Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem

Photographs, notebooks, calendars, magazines and hundreds of recordings are part of the archive.
"The saxophonist Sonny Rollins, perhaps jazz’s most respected living improviser, is also one of its most relentless seekers. But that’s well known; what’s not as widely recognized is the diversity — and the depth — of his inquiry. Yes, there’s his herculean practice regimen (upward of eight hours a day, even into middle age) and the yearslong sabbaticals he took from performing to hone his craft. But Mr. Rollins, 86, has also maintained a vigorous, syncretic spiritual practice, and he has written hundreds of pages of personal notes over the years — reflecting on music technique and the music business and expressing social laments. He even started writing an instructional saxophone book but dropped that project. ..."
NY Times (Spotify, Video)

2012 September: The Singular Sound of Sonny Rollins, 2012 December: Village Vanguard, 2015 September: Rollins Plays for Bird (1957), 2016 February: Saxophone Colossus (1956), 2016 May: Plus 4 (1956).

The Opinion Pages: Our Disgraceful Exit From the Paris Accord

"Only future generations will be able to calculate the full consequences of President Trump’s incredibly shortsighted approach to climate change, since it is they who will suffer the rising seas and crippling droughts that scientists say are inevitable unless the world brings fossil fuel emissions to heel. But this much is clear now: Mr. Trump’s policies — the latest of which was his decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change — have dismayed America’s allies, defied the wishes of much of the American business community he pretends to help, threatened America’s competitiveness as well as job growth in crucial industries and squandered what was left of America’s claim to leadership on an issue of global importance. ..."
NY Times

The Wild Palms - William Faulkner (1939)

Wikipedia - "If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem is a novel by the American author William Faulkner published in 1939. The novel was originally published under the title The Wild Palms, which is the title of one of the two interwoven stories. ... Each story is five chapters long and they offer a significant interplay between narrative plots. 'Wild Palms' tells the story of Harry and Charlotte, who meet, fall in forbidden love, travel the country together for work, and, ultimately, experience tragedy when the abortion Harry performs on Charlotte kills her. 'Old Man' is the story of a convict who, while being forced to help victims of a flood, rescues a pregnant woman. They are swept away downstream by the flooding Mississippi, and she gives birth to a baby. He eventually gets both himself and the woman to safety and then turns himself in, returning to prison. ..."
Wikipedia
Esoteric Symbolism and Allegory in Faulkner’s Old Man
amazon

2011 September: Southern Gothic, 2014 February: William Faulkner, 2015 October: William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels, 2015 November: Interviews William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12, 2016 April: Absalom, Absalom!! (1936), 2016 May: The Sound and the Fury (1929), 2016 October: The Snopes Trilogy (1940, 1957, 1959), 2016 December: Light in August (1932), 2017 February: As I Lay Dying (1930)

Afrobeat Airways 2: Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983

"In his introductory essay to Afrobeat Airways 2: Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983, Afropop Worldwide editor Banning Eyre interviews some of the compilation’s featured artists, including the legendary Ghanaian guitarist and bandleader Ebo Taylor. ... Hearing James Brown in the late 60s, Taylor adds, reminded a generation of Ghanaian musicians that lamentation was just as potent as exultation. That dichotomy of major and minor, happy and sad, haunts Return Flight. Overwhelmingly the tracks are lambent and melancholy, sunsets made sonic. Still, they teem. Swarms of organ notes and stinging guitar licks turn the African Brothers’ 'Wope Me A Ka' — one of the most irrepressible tracks on the 13-song collection—into a connect-the-dots funk-puzzle whose final form only begins to coalesce after a shuffling, skeletal break. ..."
Pitchfork
Discogs
YouTube: Afrobeat Airways 2 - Return Flight To Ghana 1974-1983 1:01:04

