The not-so-secret history of comics drawn by women

In 2014 the only woman who made the long list for the Grand Prix Angoulême International Comics Festival was Marjane Satrapi. In 2015, no women made the list.
"This week the largest comics festival in France announced its 30 nominees for what many consider the most prestigious prize in comics, the Grand Prix. Not one nominee was a woman. Usually there are at least few women on the longlist for the Angoulême International Comics Festival (known in French as the Festival international de la bande dessinée or FIBD). Last year’s list included only Marjane Sartrapi. In fact, in the festival’s 43-year history, there has only been one female Grand Prix winner: Florence Cestac, who got the prize in 2000. But this year, there was a swift reaction. ..."
Guardian
Welcome to 2016, When You Can't Afford to Ignore Women in Comics

Crescent - John Coltrane (1964)

"John Coltrane's Crescent from the spring of 1964 is an epic album, showing his meditative side that would serve as a perfect prelude to his immortal work A Love Supreme. His finest quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones supports the somewhat softer side of Coltrane, and while not completely in ballad style, the focus and accessible tone of this recording work wonders for anyone willing to sit back and let this music enrich and wash over you. ... In the liner notes, a quote from Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka states John Coltrane was 'daringly human,' and no better example of this quality transferred to musical endeavor is available than on this definitive, must have album that encompasses all that he was and eventually would become."
allmusic
W - Crescent
Slate: John Coltrane's Finest Hour
Carving Coltrane’s “Crescent”
Spotify
YouTube: Crescent (full album)

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”, 2015 July: Afro Blue Impressions (2013), 2015 September: Impressions of Coltrane, 2015 December: Giant Steps (1960).

A Surge of Interest in East-Bloc Mementos

Lithographic portraits of Lenin (1972) in a Warholian style by the Hungarian artist Tibor Zala.
"When Communist regimes in Europe were unraveling in 1989, collaborators and dissidents alike began destroying vital historical material, from statues of dictators to family snapshots of government informers to manuals that exaggerated the quality of East German car engines. Now relics of ordinary life and heinous acts in the Soviet bloc are resurfacing in museums, publications and auctions. Recent books have delved into East German propaganda posters and Stalinist architecture as well as apartment life, bus-stop design, children’s books and store-window aesthetics in the Eastern bloc. ..."
NY Times

Making Chocolate the Traditional Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

"Chef turned restaurateur Alain Ducasse has rather a lot to say on the subject of chocolate. On the website of Le Manufacture, the small-batch chocolate factory he founded in a former Renault Garage, he waxes poetic, sharing wide-eyed childhood memories of the 'terribly sensual and bewitching substance.' He’s a bit more mercenary in the pages of the The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review, noting that the chocolate operation grew out of his desire to control the process from cacao beans to dessert plates in his numerous fine dining establishments. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2015 January: Chocolate

Brooklyn, the Remix: A Hip-Hop Tour (2013)

A mural of the Notorious B.I.G., killed in 1997, in today’s Bedford-Stuyvesant.
"For current real estate purposes, the block where the Brooklyn rapper Notorious B.I.G., whose real name was Christopher Wallace, once sold crack is now well within the boundaries of swiftly gentrifying Clinton Hill, though it was at the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant when he was growing up. Biggie, who was killed under still-mysterious circumstances in 1997, was just one of the many rappers to emerge from Brooklyn’s streets in the ’80s and ’90s. Including successful hardcore rappers, alternative hip-hop M.C.s, respected but obscure underground groups and some — like KRS-One and Gang Starr — who were arguably all of the above, the then-mean streets gave birth to an explosion of hip hop. Among the artists who lived in or hung out in this now gentrified corner of the borough: Not only Jay-Z, but also the Beastie Boys, Foxy Brown, Talib Kweli, Big Daddy Kane, Mos Def and L’il Kim. ..."
NY Times (Video)

