Diane Williams

"The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called 'folk tales that hammer like a nail gun,' and these forty new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny. Not a single moment here is what you might expect. While there is immense pleasure to be found in Williams’s spot-on observations about how we behave in our highest and lowest moments, the heart of the drama beats in the language of American short fiction’s grand master, whose originality, precision, and power bring the familiar into startling and enchanted relief. ..."
The McSweeney's Store
Wikipedia
LA Times - “Beauty, Love and Vanity Itself”: An Interview with Diane Williams
Harpers ($)
Diane Williams: Avant-Garde Master of Miniature Fiction
P&W Magazine (Video)
Diane Williams: Two Stories and an Interview
amazon

America Can’t Do Much About ISIS

"In 2003, David Petraeus, then a division commander in Iraq, famously asked 'tell me how this ends?' in reference to the conflict just starting there. It was a good question then, and it’s a good question now. The war against the Islamic State gets a lot of attention, much of it focused on the immediate: Is the war going better or worse this month than last month? Is the Islamic State gaining ground or losing it? Are U.S. air strikes killing more Islamic State leaders or fewer? But these things only matter if they contribute to an ultimate end to the conflict on terms the United States can live with. Will they? In fact, we have a lot of evidence on wars like this and how they typically end. But it’s not a very encouraging story. The Islamic State threat is likely to persist, in one form or another, for a long time. ..."
The Atlantic

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, 2016 January: Ramadi, Reclaimed by Iraq, Is in Ruins After ISIS Fight, 2016 February: Syrian Officer Gave a View of War. ISIS Came, and Silence Followed., 2016 March: Brussels Survivors Say Blasts Instantly Evoked Paris Attacks.

Tubman replacing Jackson on the $20, Hamilton spared

"Harriet Tubman will bump Andrew Jackson from the front of the $20 bill while Alexander Hamilton will stay put on the $10 — a historic move that gives a woman prime placement on U.S. currency and quells a controversy kicked up by Hamilton super-fans. ... [Treasury Secretary Jack] Lew rolled out sweeping changes that will put a new cast of historic figures onto various bills that have remained largely static for decades. Leaders of the women’s suffrage movement will make their way onto the back of the $10 bill, while civil rights era leaders and other important moments in American history will be incorporated into the $5 bill. Jackson will be kicked to the back of the $20 bill. ..."
Politico
NY Times: Harriet Tubman Ousts Andrew Jackson in Change for a $20 (Video)
Washington Post (Video)
w - Harriet Tubman

Brooklyn - John Crowley (2015)

Wikipedia - "Brooklyn is a 2015 Irish-British-Canadian drama directed by John Crowley and written by Nick Hornby, based on Colm Tóibín's novel of the same name. The film stars Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent, and Julie Walters. Set in 1951 and 1952, the film tells the story of a young Irish woman's immigration to Brooklyn, where she quickly falls into a romance. When her past catches up with her, however, she must choose between two countries and the lives that exist within them for her. ... Eilis lives at an Irish boarding house where she dines each night with the landlady and her fellow residents, all young women. She also has a job at a department store but is shy and quiet when interacting with customers, earning the gentle scolding of Miss Fortini, her supervisor. Her letters from her sister, back in Ireland, give her homesickness. ..."
Wikipedia
The Atlantic - Brooklyn: A Personal Tale of Immigration
Guardian - Brooklyn review – this fairytale of New York casts a spell
Roger Ebert
YouTube: Brooklyn Official Trailer #1

Straight Ahead - Oliver Nelson With Eric Dolphy (1961)

"A very interesting quintet set, Straight Ahead matches together Oliver Nelson (on alto and tenor) and Eric Dolphy (tripling on alto, flute, and bass clarinet). With the assistance of pianist Richard Wyands, bassist George Duvivier, and drummer Roy Haynes, the two reedmen battle it out on six compositions (five of Nelson's originals plus Milt Jackson's 'Ralph's New Blues.' Although none of Nelson's tunes caught on, this is a pretty memorable date. It certainly took a lot of courage for Oliver Nelson to share the front line with the colorful Eric Dolphy, but his own strong musical personality holds its own on this straight-ahead date."
allmusic
Wikipedia
Discogs
Oliver Nelson with Eric Dolphy Straight Ahead (1961) Esquire
YouTube: Straight Ahead, Six And Four, Mama Lou, 111-44, Images, Ralph's New Blues