BBC: Paris - City of Dreams

"Few cities boast the romantic allure of Paris: its charm, its energy, its style. Sandrine Voillet reveals how Paris battled through turmoil and trauma to become the city of dreams – the capital of the world in all but name, in this BBC/OU series. We first meet Sandrine in the Louvre, the world’s most famous museum of art and the place where she studied the history of art. Before it was a museum, the Louvre was a splendid palace. That all changed with the French Revolution of 1789 and that is when Sandrine begins her story of Paris. From the blood-soaked streets of revolution Paris rose up to become the world’s first truly modern city – the place where the way we work, live and play in cities today was born during the 19th century. ..."
OpenLearn
YouTube: Paris - The City of Dreams 59:09

Gustav Wunderwald’s Paintings of Weimar Berlin

Unterführung in Spandau, 1927
"Berlin in June 1945 was not at all a pleasant place to be. As the dust settled on what was left of the city, blown to smithereens and now occupied by Russian and Allied forces, the landscape painter Gustav Wunderwald died from water poisoning in a hospital in the western suburb of Charlottenburg. He was sixty-three years old. In the seventy years or so that have passed since his death, the city that Wunderwald painted over and again during the years of the Weimar Republic has been divided, rebuilt, reunified, and revived. And yet, despite the waves of history that have beat relentlessly, remorselessly against Berlin, were he alive today, Wunderwald would still recognise many aspects of the city that he painted during the late twenties. ..."
Public Domain Review
W - Gustav Wunderwald
Artworks

New Art, New Money (February 10, 1985)

"When Jean Michel Basquiat walks into Mr. Chow's on East 57th Street in Manhattan, the waiters all greet him as a favorite regular. Before he became a big success, the owners, Michael and Tina Chow, bought his artwork and later commissioned him to paint their portraits. He goes to the restaurant a lot. One night, for example, he was having a quiet dinner near the bar with a small group of people. While Andy Warhol chatted with Nick Rhodes, the British rock star from Duran Duran, on one side of the table, Basquiat sat across from them, talking to the artist Keith Haring. Haring's images of a crawling baby or a barking dog have become ubiquitous icons of graffiti art, a style that first grew out of the scribblings (most citizens call them defacement) on New York's subway cars and walls. ..."
NY Times
artist-timeline - Jean-Michel Basquiat
YouTube: Jean Michel Basquiat Fun Gallery Crosby St Studio 1982

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, 2015 December: The Notebooks

Dining “among the rooftops” of New York in 1905

Dîner sur le Toit, Gouache on board.
"Spending a warm evening in a New York rooftop bar or restaurant is one of the city’s sublime summertime pleasures. New Yorkers in the Gilded Age thought so as well. After the first roof garden opened on top of the Casino Theater at Broadway and 39th Street in the 1880s, other theaters and hotels opened entertainment venues on their roofs, offering cool breezes and panoramic views illuminated by the city’s new electric lights. 'A number of hotels, including the Waldorf-Astoria, the Vendome, Hotel Belleclaire, the Majestic, and the Women’s Hotel, all have charming roof-gardens,' states a 1904 article in Leslie’s illustrated magazine. French artist Charles Hoffbauer was captivated by the roof garden craze too. In 1904, this Impressionist painter created a series of paintings depicting well-dressed men and women dining on a New York City rooftop. ..."
Ephemeral New York
Charles Hoffbauer’s Rooftop Diners
W - Charles Hoffbauer

The Kitchen Presents Two Moon July (1986)

"... The television production Two Moon July was a multidisciplinary event that featured experimental video, film, visual art, performance and music in a theatrical framework. More than thirty artists participated in the program, which was produced for the Kitchen by Carlota Schoolman and directed by Tom Bowes. This production reflects a moment when art centers were experimenting with new modes of presenting the arts for television. The participating artists read like a 'who's who' of 1980's downtown art icons. Short excerpts from video and film works (by artists including Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum, Bruce Connor and Bill Viola) are intercut with performances and art installations in the Kitchen's gallery spaces. ... Art works by '80s art stars Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Jonathan Borofsky are integral to the mise en scene, while music by downtown legends Brian Eno, Philip Glass and Arto Lindsay, among others, provides a running soundtrack. ..."
UbuWeb (Video)