Photo-Poetics: An Anthology

Moyra Davey, Les Goddesses, 2011. HD color video, with sound, 61 min., edition 5/5.
"This group exhibition features more than 70 works by ten artists: Claudia Angelmaier, Erica Baum, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Leslie Hewitt, Elad Lassry, Lisa Oppenheim, Erin Shirreff, Kathrin Sonntag, and Sara VanDerBeek. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue examine an important new development in contemporary photography, offering an opportunity to define the concerns of a younger generation of artists and contextualize their work within the history of art and visual culture. Drawing on the legacies of Conceptualism, these artists pursue a largely studio-based approach to still-life photography that centers on the representation of objects, often printed matter such as books, magazines, and record covers. ..."
Guggenheim
aperture: Photo-Poetics: An Anthology at the Guggenheim
YouTube: "Photo-Poetics: An Anthology" (10.7.-30.8. 2015) @ Deutsche Bank KunstHalle

Donald Trump and the Joys of Toy Fascism

"... But even the nail-pounders and wrench-twisters and fishermen and farmers and writers out here have a sense that the politics of the nation are exuding an unfamiliar stench: Fascism is in the air. It's a special kind of gold-plated fascism, a fascism with a special orange color, a fascism with special turned-out lips, a fascism with a special voice, a fascism in a special shiny suit, a fascism that rides around in special big black cars and flies around in special big private jets, a fascism that arises not from ideology but from a special sort of privilege and a special sort of resentment unique to New York City: outer-borough resentment. In short, it's from Queens and it's Donald Trump's kind of fascism. It's Toy Fascism."
Voice
Jacobin: When Fascism Was American
The Nation:  Schlonged? Donald Trump’s Pathetic Frat-Boy Politics
NY Times: A Crass Act

Fifty Years Later, Looking for Last Exit (BKLYNR - 2014)

"Fifty years ago this fall, Grove Press published Last Exit to Brooklyn, a collection of revolting interweaving stories — which Hubert Selby Jr. had begun publishing in literary magazines as early as 1957 — that became a controversial instant classic of postwar urban degeneracy, populated by drunks, drug addicts, violently repressed homosexuals, victimized transvestites, worn-out laborers, and idle thugs. It’s not the only one of Selby’s six novels (and one story collection) still in print — Da Capo Press still publishes his other best-known book, Requiem for a Dream, thanks surely in part to Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film adaptation — though it’s the only one I’ve ever seen on shelves in Brooklyn’s independent bookstores, when they stock any Selby books at all. Still, neither Grove nor anyone else has announced plans for a 50th anniversary edition; it seems like Allen Ginsberg’s hope (once used in a full-page ad in the New York Times, now a pull quote on the paperback) that the book 'should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years' may have been dashed. ..."
BKLYNR
W - Last Exit to Brooklyn (1963)
W - Hubert Selby, Jr.
amazon: Last Exit to Brooklyn
NPR: In 'Last Exit,' Brooklyn Is A Character, Too (Video)
Guardian: Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr – review
Too Horrible [LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN]
YouTube: Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989)
YouTube: Hubert Selby Jr - 'It/ll Be Better Tomorrow'

Stick McGhee & John Lee Hooker - Highway of Blues (1959)

"Rare King Records material from these two postwar blues greats – each of whom get a single side of the record! Sticks McGhee really shines on side one – with that playful, jazzy approach to blues that he used on his late 40s recordings for Atlantic – almost somewhere in the territory of Louis Jordan, especially given Sticks' sense of wit – but served up in more of an R&B mode, with similar styles to Roy Brown's King material of the early 50s. Titles include 'Head Happy With Wine', 'Get Your Mind Out Of The Gutter', 'Jungle Juice', 'Whiskey Women & Loaded Dice', and 'Sad Bad Glad'. John Lee Hooker is in a much rootsier mode on side two – recorded in a rough-edged style that's almost back to the delta, save for the use of electricity on the guitar! The spare setting really unlocks Hooker's power – and titles include 'Nightmare Blues', 'Devil's Jump', 'Thinking Blues', 'Late Last Night', and 'Moaning Blues'."
dusty groove
YouTube: Sticks McGhee - Whiskey, Women and Loaded Dice (1953), Jungle juice, John Lee Hooker - Devil's Jump, John Lee Hooker - Moanin ' Blues
YouTube: Stick McGhee & John Lee Hooker - Highway of Blues (1959)