2013 August: Out to Lunch! (1964), 2014 October: Outward Bound (1960), 2015 November: Eric Dolphy His Life and Art, 2016 February: Outward Bound (1960)

Dub Specialist - Dub store special (1974)

"Dub Specialist is a name used for a series of dub LP releases from Studio One throughout the 70s. These limited edition albums were mixed down by a number of engineers over the decade, including Sylvan Morris, Syd Bucknor & Overton 'Scientist' Brown, all under the auspices of legendary producer, sound system pioneer and music entrepeneur, Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd. The series ended when Dodd left Brentford Road for the USA at the end of the decade, but the tunes have found new life with there rerelease by labels like the US's Heartbeat & the UK's SoulJazz."
AlbumTube
YouTube: Dub store special 36:24

Stéphane Mallarmé - Encrypted

"At the dawn of modernism, in the late nineteenth century, the activity of avant-garde artists often resembled rival expeditions into uncharted polar regions. The goal was to discover novel spheres of expression: the unspoken word, the unpainted image, the unheard sound. Arguably, the Amundsen of fin-de-siècle art—the first to plant a flag at an outer extreme of artistic possibility—was the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Upon his death, in 1898, he left behind a body of work so inscrutable that it still causes literature students to fall to their knees in despair. ..."
New Yorker: Encrypted
Jacket2: Stephane Mallarmé, 'UN COUP DE DÉS' @ EPC Library
Guardian: The Poems in Verse by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Peter Manson - review
Mallarmé gets a life - London Review of Books
Poetry Foundation

The idea of the cassette: A gallery with musings

Andy Sawyer - Signs of Use
"In a recent essay for a museum show about music and objects, I made the following rash assertion: 'The poor old cassette – cheap, plastic, fragile— enjoys none of the romance associated with vinyl culture.' In retrospect this was a silly thing to say; at the least, I wish I’d said it differently. It’s a different kind of romance, and it certainly isn’t creating anything like the unlikely resurgence in sales of vinyl that’s occurred in the last couple of years. But it was flat wrong of me to imply that nobody cares about the idea of the cassette. I brooded about this for a few weeks and started collecting links and images relating to the various ways that the idea of the cassette persists. ..."
Murketing

2015 August: Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture - Thurston Moore (2005), 2015 September: OP Magazine / Tape Op, 2015 December: Cassette culture

Seward Park 100 Years Ago: Esther Johnston's Lower East Side

"One hundred years ago this coming May Day, a woman from a small town in Indiana named Esther Johnston began her first day of work at the Seward Park Library on the Lower East Side—her term at Seward lasted from 1916-1921. She eventually became the head of The New York Public Library's Circulation Department until her retirement in 1951. Yet, despite her triumphs in the upper echelons of library administration, the Lower East Side must have taken a strong hold on her. In September of 1966 she wrote an article for the Bulletin of the New York Public Library entitled "A Square Mile of New York" which recounted her experiences as a librarian on the old East Side. In 1966 it had been a full fifty years since Ms. Johnston had begun work at the Seward Park Library. ..."
New York Public Library

Carl De Keyzer

"... His latest book, 'Cuba, La Lucha' captures Cuba in a state of flux, as the country starts to open up to foreign tourism and investment, and relations with the United States start to thaw. ... Through views of crumbling buildings, once can imagine the splendour of a bygone and glorious era, as well as an ambitious population ready to open a new chapter in its history. Carl De Keyzer captures the ambivalence of a changing country, torn between the desire to preserve its traditions and the desire to improve its economy. He seizes images of the end of a bankrupt Utopia, which has plunged its population into a deep identity conflict, divided by the lure of dazzling economic growth promised by the market and fears of consumerist excesses on its traditional culture. ..."
In pictures: Carl De Keyzer captures the decline of Cuban ...
Roberto Polo Gallery
Visionary of History, Carl De Keyzer Photographs Document Cuba's Struggle to Survive
Carl De Keyzer

Sleeps with Angels - Neil Young (1994)