Habana Leones

1951 Habana Leones
Wikipedia - "The Habana club was one of the oldest and most distinguished baseball teams in the old Cuban League, which existed from 1878 to 1961. Habana, representing the city of Havana, was the only team to play in the league every season of its existence and was one of its most successful franchises. In their early history they were known by their colors as the Reds; later they adopted the names of Leones or Lions. Throughout their existence they had a famous rivalry with Almendares. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times - The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball By ROBERTO GONZÁLEZ ECHEVARRÍA
SABR: Lazaro Salazar
PEBA: Havana Leones
BR: Cuban Winter League
The Rise of the Latin American Baseball Leagues, 1947–1961

Filmed by Libin+Cameron: James White & The Blacks (1980 Live Performance Hurrah NightClub)

"Okay, so it’s Monday… That’s bad enough already, but it’s also a Monday in January and much of the eastern part of the US of A is totally blanketed in snow and freezing cold, so maybe you had to brave the elements to get to work, or maybe it’s a winter wonderland “snow day” for you and you’re sitting at home. Either way, I can’t help but to think, no matter your circumstances right now, this very moment as you are reading this, that your life will be improved by these recently posted video clips of Blondie’s Debbie Harry guesting onstage with James White and the Blacks at the Hurrah’s nightclub in New York City in 1980. ..."
Post-punk funk: Debbie Harry and James White & The Blacks cover Chic and James Brown, 1980
YouTube: Sophisticated Cancer, Melt Yourself Down, Money to Burn, Good Times (Deborah Harry)

2009 December: James Chance, 2011 December: No New York, 2014 July: No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980, 2014 July: Bush Tetras, 2015 January: Buy - James Chance and the Contortions (1979), 2015 July: James White And The Blacks - Off White (1979), 2015 October: Pat Place, 2016 January: Lost Chance (1981), 2017 January: Twist Your Soul: The Definitive Collection (2010), 2017 April: Contort Yourself / (Tropical) Heatwave full 12” (1979)Z.

ToposText

"The Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, established as a non-profit making organization on April 24, 2007 by a Presidential Decree, continues the cultural activity of the late Aikaterini Laskaridis, initiated some fifty years ago in Neo Faliro and continuing to this day. The Scope of the Foundation is to promote Greek arts and letters as well as maritime tradition and history. As an active and lively cultural – educational organization, it organizes and performs every year a large number of cultural and educational programmes. Target audiences include the general public, and especially students and the teacher and university professor communities; our educational programs involve more than 20,000 children each year. ..."
ToposText

Charles "Teenie" Harris

"Watch many photographers today working on digital SLRs and you’ll see them shoot, pull the camera down to peek in the digital screen to check the image, then repeat. This action has become known as chimping, and old salts will say that it betrays the photographer as an amateur, because back in the days of film, once you took a photo, that was what you had. But in the days of film, especially in a controlled setting, photographers often made redundant shots to make sure they captured what they wanted. Not Charles 'Teenie' Harris. A native of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the city’s cultural center of African-American life, Harris was a semi-pro athlete and a numbers runner before he bought his first camera in the 1930s. ..."
TIME - One Shot Teenie: A Retrospective of Charles Harris
TEENIE HARRIS ARCHIVE (Carnegie Museum of Art)
NPR: The Big Legacy Of Charles 'Teenie' Harris, Photographe (Radio)R
Wikipedia
Charles Harris

Ebo Taylor - Life Stories (Highlife & Afrobeat Classics 1973-1980)

"Following his recent studio album with Afrobeat Academy, Love And Death, his first international release, Ghanaian highlife guitar legend Ebo Taylor teams up again with Strut for a long overdue definitive compilation of his seminal 1970s recordings, Life Stories, focusing on his solo albums and some of his lesser known side projects including the dynamite Apagya Show Band and short-lived Taylor-led combos Assase Ase, Super Sounds Namba and The Pelikans. The selection also touches on his writing and production work for C.K. Mann and a collaboration recording with fellow member of early '70s nightclub band Blue Monks, Pat Thomas. ..."
Paris DJs
Discogs
YouTube: Atwer Abroba, Heaven, Yes Indeed, Ohiani Sua Efir, Odofo Nyi Akyiri Biara, Amponsah

