Catalonia: Past and Future - Luke Stobart

In Saint Julia de Ramis, police move in on crowds attempting to participate in the October 1 Catalan referendum vote.
"The battle around the October 1 independence referendum — called by the Catalan parliament but banned by Spain’s highest court — has become one of the most dramatic European developments in years. As result of attacks on polling stations that were occupied by citizens to guarantee the vote would take place, around nine hundred people were injured by police — including many elderly people and a man likely to lose an eye after being shot using a banned rubber bullet. In Catalonia the violence led to mass participation in a general strike two days later that managed to shut down most public transport, farms, docks, smaller shops, and the public sector — albeit helped in the last case by the Catalan government subsidizing lost pay. This was a political strike of the kind not seen since the struggles against the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. ..."
Jacobin

2017 October: Catalonia Leaders Seek to Make Independence Referendum Binding

Degas, Danse, Dessin. A Tribute to Degas with Paul Valéry

Edgar Degas, Seated Dancer
"On the centenary of his death, the Musée d'Orsay pays tribute to Edgar Degas (1834-1917) with an exhibition based around the little known work by the writer, poet and thinker, Paul Valéry (1871-1945). The friendship between Degas and Valéry lasting more than twenty years resulted in an essay published by Editions Vollard in 1937, Degas Danse Dessin. Both intimate and universal, it conveys a poetic, fragmentary image of the painter’s personality and his art, and a kind of meditation on the creative process. ..."
Musée d'Orsay
Poetry Foundation: Paul Valéry
[PDF] Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty

Jon Gibson - In Good Company (1992)

"Jon Gibson is probably one of the most important performers in Minimalist music. He primarily plays saxophone and clarinet, plus occasional flute. He played in the premieres Terry Riley's 'In C,' Steve Reich's 'Drumming,' was a founding member of Philip Glass' ensemble, and so premiered a whole lot of his early work, and has worked and recorded with LaMonte Young, Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, and pretty much every major American Minimalistish composer who needed a reed player. As a composer he's somewhat less known, though his work is really up there with all of those guys. ..."
Incessant Noise (Video)
Gramophone
amazon
YouTube: In Good Company

John Coltrane Quartet - Live at the Village Vanguard (1962)

"This set documents the four-night stand by John Coltrane (sax) and his quintet at the Village Vanguard in New York City, November 1 -- 5, 1961. Although these are not newly discovered tapes -- as the majority of the selections have turned up on no less than five separate releases -- their restoration is significant in assessing motifs in Coltrane's [read: multi-show] live appearances. Coltrane is accompanied by an all-star ensemble of Eric Dolphy (alto sax/bass clarinet), Garvin Bushell (oboe/contrabassoon), Ahmed Abdul-Malik (oud), McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Reggie Workman (bass), Elvin Jones (drums), and Roy Haynes (drums). Their presence is as equally vital as Coltrane's -- inspiring as well as informing the dimensions of improvisation. ... The highly recommended box set also includes a nine-panel fold out poster, 48-page liner notes booklet -- with a complete discography for the included material -- and other ephemera, such as rarely published photographs."
allmusic
W - Live at the Village Vanguard
Discogs
YouTube: Live at the Village Vanguard 36:32

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), 2016 January: Crescent (1964), 2016 April: The Church of Saint John Coltrane, 2016 July: Soultrane (1958), 2016 December: Dakar (1957), 2017 July: The John Coltrane Record That Made Modern Music.

The sadness of Saturn

An ultraviolet image of Saturn's rings. Ringlets shown in turquoise have a greater concentration of frozen water than those shown in red.
"If you live in a city and go outside every so often, there’s a decent chance that you might have, unknowingly, walked straight past someone who believes that you have personally laid eyes on Satan. The devil of Christian mythology — the one with the goat’s horns and the woman’s breasts, the adversary of God and humanity, the stinking and shuddering principle of evil — you have seen him, and again you didn’t even know it. You have seen the devil glimmer faintly in the night sky. You drew pictures of him as a child, or made papier-mâché idols, while your teachers grinned down on you. You have seen gorgeous photographs of the deceiver, the iridescent storms swirling infinitely deep on his surface, his crown of rings, his delicate lollipop bands — and maybe, with impossible eyes, he looked back at you. ..."
The Outline