Wikipedia - "Sleeps with Angels is the twenty-first studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young, released on August 16, 1994, on Reprise. The album was conceived as a conscious attempt to recapture some of the atmospheric experiments Young and Crazy Horse played around with in the After the Gold Rush era. Although the majority of the album was recorded before the fact, Young created the title track after the death of Kurt Cobain, who quoted him in his suicide note. As a result, Sleeps with Angels ended up more than reminiscent of Tonight's the Night; the album is practically a (more sober) 1990s update of the former record, down to the use of the old-school black Reprise label found on original vinyl pressings of Tonight's the Night and the CD version of Sleeps with Angels. ..."
Wikipedia
allmusic
songmango
YouTube: Change Your Mind (Live at Farm Aid 1994), Change Your Mind - 10/02/94 - Shoreline Amphitheatre, My Heart, Prime Of Life, Driveby - 10/02/94 - Shoreline Amphitheatre, Sleeps With Angels, Train of Love - 11/06/93 - Shoreline Amphitheatre, Piece of Crap

2008 February: Neil Young, 2010 April: Neil Young - 1, 2010 April: Neil Young - 2, 2010 May: Neil Young - 3, 2010 October: Neil Young's Sound, 2012 January: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History, 2012 June: Like A Hurricane, 2012 July: Greendale, 2013 April: Thoughts On An Artist / Three Compilations, 2013 August: Heart of Gold, 2014 March: Dead Man (1995), 2014 August: Ragged Glory - Neil Young + Crazy Horse (1990), 2014 November: Broken Arrow (1996), 2015 January: Rust Never Sleeps (1979), 2015 January: Neil Young the Ultimate Guide, 2015 March: Old Black, 2015 September: Zuma (1975), 2016 January: On the Beach (1973).

Jerome Myers, "The Mission Tent," 1912

"... Twenty two years earlier, in 1912, a major event had taken place in Jerome Myers' life. The occasion was when the Metropolitan Museum of Art first decided to make a first purchase of a painting of his titled The Mission Tent. Here is a quote from the Metropolitan Museum Bulletin in June 1913 talking about their purchase: 'Jerome Myers for several years has been showing New Yorkers the artistic possibilities of what is perhaps the unique part of the city's scenes. He has discovered these subjects for himself and treats them in his own way. It is never the exciting moments of street life that move him, only the daily happenings, the usual things that all may see. Boys and girls playing in the square, the crowd at a recreation pier, an organ-grinder followed by a troop of dancing children, old people whom the night freshness lures to the park-bench or the wharf, a religious festival in Little Italy—these are his favorite themes and he renders them with loving sincerity and a profound appreciation of their significance.' ... "
Project Gutenberg

The Poet Idolized by a New Generation of Feminists

"ON A RECENT SUNDAY afternoon, ­Eileen Myles came to meet me in the East Village on a white bicycle with brown leather handlebars. We chose as our destination Saint Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, a historic portal of downtown Manhattan a few blocks from the rent-subsidized apartment where she has lived for nearly 40 years. Since 1966, the church has housed the Poetry Project, which began as a government-­funded attempt to address the teenage hippie runaway problem by offering free creative writing workshops, and which Myles discovered when she made her way to New York from Boston in 1974, then in her mid-20s, and not yet out as a lesbian. There, she found the poets drinking and smoking cigarettes around long tables in the church’s back rooms, at seminars run by Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan. Allen Ginsberg came to readings, the group’s leaders were heroes and the East Village felt, to Myles, like the center of anti-institutional American poetry. ..."
NY Times
The “Resurgent Popularity” of Eileen Myles

2008 June: Eileen Myles, 2010 August: Inferno, 2015 February: “A Thrashing, Generous Intelligence”: Eileen Myles’s Inferno chosen for Slate/Whiting Second Novel List, 2015 August: The Women of the Avant-Garde

Architecture of Language 1979-1982 - Pere Ubu

"Like many bands during the 70s, Pere Ubu arrived out of a novel palette of influences, non-musical as much as musical. As a group they sound just as interested in scatty, disordered sounding improvisation in jazz as much as were the bizarre ideas behind the creation of certain modernist literature. Points of reference include Miles Davis; playwright Alfred Jarry (their name is a direct reference to central character of the same name); "typical high-school stuff", as their singer David Thomas puts it, like Terry Riley's In C. ... This is most clear on this quartet of albums, released on the 4 LP boxset Architecture of Language 1979-1982, which can be easily blocked off as one segment of Pere Ubu's lifespan. ..."
The Quietus
Pere Ubu released ‘Architecture Of Language 1979-1982′ box set (Video)
UbuProjex
Graded on a Curve: Pere Ubu, Architecture of Language 1979-1982
Louder Than War (Video)
juno: Architecture Of Language 1979-1982 (Video)

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), 2016 January: Live at the Longhorn: April 1, 1978, 2016 February: Cloudland (1989).