2011 August: Ebo Taylor, 2013 March: "Ayesama"

Temporary Equilibrium by Eleanor Ray

Morandi, Natura Morta (Still Life), 1956
"Arguing against Frank Stella’s famous assertion that 'Painting is made with colored paint on a surface and what you see is what you see,' Philip Guston claimed that a painting is 'not there physically at all.' For Guston, who spoke energetically about his varied experiences with the paintings he admired, powerful works could not be seen quickly or definitively. 'The art of the past is a hidden art,' he once said. Despite his acknowledged difficulties with talking about painting, Guston was unwilling to wave away the stubbornly elusive quality of the paintings, and the ordinary objects, that moved him. ... For Guston and Morandi, painting what was around them – books and shoes, bottles and boxes – provided a way to engage with certain aspects of painting that, while always in plain sight, refuse to be pinned down. ..."
This Recording

Martha Cooper: Five Decades of Street Art and Culture Around the Globe

Woman with white pants on 180th Street platform, Bronx, NYC, 1980.
"Photographer Martha Cooper has always lived life on her own term. ... By this time a new culture was bring born: street art. Forgoing the letterforms of graffiti, it embraced the pictorial traditions of murals and the techniques of aerosol art, and a new generation of artists was readily embraced by the art world. Cooper suddenly found herself in demand, as the photographs she had created were now being reproduced by artists like Shepard Fairey and Chris Stain to create street art works inspired by photographs from Street Play. ..."
Feature Shoot

Greenwich Village Stories: A Collection of Memories (2012)

"'In an age of cities, there is just one village that is known by people the world over: Greenwich Village,' writes Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter in Greenwich Village Stories: A Collection of Memories. Carter is one of 66 artists, writers, actors and others who reminisce about their time in the village in the new book by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. ... Contributors range from Mario Batali to Penny Arcade to Wynton Marsalis and the book also includes historical photos and other artworks. The photo on the cover of the book, taken by Robert Otter in 1965 at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, remains a bit of a mystery...."
THIRTEEN (Video)
Greenwich Village Stories
A love letter to Greenwich Village by luminaries who have called it home
NY Times: Grinding Beans Long Before the Baristas Came
amazon

The Thelonious Monk Quartet: The Complete Columbia Studio Albums Collection (2012)

"In a sense, I understand why Thelonious Monk's albums on Columbia, recorded between 1962 and 1968, have been neglected. His earlier sessions, on Blue Note, Prestige, and Riverside, were the ones where he introduced his classic songs, developed his eccentric style, and played with star-studded rhythm sections. The six quartet albums for Columbia feature a total of just six new Monk songs. And they find him playing with a working band of accompanists — no John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Griffin, Art Blakey, or Roy Haynes here. Yet the Columbias — Monk's Dream, Criss-Cross, It's Monk's Time, Monk, Straight No Chaser, and Underground — are shamefully underrated, and the proof is in Sony's new six-CD boxed set from Sony, The Thelonious Monk Quartet: The Complete Columbia Studio Albums Collection. ..."
Stereo Phile
New Yorker: The Best of Thelonious Monk
allmusic
amazon

2012 September: Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser, 2013 August: Five Spot Café, 2014 February: Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, 2015 February: "Epistrophy" - Thelonious Monk / Kenny Clarke (1941), 2016 November: Underground (1968).

Five Came Back (2017)

"Five Came Back is an irresistibly watchable and ebullient celebration of five remarkable Hollywood studio directors – William Wyler, Frank Capra, George Stevens, John Ford and John Huston – who tackled the second world war head on. These were the patriotic idealists who put their talents to work on the frontline, creating enlightened propaganda for Uncle Sam. It is a romantic story in its way, although one that sometimes succumbs to its own need for derring-do and self-mythologising. ... But Five Came Back is certainly timely and welcome, with its emphasis on how these five musketeers were fighting against isolation and cynicism, as exemplified by Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement. ..."
Guardian
NY Times: ‘Five Came Back,’ and Inspired the Likes of Spielberg
YouTube: Five Came Back | Official Trailer