Ramadi, Reclaimed by Iraq, Is in Ruins After ISIS Fight

"As his armored vehicle bounced along a dirt track carved through the ruins of this recently reconquered city on Wednesday, Gen. Ali Jameel, an Iraqi counterterrorism officer, narrated the passing sites. Here were the carcasses of four tanks, charred by the jihadists of the Islamic State. Here, a police officer’s home that the jihadists had blown up. Here, a villa reduced to rubble by an airstrike. And another. And another. In one neighborhood, he stood before a panorama of wreckage so vast that it was unclear where the original buildings had stood. He paused when asked how residents would return to their homes. 'Homes?' he said. 'There are no homes.' The retaking of Ramadi by Iraqi security forces last week has been hailed as a major blow to the Islamic State and as a vindication of the Obama administration’s strategy to fight the group by backing local ground forces with intensive airstrikes. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Iraqi Army Retakes Government Complex in Central Ramadi

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, 2015 December: A Brief History of ISIS, 2015 December: U.S. Seeks to Avoid Ground War Welcomed by Islamic State.

Pazuzu

Wikipedia - "In Assyrian and Babylonian mythology, Pazuzu (sometimes Fazuzu or Pazuza) was the king of the demons of the wind, brother of Humbaba and son of the god Hanbi. He also represented the southwestern wind, the bearer of storms and drought. Pazuzu is often depicted as a combination of diverse animal and human parts. He has the body of a man, the head of a lion or dog, talons of an eagle, two pairs of wings, a scorpion's tail, and a serpentine penis. Pazuzu is the demon of the southwest wind known for bringing famine during dry seasons, and locusts during rainy seasons. Pazuzu was invoked in apotropaic amulets, which combat the powers of his rival, the malicious goddess Lamashtu, who was believed to cause harm to mother and child during childbirth. Although Pazuzu is, himself, considered to be an evil spirit, he drives and frightens away other evil spirits, therefore protecting humans against plagues and misfortunes."
Wikipedia
Metropolitan Museum of Art - Pazuzu: Beyond Good and Evil (Video)
Louvre: Statuette of the demon Pazuzu with an inscription

Reality Studios, 1978–88 (ed. Ken Edwards)

"Over the course of its ten-year span, Reality Studios introduced a vital new interface between the various permutations around the British Poetry Revival in the UK and emergent strands of Language writing in the US. Edited by Ken Edwards and published in London, the magazine followed Alembic (1973–78) and immediately preceded Edwards’s Reality Street press, which continues publishing experimental poetry and prose to this day. First released in April of 1978, the magazine was originally published as a monthly corner-stapled newsletter. ... Investigating experimental language arts across international borders and beyond local poetic coteries, Reality Studios delivered a wildly heterogeneous array of writing that ranged from Neo-Dadaist and Situationist experiments to sound-text poetry, experimental prose, conceptual writing, and graphic art. ..."
Jacket2
Reality Street

Leon Bridges: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

"We probably should have shot this Tiny Desk Concert in black-and-white. Listening to Leon Bridges, I hear a sound with its heart and soul rooted in 1962. There's purity in his soulful voice that's unadorned, untouched and unaffected by 21st-century pop. Still, the songs from this 26-year-old Texas singer feel refreshing in the context of the day. Surely there are touches of Sam Cooke's sound, but Bridges has a way of making the familiar feel adventurous and new. That may be because this is new to him. Bridges only picked up the guitar around age 20, and only began listening to classic soul music after friends told him he sounded like R&B musicians from long ago. What he's tapped into on his debut album Coming Home — recorded with fellow Fort Worth musicians, including Austin Jenkins from White Denim — is a universal sound. He's easy to love and tough to resist, and his performance at the Tiny Desk with his fabulous band is a testament to that."
NPR (Video)

2015 June: Leon Bridges

The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death - John Fahey (1965)