In Which We Cook By The Recipes Of Paul Cézanne

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1882–1885
"... In spring of 1859, Paul Cézanne fell in love for the first time. Unfortunately the woman in question, whose name was Justine, was already involved with a classmate. He wrote, 'What fantasies I built, as mad as can be, but you see it’s like this: I said to myself if she didn’t despise me we should go to Paris together, there I should become an artist, we should be happy.' She never took notice of him. To make himself forget the girl, he spent all his time at the Free School of Drawing. While there, you were forbidden to ever go to the bathroom. Cézanne disdained the nude models, and at first he shied away from depicting the human form at all. He was far from the best of the group. ..."
This Recording

2011 August: Paul Cézanne, 2015 March: Madame Cézanne

Algerian Chronicles - Albert Camus (2013)

"... When the Algerian war for independence broke out in 1954, Camus was devastated. For years he had voiced strong criticism of French colonial policy in Algeria, and was forced to leave the country in 1940 after the authorities shut down the newspaper where he had published his most critical articles. He considered himself Algerian. ... When even such modest proposals were scuttled by hard-line French settlers and the French government, power among Arabs shifted to the independence movement, which had concluded that only violence could make the French budge. The bloody war that ensued lasted eight years; terrorism and brutal repression — including the torture of militants by the French Army — reinforced each other in a deadly cycle. Even a regime change in France, with Charles de Gaulle returning as president of the Fifth Republic in 1958, could not stop the bleeding for another four years. ..."
NY Times: The Postcolonial
NYB - Camus & Algeria: The Moral Question
New Republic: What Camus Understood About the Middle East
Harvard: Algerian Chronicles (Video)
France24: Special show for the 100th anniversary of Albert Camus’ birth (Video)
amazon

2011 October: Albert Camus on Nihilism, 2014 November: Albert Camus: Soccer Goalie, 2015 May: LISTEN: New Cave And Ellis Soundtrack, 2016 April: Anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Wondem - Dexter Story (2015)

"Wondem is Dexter Story's second album as a solo artist. His first, 2012's Seasons, was a gem that highlighted his take on global soul and reflected his lifelong participation in L.A.'s sprawling, interconnected, independent music scene. A singer, songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and arranger, he is a founding member of the Life Force Trio, as is his co-producer here, Carlos Niño. The lineup on Wondem features a host of their regular musical partners, including Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Mark de Clive-Lowe. The album was inspired by East African, North African, and Caribbean music, all sifted through modern L.A. soul, funk, and jazz. Story is everywhere, singing, playing keyboards, percussion, guitars, basses, etc. His arrangements are easy on the ears; they cordially invite the listener into his brand of global fusion on their own terms. ..."
allmusic
NPR - Review: Dexter Story, 'Wondem' (Spotify)
Wondem (Video)
YouTube: Lalibela (Official Video 8mm version - Live), Eastern Prayer (ft Nia Andrews)
YouTube: Wondem (Full Album)

Paul Strand

Wikipedia - "Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Strand was born in New York City to Bohemian parents. In his late teens, he was a student of renowned documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. ... Over the next few decades, Strand worked in motion pictures as well as still photography. His first film was Manhatta (1921), also known as New York the Magnificent, a silent film showing the day-to-day life of New York City made with painter/photographer Charles Sheeler. ..."
Wikipedia
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
New Yorker: Paul Strand’s Sense of Things
Lumiere Gallery
V&A: Paul Strand – an introduction (Video)
YouTube: Paul Strand 22:19

Tellus #25 - Site-Less Sounds (1991)