The Syncopated Geography of Hip-Hop

"Since its beginnings, the hip-hop universe has expanded, its centers of gravity multiplied. The culture that was initially localized in the boroughs of New York, and which encompasses not only rap music, but also includes DJ-ing, breaking, graffiti, and fashion, has since been destabilized, and the culture continues to scatter and fragment through a continual alteration of sound, space, and technologies. Not long after its birth in the 70s, hip-hop spread like wildfire across the United States and around the world, with imitation and replication as a central facilitator of this dispersal and cross-pollination of musical and lyrical styles. Cities such as Atlanta, Miami, Houston, Memphis, Detroit, D.C., Philadelphia, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New Orleans, and several others soon developed their own communities and local styles that imitated the parent cultures residing in New York and L.A. while also reflecting the unique experiences of what it meant to live in each of these urban (or, in some cases, rural) locales. ..."
The Geography of Hip-Hop (Spotify)
Hip-Hop Map: A Story Map (Spotify)

Are You Glad to Be in America? - James Blood Ulmer (1980)

"In 1972, Ornette Coleman took guitarist James Blood Ulmer under his wing and taught Ulmer the principles of harmolodics, a musical system that treats the elements of harmony, rhythm, and melody equally. On Are You Glad to Be in America?, it drives a series of group improvisations that are simultaneously complex and direct. The sound of Are You Glad? is largely defined by its rhythm section: G. Calvin Weston and Ronald Shannon Jackson's propulsive drumming, Amin Ali's kinetic bass, and Ulmer's tightly wound guitar. The two drummers lay down persistent, tense rhythms that establish the album's nervous energy. ..."
allmusic
W - On Are You Glad to Be in America?
amazon
YouTube: Are You Glad To Be In America (Live)
YouTube: Are You Glad To Be Living In America, Jazz Is The Teacher (Funk Is The Preacher), Pressure, TV Blues

2015 November: Prime Time (1981), 2016 September: Black Rock (1982)

Green woodworking

Wikipedia - "Green woodworking is a form of wood craft or in broad terms, carpentry, that works unseasoned or 'green' timber into finished items. Unseasoned wood is wood that has been freshly felled or preserved by storing it in a water-filled trough or pond to maintain its naturally high moisture content. Green wood is much softer than seasoned timber and is therefore much easier to shape with hand tools. As moisture leaves the unseasoned wood, shrinkage occurs and the green woodworker can use this shrinkage to ensure tight joints in their work. To enhance the effect of the shrinkage, one half of a joint may be forcibly over-dried in a simple kiln while its encapsulating component is left green. The components tighten against each other as the parts exchange moisture and approach equilibrium with the surrounding environment. ..."
Wikipedia
Greenwoodworking
what is green woodworking?
YouTube: Green Wood Working NT, 50 Dollar Tool Kit for Green Woodworking

Books. Dieter Roth. Bjorn Roth. Studio.

"Beginning 27 April, Hauser & Wirth will present an exhibition offering rare insights into the central role that books played in the remarkably diverse artistic practice of legendary German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930 – 1998). Fueled by artistic restlessness, Roth’s wildly experimental approach to drawing, printing, and book making eventually found its way into ambitious large-scale sculptural installations, many conceived and executed in collaboration with his son Björn Roth. The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth presents ‘The Studio of Dieter and Björn Roth, Ackermannshof, Basel’ (1995 – 2008), an installation of the actual studio in Basel, Switzerland, shared by the father and son artmaking team, that includes furniture, books, and an array of personal items reflecting not just the Roths’ practice but a defining philosophy in which art and daily life are indivisible. ..."
Hauser Wirth
Hauser Wirth: Installation Views
Mousse Magazine
Alchetron
YouTube: Dieter Roth. Björn Roth. Inaugural Exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York 18th Street

Psych kg 173 flux lp kommissar hjuler speaks

2010 July: Dieter Roth

War - The World Is a Ghetto (1972)