Wikipedia - "The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death is a 1965 album by American fingerstyle guitarist and composer John Fahey. Originally issued in a hand-lettered edition of 50, it was Fahey's first album to be released by a label other than his own Takoma Records. As with all of Fahey's independently released early albums, it had little critical recognition upon release. The album has grown in stature since its reissue on CD in 1997 and is now highly regarded critically. ... The title refers to a fictional bluesman named Blind Joe Death, first introduced by Fahey on his debut album Blind Joe Death. For years Fahey and Takoma Records continued to treat the imaginary guitarist as a real person, including booklets with their LPs containing biographical information about him and that he had taught Fahey to play. ..."
Wikipedia
Ace
Tiny Mix Tapes
YouTube: 1965 - The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death

2009 March: John Fahey, 2011 March: Your Past Comes Back to Haunt You (The Fonotone Years 1958-1965), 2012 September: Fare Forward Voyagers (Soldier's Choice), 2013 February: The Mill Pond, 2013 August: Railroad (1983), 2013 December: Dances of the Inhabitants of the Invisible City of Bladensburg (1973).

Solar System Featured on New U.S. Stamps

"What do Pluto, Shirley Temple, and quilting have in common? This year the U.S. Postal Service will issue stamps highlighting all three. In fact, recently the USPS unveiled three sets of stamps that celebrate the solar system and NASA's exploration thereof. The ones likely to draw most interest involve Pluto and NASA's New Horizons mission. The USPS plans to issue a sheet of four stamps, titled 'Pluto — Explored,' that showcase an image of the dwarf planet and of New Horizons. It's sweet vindication for the mission's scientists — not only because July's flyby proved spectacularly successful but also because they've been trying to get their spacecraft on a stamp since 2012. At that time, an online petition drew only 12,000 supporters — far short of the 100,000 needed. ..."
Sky & Telescope

James Casebere: Fugitive

Mosque (After Sinan), 2006
"The photographic works of James Casebere (born in 1953, Lansing, Michigan, United States) explore architectural subjects such as domestic settings, flooded corridors of grand mansions, bare spaces of prison interiors, Moorish and Islamic architecture, ancient water tunnels in Bologna, or the Jewish Ghetto in Venice. However, these images emerge from a singular approach of production: they are photographs of detailed, self-made architectural models in which completely imagined and fabricated scenes are subsequently transposed into a pictorial record. Thus Casebere generates images that hover somewhere between the fugitive and the sublime, between the representational and the staged. ..."
SKNY
Hausder Kunst
Lisson Gallery
W - James Casebere
ArtNet

PJ Harvey - Rid of Me (Big Day Out festival...Sydney, 2001)

"Tie yourself to me, no one else / No, you're not rid of me, you're not rid of me / Night and day I breathe, hey, you're not rid of me / Yeah, you're not rid of me, yeah, you're not rid of me / Yeah, you're not rid of me // I beg you my darling don't leave me, I'm hurting / Lick my legs I'm on fire, lick my legs of desire ..."
YouTube: Rid of Me (Live), Rid Of Me (Private Remaster)

2009 November: PJ Harvey, 2011 May: Let England Shake, 2013 May: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, 2013 July: White Chalk (2007), 2014 July: LSO St Luke's in London (2005), 2015 March: Who Will Love Me Now (1996).

Mulatu Astatke - New York–Addis–London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965–1975 (2009)

"Ethio jazz. That's what Mulatu Astatke called his style of music when he invented it back in the 1960s, and it means exactly what it implies: Ethiopian melodies played on Western instruments with room for improvisation. Astatke was a pioneer for his country's modern music. His concept of instrumental music as an end in itself was a bit foreign in his homeland, where singers rule the popular music sphere, and he was among the very first musicians from Ethiopia to learn about music while abroad. He started playing as a teenager at school in Wales, and after a stint at London's Trinity School of Music, he jumped the Atlantic for a brief stay at Boston's Berklee College of Music, ultimately winding up in New York City in the mid-60s. There, he was exposed to sounds he simply couldn't have heard back home in Addis Ababa, and his exposure to jazz and Western harmonic concepts led him to formulate Ethio jazz, the perfect hybrid of the traditional and the modern. ..."
Pitchfork
W - New York–Addis–London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965–1975
... my passion for ethiopian music ... (Video)
YouTube: Mulatu Astatke - New York-Addis-London [Full Album]