"TELLUS issue #25 looks like a continuation from previous endeavors, namely #9 ‘Music With Memory’, 1985 (especially for the Brenda Hutchinson‘s interviews collage ‘Interlude from Voices Of Reason’) and #18 ‘Experimental Theater’, 1987, which included impressive readings on gender issues by Spalding Gray and Jerri Allyn, amongst others. Tellus #25 ‘Site-Less Sounds’ is a theater of voices with all contributions based on reading, sound poetry and language, as well as extended use of recording studio facilities (including Studio Pass on tracks #1 & 6). The works on this CD mingle semantics with politics, mirroring racial, political and gender issues with semantics/phonetics. Language is considered the tool of oppression itself (via media overload, political blabber and daily prejudices) and the means of liberation at the same time, providing composers and the people use it as a weapon. ..."
Continuo
Discogs
[PDF] Tellus 25#
UbuWeb: Tellus #25 - Site-Less Sounds (Video)

2009 September: Tellus Audio Cassette Magazing, 2010 May: Tellus #16 - Tango, 2010 June: Tellus #12 - Dance (1986), 2010 June: Tellus #10: All Guitars! (1985), 2010 August: Tellus #13 - Power Electronics (1986), 2011 March: Tellus #15: The Improvisors (1985), 2013 July: Tellus #23 - The Voices of Paul Bowles (1989), 2014 June: Tellus #26 - Jewel Box (1992).

The Band — Don’t Do It (1976)

"... Of course, what I REALLY love writing about is how Music A informs Music B and how exploring A and B allows you see both differently. So, it’s within that framework that we revisit [Marvin] Gaye. He was one of the benchmark R&B singers of the 20th century, with enough pop sensibility to crossover, and enough gospel in his voice that you knew he meant business. And yet, he also occupies an interesting niche in rock history. As it happens, an obscure-ish 1964 Marvin Gaye single was the first song heard in The Last Waltz, and the final song ever played by the original Band. When Robbie Robertson says, 'We’re gonna do one more song and that’s it,' that was it. ..."
Adios Lounge (Video - Winterland, San Francisco, November 25, 1976)
song mango
W - Baby Don't You Do It
YouTube: Don't Do It (live 12/28-12/31/71, the Academy of Music, NYC)

2009 July: The Band, 2011 June: Music from Big Pink, 2011 September: The Last Waltz, 2012 December: King Harvest 2012 January: Rare Concert Footage of The Band, 1970, 2015 January: Stage Fright (1970), 2015 October: The Band (1969), 2015 December: The Band With The Hawks - The Silver Dome 1989.

Nassau Street

"Nassau Street is referenced only once in Dubliners. It appears early in 'Two Gallants' as one of the avenues Corley and Lenehan traverse on their way from a public house in Dorset Street, in the north part of the city, to the area of Stephen’s Green in the south, a journey of over 1.5 miles (2.5 km) that would take roughly 30 minutes to walk, according to the map. Nassau Street runs along the southern edge of Trinity College, connecting Grafton Street in the west and Kildare Street in the east. The young men’s path takes them past the gates of Trinity College (which face west), which they reach at 'twenty after,' around the corner and along Nassau Street, and then into Kildare Street. ..."
Mapping Dubliners Project

2011 March: Passages from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1965-67), 2010 March: Ulysses Seen, 2013 February: ULYSSES “SEEN” is moving to Dublin!, 2013: Dubliners, 2014 May: The Dead (1987 film), 2014 May: “Have I Ever Left It?” by Mark O'Connell, 2014 July: Digital Dubliners, 2014 September: Read "Ulysses Seen", A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Classic, 2015 January: The Mapping Dubliners Project, 2015 February: Davy Byrne’s, 2016 January: Port and Docks, 2016 February: Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Unabridged & Set to Music By 17 Different Artists.