"War's third album as an act separate from Eric Burdon was also far and away their most popular, the group's only long-player to top the pop charts. The culmination of everything they'd been shooting for creatively on their two prior albums, it featured work in both succinct pop-accessible idioms ('The Cisco Kid,' etc.) as well as challenging extended pieces such as the 13-minute 'City, Country, City' -- which offered featured spots to all seven members without ever seeming disjointed -- and the title track, and encompass not only soul and funk but elements of blues and psychedelia on works such as the exquisite 'Four Cornered Room.' ... Not only does it sound great, but there are important touches such as the phasing in 'Four Cornered Room,' not only on the percussion but also on the vocals, guitars, and other instruments, and the overall effect is a seemingly contradictory (yet eminently workable) shimmering blues, even working in a mournful and unadorned harmonica amid the more complex sounds."
allmusic
Superseventies
W - The World Is a Ghetto
amazon
YouTube: The World Is a Ghetto (Full Album) 44:01

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster (1986)

Wikipedia - "The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a single volume. ... The New York Trilogy is a particular form of postmodern detective fiction which still uses well-known elements of the detective novel (the classical and hardboiled varieties, for example) but also creates a new form that links 'the traditional features of the genre with the experimental, metafictional and ironic features of postmodernism.' A 2006 reissue by Penguin Books is fronted by new pulp magazine-style covers by comic book illustrator Art Spiegelman. ..."
Wikipedia
Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews
The New Canon: The Best in Fiction Since 1985
An Examination of the Identity of Author and Character and Their Relationship Within the Narrative Structure of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy
[PDF] The New York Trilogy (City of Glass) - Chapter 8
amazon

Aleppo After the Fall

"As the Syrian civil war turns in favor of the regime, a nation adjusts to a new reality — and a complicated new picture of the conflict emerges. One morning in mid-December, a group of soldiers banged on the door of a house in eastern Aleppo. A male voice responded from inside: 'Who are you?' A soldier answered: 'We’re the Syrian Arab Army. It’s O.K., you can come out. They’re all gone.' The door opened. A middle-aged man appeared. He had a gaunt, distinguished face, but his clothes were threadbare and his teeth looked brown and rotted. At the soldiers’ encouragement, he stepped hesitantly forward into the street. He explained to them, a little apologetically, that he had not crossed his threshold in four and a half years. ..."
NY Times

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, 2016 April: America Can’t Do Much About ISIS, 2016 June: What the Islamic State Has Won and Lost, 2016 July: ISIS: The Cornened Beast, 2016 October: Archaeological Victims of ISIS Rise Again, as Replicas in Rome, 2016 December: Battle Over Aleppo Is Over, Russia Says, as Evacuation Deal Reached, 2017 January: Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra, 2017 February: Tour a City Torn in Half by ISIS, 2017 March: Engulfed in Battle, Mosul Civilians Run for Their Lives.

The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s

Detail of a firescreen by Edgar Brandt in wrought iron and gilding, from around 1925.
"The first major museum exhibition to focus on American taste during the creative explosion of the 1920s, The Jazz Age is a multi-media experience of more than 400 examples of interior design, industrial design, decorative art, jewelry, fashion, and architecture, as well as related music and film. Giving full expression to the decade’s diversity and dynamism, The Jazz Age defines the American spirit of the period. During the 1920s, the influences that fueled design’s burst of innovation, exoticism, and modernity were manifold and flowed back and forth across the Atlantic. Jazz music, a uniquely American art form, also found a ready audience in Europe. An apt metaphor for the decade’s embrace of urbanity and experimentation, jazz captured the pulse and rich mixture of cultures and rhythms that brought a new beat to contemporary life. ..."
Cooper Hewitt
VOGUE - See How They Roared: A Pair of Exhibitions at the Cooper Hewitt Celebrates the Style and Dash of the Jazz Age
NY Times: Unnamed, Art Deco Steps Out With Plenty of Company in ‘The Jazz Age’
amazon

King Tubby & Clancy All Stars - Sound System International Dub LP (1976)