Alienation and anxiety in a 1950s subway station

"Brooklyn-born painter George Tooker depicts the disquietude of a mundane trip into a contemporary subway station in The Subway, on display at the Whitney Museum. 'Made in 1950 with egg tempera paint, George Tooker’s The Subway, takes as its subject the alienating effects of modern life,' states the museum website. 'Just as the positioning, color, and facial expressions of figures in the painting suggest a dark side to modern life, so too does Tooker’s choice of subject matter: a subway station,' according to the website. 'This location emphasizes feelings of alienation, as any New York subway passenger knows. Subways are labyrinthine and almost prison-like, with low ceilings and barred areas. Tooker accentuates this effect by removing all signs from the subway station of his imagination, so that a person who is lost might never find his or her way out.'”
Ephemeral New York
Wikipedia
NY Times: George Tooker, Painter Capturing Modern Anxieties, Dies at 90
Whitney (Video)
American Art: The Waiting Room, 1959 (Video)
YouTube: GEORGE TOOKER part 1 of 3, part 2 of 3, part 3 of 3

JUDSON AT 50: Robert Morris

Simone Forti, Platforms, 1961. Performance view, Loeb Student Center, New York University, 1961. Foreground: Robert Rauschenberg.
"... Looking back half a century to the days of Judson Dance, it is difficult not to historicize a little. After all, the work that emerged from that time and place did not come out of nothing. In the larger sense it continued the project launched half a century before, when Marcel Duchamp christened that hulking hull of modernism with the fizzy champagne bottle of the readymade. John Cage’s subsequent explorations of chance and indeterminacy were well known by the early 1960s. The awe of 4'33" was part of the conversation. But perhaps the more significant precedent for the new dance seen at Judson was the work of Simone Forti. As part of a series of performances and events organized by La Monte Young at a loft on Chambers Street in 1961, Forti presented an evening of radical dance works that attacked the notion of dance as a format that required the trained body of the dancer. ..."
ARTFORUM
MoMA - Performance 2: Simone Forti. March 7–8, 2009
[PDF] The Minimal Presence of Simone Forti
W - Simone Forti
Where Sculpture and Dance Meet: Minimalism from 1961 to 1979
vimeo: ± I96I Simone Forti@Reina Sofia

Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds - Michael Nyman

Wikipedia - "Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds is a piece of minimalist music from the soundtrack for The Draughtsman's Contract, written by Michael Nyman. In the thirty years since its release it has been much quoted and sampled and performed by various ensembles. It is based on a ground bass from the Prelude to Act III, Scene 2 of Henry Purcell’s opera, King Arthur. There are different arrangements of this piece, one of which is broadcast on Classic FM TV, performed by the Michael Nyman Band, which was not the original arrangement for the film. ..."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Chasing Sheep Is Best Left To Shepherds, Chasing Sheep Is Best Left To Shepherds (Live)

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), 2015 September: An Eye for Optical Theory (Live at Studio Halle, 2010).

Downton Abbey Returns for a Feel-Good Final Season

"When you’re alone, and life is making you lonely, you can always go … to Downton. Not that it’s an easy ride: The past five seasons of Julian Fellowes’s early 20th-century aristocratic soap opera have been fraught with drama, heartbreak, aristocratic disgrace, and the specter of socialism, which looms over the ridiculously privileged Crawley family even more insistently than rain clouds hover over Yorkshire. Still, there’s something about the combination of upstairs/downstairs antics, manor-house glamour, and the Dowager Countess’s bon mots that makes even the silliest storylines bearable. ..."
The Atlantic
NY Times: ‘Downton Abbey’ Season 6, Episode 1: Off They Go
PBS

2012 March: Downton Abbey, 2013 February: Downton Abbey 3, 2015 January: ‘Downton Abbey’ and History: A Look Back, Recap: Rumble With Lord G!, 2015 February: Recap: Prayers for Lord G’s Truest, Furriest Love, 2015 February: Recap: The Crawleys Should Have Sent Their Regrets, 2015 February: Recap: Yes, It’s Called the Hornby Hotel, 2015 March: Recap: In the Finale, Mary Meets Mr. Handsome.

Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting

"This major retrospective exhibition—the first in the United States in more than 35 years and the most comprehensive ever mounted—showcases the pioneering work of Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915–1995). Exploring the beauty and complexity of Burri’s process-based works, the exhibition positions the artist as a central and singular protagonist of post–World War II art. Burri is best known for his series of Sacchi (sacks) made of stitched and patched remnants of torn burlap bags, often combined with fragments of discarded clothing. ..."
Guggenheim (Video)
Guggenheim: The Trauma of Painting
NY Times: Alberto Burri, a Man of Steel, and Burlap
VOGUE: Why You Should See the Guggenheim’s Alberto Burri Retrospective for Veterans Day
artbook

Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs

"You almost certainly know the name of William S. Burroughs, and more than likely you know him as the author of the novel Naked Lunch. If the idea of plunging straight into his writing intimidates you, given how drug-saturated, psychologically unconventional, and formally 'cut-up' that writing can get, where should you go to get some background on this unstoppably influential member of the Beat Generation? After all, knowledge of Burroughs’ work seems creatively beneficial: so many different kinds of artists found inspiration in his chaotic, fragmented work and even more chaotic, fragmented life that he wound up making collaborative appearances in nearly every medium known in his lifetime: film, music, television, performance art, rock videos. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
YouTube: Commisioner of Sewers 1991 (full documentary) 52:03

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, 2015 December: Destroy All Rational Thought.

Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection

"***, the symbol was called. When *** was handwritten on books and periodicals in the New York Public Library’s permanent collection, it meant one thing: supervision required. The triple-star code, created some time in the first part of the 20th century, identified the printed works that were considered too hot for the general reader to handle. Playboy was once classified with a triple star. So were raunchy pulp novels, fliers for Times Square massage parlors, business cards offering phone sex for $2 a minute, even playing cards with illustrations of naked women. For decades, they were kept in locked cages, accessible only with special permission and viewed in a small, secured area in the main research library. More recently, hundreds of works that make up the triple-star collection have been liberated from the restricted controls. ..."
NY Times (Video)

Pere Ubu - Live at the Longhorn: April 1, 1978

"I saw Ubu 4-5 times, but the show that made the biggest impression on me was on the tour the undertook for their 1st album, The Modern Dance. I saw them about 5 weeks before this show and they were crazy and splendid. Finally, you (and I) can hear what I heard then. Not a perfect recording by any means, but pretty good and certainly good enough. Conditionally recommended! Pere Ubu's Live at the Longhorn is as much an indispensable live rock album as Modern Dance is an indispensable studio album. The show consists mainly of material from Modern Dance, only rocked out and swinging, more raw-nerved yet seasoned than their studio counterparts. What becomes apparent, especially on repeated listening is how well-made this music is, how the drama and comedy flows within the modules of each song, how the songs fit together to give an audience an experience that - while sharpened to paranoia and sensitive to harsh realities - is as ineffable as it is concrete."
Wayside Music
amazon
YouTube: Humor Me (Live, 1978), "Heart of Darkness" live (12.6.78), Street Waves (Theatre 140, Brussels 1978-05-05)

2008 April: Pere Ubu, 2010 July: Pere Ubu - 1, 2012 November: David Thomas And The Pedestrians - Variations On A Theme, 2013 February: Dub Housing, 2014 September: Carnival of Souls (2014), 2015 June: Street Waves / My Dark Ages (1976).

Chumley's

Wikipedia - "Chumley's is a historic pub and former speakeasy at 86 Bedford Street in Greenwich Village, New York City. It was established in 1922 by the socialist activist Leland Stanford Chumley, who converted a former blacksmith's shop near the corner of Bedford and Barrow Streets into a Prohibition-era drinking establishment. The speakeasy became a favorite spot for influential writers, poets, playwrights, journalists, and activists, including members of the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation movements. Some features remain from Chumley's Prohibition-era history. Notably, the Barrow Street entrance has no exterior sign, being located at the end of a nondescript courtyard ('The Garden Door'), while the Bedford Street entrance, which opens to the sidewalk, is also unmarked. Inside, Chumley's is still equipped with the trap doors and secret stairs that composed part of its elaborate subterfuge. ..."
Wikipedia
Famous West Village Speakeasy Chumley's One Step Closer To Reopening
NY Times: At Chumley’s, a Former Speakeasy, the Password Doesn’t Work
Chumley's Hopes to Keep History Alive in a 'Changed' Neighborhood

Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting

Black Monolith, II: Homage To Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man, 1994
"For 50 years, Jack Whitten has explored the possibilities of paint, the role of the artist, and the allure of material essence in his innovative studio process. With compositions that are abstract and elegiac, Whitten foregrounds the material properties of paint—pigmentation, viscosity, and mark—to capture the momentary and suggest the enduring. ... Whitten’s poetic and physically compelling compositions reinvent the medium of painting time and again—from his series of small 'ghost' paintings of the 1960s, his smeared test slabs and dragged canvases of the 1970s, and his collaged acrylic 'skins' of the 1980s to his more recent tessellated constructions of paint tiles. ..."
Walker
Artbook@
Alexander Gray Associates
W - Jack Whitten
YouTube: Five Decades of Painting, The Art of Jack Whitten

Secondhand Stories in a Rusting Steel City

"A SECONDHAND STORE IN A SECONDHAND TOWN IS ABOUT WHAT YOU’D EXPECT. A bit derelict, a bit kooky. Rows of thin gold necklaces, mostly crosses and hearts too small to melt down for scrap. Four Sony PlayStations, only two of which work. Boxes of cords to who knows what. Tools — piles of screwdrivers and buzz saws and toolboxes and doohickeys on collapsible tables. Scuffed guitars hanging by their necks. Guns and more guns — some mounted on a pegboard wall and others stuck in a cardboard barrel, butts up. Unopened, unwatchable movies. 'Kitchen' scales never purchased for cooking. In a place like Braddock, Pennsylvania, nothing much surprises you. It’s a poor place, mostly black, mostly a shadow of the boomtown steel days. ..."
Wilson Quarterly

Francis The Great :- Ravissante Baby / Look Up In The Sky (2015)

"Repressed. Rare funk and avant-garde soul from a seven-year-old kid singer featuring the best musicians of France and the Cameroonian diaspora, recorded in Paris in 1977. The album contains two nicely dramatic tracks: 'Ravissante Baby (Negro Phasing)' is a long, hypnotic, funky soukous track with a tremendous lead guitar and a long spoken-word and soulful kid vocal about the beauty of nature; 'Look Up in the Sky (Negro Nature)' is a stretched funk groove with psych synth by Michel Morose, bubbling bassline by the great Victor Edimo, the famous Toto Guillaume on guitar, and a brilliant poetic lyric by Francis the Great, who at that time studied in Ménilmontant, Paris. Originally produced by his father, a great impresario of African artists in Paris during the '70s, and coordinated by his mother, this album is unique, fresh, and almost unclassifiable."
Forced Exposure
amazon
YouTube: Ravissante Baby / Look Up In The Sky

Some Girls - Rolling Stones (1978)

"During the mid-'70s, the Rolling Stones remained massively popular, but their records suffered from Jagger's fascination with celebrity and Keith's worsening drug habit. By 1978, both punk and disco had swept the group off the front pages, and Some Girls was their fiery response to the younger generation. Opening with the disco-blues thump of 'Miss You,' Some Girls is a tough, focused, and exciting record, full of more hooks and energy than any Stones record since Exile on Main St. Even though the Stones make disco their own, they never quite take punk on their own ground. Instead, their rockers sound harder and nastier than they have in years. ... Some Girls may not have the back-street aggression of their '60s records, or the majestic, drugged-out murk of their early-'70s work, but its brand of glitzy, decadent hard rock still makes it a definitive Stones album."
allmusic
W - Some Girls
Some Girls Sessions
Rolling Stones – Some Girls Live In Texas
Concerts: Some Girls (Live)
YouTube: Beast of Burden (Live), Respectable, Miss You, Just My Imagination (Live), Shattered, Far Away Eyes
YouTube: SOME GIRLS ALBUM COMPLETO + BONUS TRACKS 1:39:40, Some Girls Revisited (Disc 1) Alternate Mixes 1:18:10, Some Girls Revisited (Disc 2) Studio Leftovers 1:18:17