Julia Wertz

Greenpoint drawing of Manhattan Ave and Kent St in the 1920’s
Wikipedia - "Julia Wertz (born December 29, 1982 in the San Francisco Bay Area) is an American cartoonist, writer and urban explorer. ... In 2010, Random House published Drinking at the Movies, Wertz's first full-length graphic memoir. Against the backdrop of her move from San Francisco to New York, the book details serious issues, such as a family member's battle with substance abuse and her own alcoholism, with trademark wit and self-effacement. ... In 2015, Wertz started a monthly comics series for The New Yorker, about lesser known historical events and facts about New York City, as well as a monthly illustration series of cityscapes for Harper's Magazine. Wertz currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. ..."
Wikipedia
Harpers | Julia Wertz
The Paris Review - Staying Out of Trouble: An Interview with Julia Wertz
Aha Moment: “My New York Diary” (Video)
Julia Wertz
YouTube: Young and Uninsured: Cartoonist Julia Wertz

Bouchra Khalili: The Mapping Journey Project

"This exhibition presents, in its entirety, Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), a series of videos that details the stories of eight individuals who have been forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally and whose covert journeys have taken them throughout the Mediterranean basin. Khalili (Moroccan-French, born 1975) encountered her subjects by chance in transit hubs across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Following an initial meeting, the artist invited each person to narrate his or her journey and trace it in thick permanent marker on a geopolitical map of the region. The videos feature the subjects’ voices and their hands sketching their trajectories across the map, while their faces remain unseen. ..."
MoMA
Sharjah Art Foundation
The Meaning in Mapping: Bouchra Khalili's Border-Crossing Video Art at the New Museum
NY Times: ‘The Mapping Journey,’ Bouchra Khalili’s Searing Refugee Project

Till human voices wake us - Siavash Amini (2014)

"'Till human voices wake us' comprises ten tracks with an obvious and smart structural script, based on poems by T.S Eliot. Which highlights Siavash Amini’s work as a composer for theater, film and art exhibitions. His music deliberately slants to the ambient statements – or Morricone’s Western film scores. The different nuances of the synthetic/digital and the multilayered soul healing riffs of electric guitar create an opulent sonic texture ranging from the dramatic to melancholic moments, with a finely constructed and fluid dynamism. There is an emotional depth in each of Amini’s songs, guided by tonal variations and blending grains that make his music a mental journey with landscapes and cold outcomes and the passivity of an ending that everyone expects at the end of this long road. Till human voices wake us is the first album of Amini in a non-Iranian label, and we are very proud to present it in Umor Rex. He is one of the most familiar faces on the experimental music scene in Iran, on the boil in recent years."
Umor Rex (Video)
Headphone Commute (Video)
futuresequence (Video)

The unsanitized story of Jackie Robinson

"... Yet even that is a concoction. At best, it is a fantasy discouraging the deeper, more painful excavation of the barriers he couldn't break and why, the ones society did not lower but strengthened because of the threat of his presence. At worst, it is a simplistic and corrosive lie designed to keep America from itself, to keep it from what it is, which is a nation far more comfortable with always being the good guy, always preferring the fairy tale to the truth. The real Robinson, whole and unsanitized, was constantly human, competitive, flawed and pained, honorably naïve but always in determined opposition to the obstacles that prevented him from fulfilling a quest still unrealized some 44 years after his death: full partnership in the American dream for African-Americans. The real Robinson lives beautifully and heroically, inside a confectionary lie that his sainthood was something given by a redeemed America rather than taken from a resistant one. ..."
ESPN
LA Times: Ken Burns' 'Jackie Robinson' documentary is a lump-in-the-throat trip that goes beyond baseball
NY Times: ‘Jackie Robinson,’ on PBS, Covers More Than Race and Baseball
Mother Jones: Ken Burns on His New Jackie Robinson Documentary: "It's About Black Lives Matter" (Video)
PBS: Jackie Robinson (Video)

2009 September: Jackie Robinson

The story behind three faded ads in Manhattan

"If you look up enough while walking through the city, you see a fair number of these weathered ads, partly erased by rain and grime. Deciphering what they say isn’t always easy. Take this ad at 23 East 20th Street. “Furs” is still legible, but the name of the company is tricky. It looks like M. Handin & Grapkin—which is close, as sure enough a company with the name Drapkin appears to have gone into the furrier business as early as 1909. The wonderful faded sign site 14to42.net says that M. Handin and Drapkin were located in this building around 1909, and the faded ad could be more than a century old. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Clifford Brown and Max Roach (1955)