"Those with a casual interest in dub may find that this recently discovered album sounds a bit raw -- but for aficionados of the genre, it's a treasure trove. It finds a young King Tubby (who would later become dub's most famous and celebrated practitioner) flexing his chops and experimenting with techniques that he would later hone to a razor sharpness: the wholesale dropouts with throbbing echo that are in full effect on 'Joe'; tastefully selected scraps of vocals that float all over the place on 'Kingston Dub Town' (a brilliant and strangely tender dub version of the Lord Creator hit 'Kingston Town'); the reductions of backing tracks down to a dry and spare minimum, only to suddenly flower into echo-drenched blooms of sound -- all of these are techniques that Tubby either pioneered or perfected, and it's fascinating to hear them being applied to these late rocksteady and early reggae classics before he was fully in control of them. ..."
allmusic
Pressure
YouTube: Sound System International Dub LP 43:04

The Queens landscape by Frank Gohlke and Joel Sternfeld

The Lemon Ice King of Corona, 108 Street, 2003
"Steidl has just published Landscape as Longing, a book of photographs by Frank Gohlke and Joel Sternfeld made in Queens neighborhoods in New York between 2003 and 2004. The title immediately evokes the idea of desire and expectation tinged with nostalgia, and seems to suggest a definition and a method: landscape as a form of wistful anticipation. Gohlke and Sternfeld’s book is not, contrary to what one might expect, a celebration of multiethnic and multicultural Queens, and if there is a hint of journalism it is only in the style which occasionally draws on documentary photography. The views are captured with sober precision, with no aestheticization, if not for the fact that the whole is bathed in the same summer light. There is nothing excessive about them, either: Gohlke and Sternfeld’s Queens is a rather sad looking suburb, filled with parking lots, empty streets, garish store fronts, and highways; it’s an amalgam, devoid of coherence or cohesion, of industrial zones, no-man’s lands, natural areas, and residential lots. ..."
Steidl Verlag
GUP
amazon

Eddie & Ernie

"Eddie & Ernie were the Phoenix-based soul duo of Eddie Campbell and Ernie Johnson, issuing about 15 singles between 1963 and 1971. To make matters a little confusing, some of the singles were credited to Ernie & Eddie, the New Bloods, or Ernie & Ed. There were also 1967 solo releases by Campbell and Johnson. ... They were good soul singers, though, often recording their own material, sometimes sounding a little like Memphis or Alabama deep soul singers with a slightly less avowedly church-like overlay, sometimes going into more minor melodies and downbeat subject matter than most such soul performers did. Eddie & Ernie, like so many soul singers, did some time in gospel groups as youngsters before hooking up as a duo. ..."
allmusic
W - Eddie & Ernie
Discogs
YouTube: Outcast, We try harder, I Can't Do It, I'm a Young Man, Bullets Don't Have Eyes, Listen, I'm Gonna Always Love You, It's A Weak Man That Cries, The Cat (Eastern), Thanks For Yesterday, Lost friends, I Can't Do It (I Just Can't Leave You), Bullets Don't Have Eyes

Sundial and SUN - Bill Zavatsky

Sundial, vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter 1968).
"SUN — the magazine and the press (never 'Sun Press' or 'Sun Books” or 'Sun magazine') — emerged from the collapse of Sundial, a literary magazine started at Columbia University by undergraduate Lawrence Susskind in 1966. (The sundial at the center of 116th Street, which runs through the campus, offered its name as a hub of activity.) Sundial was funded by the Protestant Episcopal Office in Earl Hall, and featured dynamic graphic design and an eclectic approach that opened its pages not only to Columbia students but to anybody connected to the school. ..."
from a secret location
You Publish Too Much!: A Room 220 Interview with Bill Zavatsky
W - Bill Zavatsky
[PDF] Sundial/SUN, 1966 – 1983, compiled by Bill Zavatsky

