NOWNESS (Video)

Fernando Bryce

El mundo en llamas, 2010-2011, Tinta sobre papel 83 dibujos de 70 x 50 cm.
"Fernando Bryce was born in Lima in 1965 and now divides his time between Lima and Berlin. His ink on paper drawings systematically re-examine the way historical events are represented. The process, which Bryce describes as ‘mimetic analysis’ involves culling archives for print materials like advertisements, newspaper articles, and propaganda pamphlets relating to specific political developments in order to faithfully reproduce a select few on ink paper. ..."
Alexander and Bonin
Fernando Bryce: His Art And History
frieze
The Artist and the Propaganda Machine: How Fernando Bryce Retells 20th-Century History
YouTube: Fernando Bryce

Nicolas Jaar - Soundtrack, The Color of Pomegranates (2015)

"Other hobbyists gravitate to woodworking, marijuana cultivation, gemology, and urban gardening, but Nicolas Jaar’s pastimes tend to be more fruitful. Hence, when he got bored in 2013, he and Dave Harrington re-worked the entire Daft Punk album for the funk of it. His most recent contribution to the numinous is an unofficial soundtrack to the 1969 Soviet masterpiece commonly known as The Color of Pomegranates. ... The film’s director was the brilliant and frequently banned Sergei Parajanov, who drew heavy censorship from Soviet authorities for his all-out subversion. He was somewhere between Andrei Tarkovsky and Oscar Wilde, abandoning social realism for stunning visuals, persecuted for his homosexuality, sentenced to time in labor camps, and beloved by fellow artists from John Updike to Godard and Fellini. ..."
Passion Of The Weiss (Video)
Nicolas Jaar releases new album Pomegranates — listen (Video)
vimeo: Near Death
YouTube: Tracklist
YouTube: Նռան գույնը (1969) - OST by Nicolas Jaar 1:17:04

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), 2015 October: Darkside EP - Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington (2011). 2012 January: The Color of Pomegranates (1968) - Sergei Parajanov

Hector Zazou - Chansons des mers froides (1994)

Wikipedia - "Chansons des mers froides (French: 'songs from the cold seas') is a 1994 album by French musician Hector Zazou. Zazou approached Sony Records with merely the title and the concept of songs from the Arctic. He was accompanied by cameraman Philippe Roméo as he recorded traditional folk songs in and from Alaska, Canada (Newfoundland), Greenland, Iceland, Japan, Scandinavia and Scotland. He incorporated the shamanic incantations and lullabies of aboriginal people such as the Ainu, Inuit, Nanai, and Yakuts. The only original composition, 'The Long Voyage', was written by Zazou as an expression of gratitude to his record company for granting him complete artistic freedom on the project. The song was released as a single and featured several remixes, including one by Mad Professor and by Zazou himself."
Wikipedia
SOS
YouTube: Yaisa Maneena, Yakut Song, She's Like a Swallow, Visur Vatnsenda-Rosu, The Long Voyage, Annukka Suaren Neito

2008 September: Hector Zazou, 2011 December: Sahara Blue

A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s --1980s

Charlotte Moorman performs Nam June Paik’s "One for Violin Solo," New York City, March 22, 1968.
"The indelible image of Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991) playing the cello topless -- save for a pair of miniature television sets strapped to her chest -- is about to be replaced with a more complex, but equally powerful, portrait of the girl from Little Rock, Arkansas. She metamorphosed into a seminal and barrier-breaking figure in performance art and an impresario of the postwar avant-garde. The occasion is 'A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s --1980s,' a groundbreaking exhibition opening Jan. 16, 2016, at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, where it will remain through July 17, 2016. The Moorman exhibition will then travel to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in fall 2016 and to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, in spring/summer 2017. ..."
Northwestern
amazon
NY Times: Exhibitions Where Moral Force Trumps Market Forces

The French Emergency

"Shortly before midnight on November 13, in the aftermath of terrorist attacks that left 130 dead and hundreds more wounded, French President François Hollande declared a national state of emergency. Not long thereafter, the Élysée issued a communiqué detailing its provisions, including the warrantless detention and house arrest of suspects, additional border controls, closure of schools and other public places, and expanded powers of search and seizure. Days later, the government presented parliament with a law extending the state of emergency for an additional three months, beyond the twelve days allowed under initial decree, and updating the existing legislation. ... A dramatic rhetorical escalation has accompanied this judicial response. Across the spectrum, politicians and commentators aver that France is now at war. ..."
Jacobin

In Which She Is Not Like Any Of The Other Wives

"Restaurant Men by ELLEN COPPERFIELD. Dorothea Lange, 26, featured a high pitched voice and a pronounced limp. She made her living from portrait photography. She set a price and never haggled over it; no one quibbled with the results. For example: They called it the slipper club. All of the photographer Dorothea Lange's friends were Jews; exiled for a second time from the mostly gentile areas of Nob, Russian, and Telegraph Hills in San Francisco to Pacific Heights. Lange was not herself among the chosen people, but all her friends were. (They were as far from the immigrant Jews in the Fillmore as they were from the gentiles in the wealthier neighborhoods.) The slipper club, so named because Dorothea gave all her closest ones footwear as a gift, met outside the circles of power due to the vagaries of a parlor anti-Semitism. They talked of gardening, the arts, their relationships.... It was through these people that Dorothea met the artist who would become her first husband, Maynard Dixon. ..."
This Recording

2008 May: Dorothea Lange

Jimi Hendrix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Guitar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Buddy Guy & B.B. King

"'I started playing the guitar about 6 or 7, maybe 7 or 8 years ago. I was influenced by everything at the same time, that’s why I can’t get it together now.' When you listen to Jimi Hendrix, one of the last things you’re ever likely to think is that he couldn’t 'get it together' as a guitarist. Hendrix made the characteristically modest statement in 1968, in a free form discussion about his influences with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner and Baron Wolfman. 'I used to like Buddy Holly,' he said, 'and Eddie Cochran and Muddy Waters and Elvin James… B.B. King and so forth.' But his great love was Albert King, who 'plays completely and strictly in one way, just straight funk blues.'”
Open Culture (Video)

2010 September: Jimi Hendrix, 2013 November: Watch Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin’, the New PBS Documentary, 2014 July: Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock: The Complete Performance in Video & Audio (1969), 2014 October: Live at Monterey (1967), 2015 March: "Little Wing" (1967).

Paul Bowles: The Rolling Stone Interview (May 23, 1974)

"On the fourth floor of a small gray apartment house at the sunny outskirts of Tangier, Morocco, lives an American who may well rank as the premier expatriate of his generation; a rare blend of talents—composer, novelist, short-story writer—who has spent the last 40 years of his life on the move, through Europe, South and Central America, Africa and the Far East, and who settled at last in the odd and exotic blend of cultures that is Tangier. 'The Greeks used to call Greece the navel of the world,' says Paul Bowles. 'I always thought it was Tangier.' It seems a fair call: The compact white city perches at the very tip of northern Africa, almost precisely between continents, a mix of influences European, African and Arabic. ..."
Rolling Stone
UbuWeb: An American in Tangier (1993) Dir. Mohamed Ulad-Mohand. Runtime: 27 min.

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, 2015 October: The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles – a cautionary tale for tourists.