"According to the original 1955 liner notes to Clifford Brown and Max Roach, the announcement that Clifford Brown and Max Roach had begun recording and playing together sent shock waves throughout the jazz community and predictions ran rampant about how the two might shape bop to come. The last duo to really shape the music had begun over ten years earlier, with the relationship between Bird and Diz. This recording was early fruit from a tree that would only live as long as Clifford Brown was around to water it (1956, the year of his tragic auto accident). The result is by far some of the warmest and most sincere bebop performed and committed to tape. Brown's tone is undeniably and characteristically warm, and he keeps the heat on alongside Roach's lilting vamps and pummeling solos. ..."
allmusic (Video)
W - Clifford Brown and Max Roach
Clifford Brown-Max Roach Project at the Piedmont Piano Company
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: Clifford Brown & Max Roach (Full Album)
1/ Delilah 00:00 2/ Parisian Thoroughfare 08:03 3/ Daahoud 15:18 4/ Joy Spring 19:19 5/ Jordu 26:09 6/ The Blues Walk 33:51 7/ What Am I Here For? 40:36

The world’s best record shops #007: Rockers International, Kingston

"We continue our quest with Jamaica’s finest. Every week, we pick out one must-visit spot from a different city around the world with photos and a little bit of history. Think of it as a kind of 1000 places to see before you die for record shops. Our round-the-world-trip has already taken us to London, Berlin, Chicago, New Delhi, Tokyo and Paris. Next stop? Orange Street, downtown Kingston. Once alive wth record shops and music studios, Orange Street today is an abandoned ghost town, the last vestige of reggae’s golden era. Augustus Pablo’s legendary dub institution Rockers International is just one of two record shops left on the strip. ..."
The Vinyl Factory
Keep on Dubbing: Inside Jamaica’s Rockers International Record Shop
Guardian - Rockers International Records on Orange Street, Kingston: reggae playlist (Video)
Orange Street, Vestige of the Golden Age of Reggae
YouTube: Addis Pablo @ Rockers International Record Shop speaking; Java & Augustus Pablo

Bernie Sanders and the History of American Socialism

Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs addressing a 1912 meeting in New York.
"Evidence suggests that, in the early 1960s, American college students favored pouring beer on their heads and dancing to 'Louie Louie' over joining the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). But if anybody was likely to join the Socialist Party’s youth auxiliary, it was a brainy child of immigrant Jews, a son of Brooklyn — where Jewish voters had, for decades, cast ballots for socialists and liberals who resembled socialists. For Bernie Sanders, socialism was something of a birthright. ... It seems fitting that the country’s first serious socialist presidential candidate since the 1930s should have political roots in the Lower East Side — the cradle of New York socialism. ..."
Jacobin

2016 January: Donald Trump and the Joys of Toy Fascism, 2016 January: Sanders Is Not Trump, 2016 January: Donald Trump’s Twitter Insults: The Complete List (So Far), 2016 February: Bernie and the Millennials, 2016 April: Lost in TRUMPLANDIA.

Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

"Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial is the fifth installment of the museum’s signature contemporary design exhibition series. With a focus on aesthetic innovation, Beauty celebrates design as a creative endeavor that engages the mind, body, and senses. Curated by Andrea Lipps, Assistant Curator, and Ellen Lupton, Senior Curator of Contemporary Design, the exhibition features more than 250 works by 63 designers and teams from around the globe, and is organized around seven themes: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental, and transformative. ..."
Cooper Hewitt
NY Times: Cooper Hewitt Triennial Offers a Bold Look at ‘Beauty’
CNN: Sniff Central Park and see Bogota at dusk, 63 designers capture 'Beauty'
Beauty, According to the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

When the Oil Fields Burned

"Twenty-five years ago, as the United States-led coalition started driving out Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s troops responded by setting ablaze hundreds of oil wells, creating one of the worst environmental disasters in recent memory. By the time I reached southeastern Kuwait in April 1991, on assignment for The New York Times Magazine, the war had ended but the smoke from the arson in the Greater Burgan oil fields continued to obliterate the sun and the flames lit up the desert horizon. Oil-well firefighters from dozens of countries had begun working in unbelievably difficult circumstances to try to extinguish the inferno. For me, these men are the true heroes of the war. Covered head to foot in oil, they moved like phantoms through the gloom. The roar of the flames forced them to communicate by shouting into one another’s ears. ..."
NY Times
W - Kuwaiti oil fires
Kuwaiti Oil Wells
Kuwait Oil Field Restoration
NPR - Iraq War Fear: The Burning Fields
VICE: Syria's Illegal Oil Wells (Video)
YouTube: Kuwait oil fields burning Gulf War 1991