Maximalism or Minimalism? The Modern Ice Cream Lover’s Dilemma

Ample Hills’ It Came From Gowanus with munchies topping (left) and Van Leeuwen’s strawberry with sprinkles
"On a recent Sunday at Van Leeuwen in Cobble Hill, coffee, chocolate, and Earl Grey tea ice creams filled the dipping cabinet in gradated shades of beige. A fifteen-minute walk away in Gowanus, Ample Hills Creamery was stocked with tubs of The Munchies, a pretzel-flavored scoop layered with potato chips, crackers, and M&Ms; and the store’s exclusive dark chocolate, orange brownie, hazelnut crack cookie, and white chocolate pearlfilled signature, It Came From Gowanus. ..."
VOICE

2014 August: Ice Cream

Brian Eno Releases Top 5 Favorite Fela Kuti Songs Playlist

"... Before about mid-September 1973 I didn’t have much interest in polyrhythmic music. I didn’t really get it. That all changed one Autumn day when I walked into Stern’s Record Shop off Tottenham Court Road in London. For reasons I’ve long forgotten, I left the store with an album that was to change my life dramatically. It was AFRODISIAC by Fela Ransome-Kuti (as he was then known) and his band The Africa 70. I remember the first time I listened and how dazzled I was by the groove and the rhythmic complexity, and by the raw, harsh sounds of the brass, like Mack trucks hurtling across highways with their horns blaring. Everything I thought I knew about music at that point was up in the air again. The sheer force and drive of this wild Nigerian stuff blew my mind. My friend Robert Wyatt called it ‘Jazz from another planet’ – and suddenly I thought I understood the point of jazz, until then an almost alien music to me.” – Brian Eno
Fela (Spotify)
YouTube: Thoughts On Fela

Crawdaddy

Wikipedia - "Crawdaddy was an American rock music magazine launched in 1966. It was created by Paul Williams, a Swarthmore College student at the time, in response to the increasing sophistication and cultural influence of popular music. The magazine was named after the Crawdaddy Club in London and published occasionally during its early years with an exclamation point, as Crawdaddy!. According to The New York Times, Crawdaddy was 'the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously', while the magazine's rival Rolling Stone acknowledged it as 'the first serious publication devoted to rock & roll news and criticism'. ... The magazine spawned the career of numerous rock and other writers. Early contributors included Jon Landau, Sandy Pearlman, Richard Meltzer and Peter Knobler. ..."
Wikipedia
NPR: Remembering Paul Williams, Founder Of Rock Magazine 'Crawdaddy!'
amazon
Crawdaddy Magazine 1966-1968

'Those are our Eiffel Towers, our pyramids': Why Standing Rock is about much more than oil

"On May 15, the Dakota Access Pipeline is scheduled to start delivering oil. The indigenous community of Standing Rock, North Dakota, has protested the pipeline for two years since its re-routing. Media coverage has largely portrayed the protest as an environmental movement and discussion of indigenous religion is rare. However, while environmental protection is a central and connected issue, discussions of Standing Rock that do not include an understanding of Native American religious traditions are missing important context. Over 5,000 years ago, the inhabitants of a village along the Green River, Kentucky, practiced the Cult of the River Keepers. Skeletons show evidence of auditory exostoses, a growth of cartilaginous tissue on ear bones that is found in humans who are repeatedly exposed to cold water – suggesting they frequently performed religious ceremonies in the river. ... Understood in its religious context, the Standing Rock Sioux are not anti-industry protestors, but practitioners of religious elements that may predate Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by centuries."
Guardian
Guardian: The Dakota pipeline is already leaking. Why wait for a big spill to act?

2011 July: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown, 2012 September: The Ghost Dance, 2016 September: A History and Future of Resistance, 2016 November: Dakota Access Pipeline protests, 2016 December: Police Violence Against Native Americans Goes Far Beyond Standing Rock, 2016 December: Dakota Protesters Say Belle Fourche Oil Spill 'Validates Struggle', 2017 January: A Murky Legal Mess at Standing Rock, 2017 January: Trump's Move On Keystone XL, Dakota Access Outrages Activists, 2017 February: Army veterans return to Standing Rock to form a human shield against police, 2017 February: Standing Rock is burning – but our resistance isn't over, 2017 March: Dakota Access pipeline could open next week after activists face final court loss, 2017 April: The Conflicts Along 1,172 Miles of the Dakota Access Pipeline