2015 August: Exile on Main Street (1972), 2015 October: "Let's Spend the Night Together" / "Ruby Tuesday" (1967), 2015 December: Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (1971)

Chicago Blues (1972)

"'CHICAGO BLUES' is an angry film. To document Chicago blues at its source, the British director Harley Cokliss went to South Side clubs, storefront churches and homes. He wound up with both a performance film and an anti-travelogue on ghetto life. It is a stark, forceful combination. Although it was made in 1972, 'Chicago Blues' is having its New York theatrical premiere tonight at the Bleecker Street Cinema as part of the Greenwich Village Jazz Festival's film series. Without condescending to viewers, 'Chicago Blues' sketches the history of the music - the rural blues that came to Chicago with black migrants from the South and was transformed by urban life and electric guitars. Johnie Lewis, who moved to Chicago in 1943, plays a country-blues about being a 'poor boy in a strange city,' and later a bluesy gospel song. Willie Dixon, a major blues songwriter, improvises a Mississippi-style field holler. Floyd Jones, in his living room, plays a country-style blues about the stockyards. And the congregation at the Liberty Union Church sings an exuberantly out-of-tune hymn - the blues in its Sunday clothes. ..."
NY Times
amazon: Chicago Blues Featuring Muddy Waters, Johnnie Lewis, Buddy Guy, Junior Well, J. B. Hutto
YouTube: Chicago Blues 49:31

The 2015 Jacobin Mixtape

Nostalgia Musical, Kamillo Reis / Flickr
"It’s that time of year again. And by 'that time of year again,' we mean it’s New Year’s Eve and we’re eager to go home to our tiny apartments, watch Netflix, and down champagne with our pet ferrets. What better way to get the day over with than a hastily assembled compilation post? You can excuse the laziness, because we did manage to publish close to eight hundred essays in 2015. And many of them were quite good. Before the rundown of our 2015 hits, a public service announcement. It’s still December, which means we’re still fundraising, just like every other organization you made the mistake of once giving your email to. ..."
Jacobin

Rumor and Sigh - Richard Thompson (1991)

"While Richard Thompson's devotees will tell you the man is a triple-threat genius -- passionate vocalist, compelling songwriter, and sterling guitarist -- even his most loyal supporters will concede that the dour nature of his songs and the no-frills production of many of his albums make the bulk of his catalog tough sledding for the uninitiated. Given this, 1991's Rumor and Sigh is arguably the best album for those wanting to sample Thompson's work for the first time. It captures Thompson at the top of his form on all fronts, but also gives his songs just enough polish to make them approachable for the unconverted, and though it's several shades darker than the average adult-contemporary album, it honors Thompson's obsession with romantic despair and the less pleasant quirks of fate without sounding depressing in the process. ..."
allmusic
W - Rumor and Sigh
Sway into emotion by Anil Prasad
Revisit: Richard Thompson: Rumor and Sigh
YouTube: I Misunderstood (Live on Sound Opinions), I Feel So Good, 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
YouTube: Rumor and Sigh Album

2011 July: Shoot Out the Lights - Richard and Linda Thompson, 2012 February: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, 2014 March: Videowest 81, 2015 October: Richard & Linda Thompson - Rafferty's Folly (1980)

John Sloan, "Red Kimono on the Roof," 1912

"Red Kimono on the Roof is an oil painting by American artist John Sloan, located in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. ... Red Kimono on the Roof is a matter-of-fact depiction of a woman in a vibrant red wrap hanging laundry on a New York roof, clothespin in her mouth. Sloan's spontaneous brushwork give the painting a sense of immediacy, while his careful attention to light and shade suggests the passage of time. This particular slice of the Lower East Side probably caught Sloan's eye due to the kimono worn by the woman, a charmingly bohemian sartorial choice that meshed well with the novel Maratta color system Sloan had just begun using on his typically sober paintings. This painting also marks a shift from horizontal to vertical in Sloan's canvases, an artistic and perceptual shift that occurred between 1909 and 1915. ..."
Wikipedia
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS - On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art. Patricia McDonnell