The Elements - Joe Henderson featuring Alice Coltrane (1973)

Wikipedia - "The Elements is an album by American saxophonist Joe Henderson, released in 1973 on Milestone. 1970 began a decade of discovery for Joe Henderson, a time to set aside the post-bop instrumentation and repertoire he was identified with and branch out into other realms. One of the most successful and challenging of these efforts that the Milestone label documented was the present four-part improvisation on the basic themes of 'Fire', 'Air', 'Water' and 'Earth'. Assisting the tenor saxophonist was a group of sympathetic explorers--Alice Coltrane on piano and harp, violin original Michael White, bass giant Charlie Haden, and the multifaceted percussionist Kenneth Nash. Latin American, Indian, and Native American strains enter the mix as Henderson applies the heat and mercurial invention of his more conventional work to these open-ended settings. While the music is enhanced with overdubbing in spots, the true magic of The Elements emanates from the musicians' collective genius at listening and responding to each other. ..."
Wikipedia
JOE HENDERSON featuring ALICE COLTRANE
YouTube: The Elements (Full Album)

2016 January: Ptah, The El Daoud - Alice Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders (1970)

Experiments with the New York School of Poets

Frank O'Hara and Franz Kline - Cedar Tavern, 1959
"... Borrowing this line, our four-week poetry writing workshop at Mid-Manhattan Library began writing poems in March. We traveled our own memory lanes to call up a friend, a lover, a favorite actor, or a foe to give a line to in our notebook, a public address to aid in immortality. Our March workshop, led by poet Hermine Meinhard, discussed the New York School of poets, their influences, their style, and their writing habits as it captured the spirit of the 1950s and 60s in New York City. Taking some of these habits, we wrote poetry, trying for a slice of life or a walk down a New York street, using drips and splashes of collaged ideas. The New York School of poets began in the late '40s with a group of poets interested in art, especially the Abstract Expressionists, and urban life. Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Barbara Guest were among the originals to this group and we devoted a session to discussing each of them and then writing poetry inspired by their style. ..."
The New York Public Library
Elaine de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, and the New York School

2013 June: Cedar Tavern

Agitprop!

Yoko Ono and John Lennon made noise with their 1972, Some Time in New York City.
"At key moments in history, artists have reached beyond galleries and museums, using their work as a call to action to create political and social change. For the past hundred years, the term agitprop, a combination of agitation and propaganda, has directly reflected the intent of this work. Agitprop! connects contemporary art devoted to social change with historic moments in creative activism, highlighting activities that seek to motivate broad and diverse publics. Exploring the complexity, range, and impact of these artistic practices—including photography, film, prints, banners, street actions, songs, digital files, and web platforms—the exhibition expands over its run within a unique and dynamic framework. ..."
Brooklyn Museum
NY Times: The Art of Politics, in ‘Agitprop!’ at the Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn Museum’s Activist Art Show Is a Messy Collision of Curation and Politics
Art In America: Waves of Dissent, Legacies of Change
YouTube: Dread Scott: Brooklyn Museum's New 'Agitprop!' Exhibit | BK Live

The Jam - "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight" (1979)

Wikipedia - "'Down in the Tube Station at Midnight' was the second single taken from the album All Mod Cons by The Jam. Released on 21 October 1978, it charted at number 15 and was backed by a cover of the Who song 'So Sad About Us', and 'The Night', written by Bruce Foxton. The back of the record jacket displayed a photo of Keith Moon, former drummer of The Who, who had died of an overdose of prescribed medication intended to help his alcoholism the month prior to the single's release. ..."
Wikipedia - Down in the Tube Station at Midnight
allmusic
Genius
YouTube: Down In The Tube Station At Midnight, So sad about us, The Night

2009 March: The Jam, 2012 November: "Going Underground", 2013 January: In the City, 2013 February: This Is the Modern World, 2013 July: All Mod Cons, 2013 November: Setting Sons, 2014 January: Sound Affects (1980), 2014 December: Live At Bingley Hall, Birmingham, England 1982, 2015 March: "Town Called Malice" / "Precious", 2015 July: The Gift (1982), 2015 September: "Strange Town" / "The Butterfly Collector" (1979).