2017 September: Cassini Flies Toward a Fiery Death on Saturn

The Lounge Lizards - Lounge Lizards (1981)

"One might be forgiven for mistaking the Lounge Lizards' debut album for a traditional jazz release at a glance, what with the two Thelonious Monk covers and the participation of producer Teo Macero (who had previously worked with such heavyweights as Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and Ella Fitzgerald, to name just a few). No, while there's definitely great respect shown here for the jazz tradition, the members are obviously coming at it from different backgrounds -- most especially guitarist Arto Lindsay, whose occasional atonal string scraping owes far more to his experience in New York City's no wave scene than to quote unquote traditional jazz. In fact, the two aforementioned Monk covers seem a strange choice when you actually hear the band, which has more in common with sonic experimentalists like Ornette Coleman or Sun Ra. That's not to say that this is too experimental; saxophonist and lead Lizard John Lurie knows when to blow noise and when to blow melody, and ex-Feelies drummer Anton Fier manages to infuse a good rock feel into the drum parts even when he's playing incredibly complex rhythms. ..."
allmudic
W - Lounge Lizards
YouTube: Lounge Lizards 40:32

2012 July: The Lounge Lizards

ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse

Displaced people arrived at a security screening center in Dibis, Iraq. Islamic State militants fled there with their families after their defeat in Hawija, the group’s last major urban stronghold in the country.
"DIBIS, Iraq — The prisoners were taken to a waiting room in groups of four, and were told to stand facing the concrete wall, their noses almost touching it, their hands bound behind their backs. More than a thousand prisoners determined to be Islamic State fighters passed through that room last week after they fled their crumbling Iraqi stronghold of Hawija. Instead of the martyrdom they had boasted was their only acceptable fate, they had voluntarily ended up here in the interrogation center of the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq. For an extremist group that has made its reputation on its ferociousness, with fighters who would always choose suicide over surrender, the fall of Hawija has been a notable turning point. The group has suffered a string of humiliating defeats in Iraq and Syria, but the number of its shock troops who turned themselves in at the center in Dibis was unusually large, more than 1,000 since last Sunday, according to Kurdish intelligence officials. ..."
NY Times (Video)

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, 2017 May: Aleppo After the Fall, 2017 July: Iraqi forces declare victory over Islamic State in Mosul after grueling battle, 2017 July: The Living and the Dead.

Pascal Comelade ‎– Detail Monochrome (1982)

"Pascal Comelade was born in Montpellier, France. After living for several years in Barcelona, he made his first album, Fluences, influenced by electronic music and by the group Heldon. Subsequently, his music has become more acoustic and is characterised by the sounds of toy instruments, used as solo-instruments and as an integral part of the sound of his group, the Bel Canto Orquestra. In 2007 he did a Take-Away Show acoustic video session shot by Vincent Moon. He has collaborated with many singers and musicians from diverse genres of music including Robert Wyatt, Dani, Faust, Christophe Miossec, Toti Soler, Jac Berrocal, Pierre Bastien and P.J. Harvey to mention just a few."
Further Beyond Musicology
Discogs
YouTube: Detail Monochrome 37:18

2014 June: Pascal Comelade, 2014 September: September Song (2000), 2014 November: El pianista del antifaz (2013), 2015 April: L'argot Du Bruit (1998), 2015 June: La Catedral D'Escuradents.

Clever Literary Coffee Poster

"Food illustrator Gianluca Biscalchin has combined two of our loves – coffee and books – into one fun illustration. Called Literary Coffee, it shows famous authors like Bram Stroker, Jane Austen, and William Shakespeare as cups of hot java (or other drinks). While many of these you'll know right off the bat, some you may have to look up to really get the inside joke."
Gianluca Biscalchin's website

Execution Still Haunts Village, 50 Years After Che Guevara’s Death

The laundry room at the hospital where Che Guevara’s body was displayed to the world. It has been turned into a memorial.
"LA HIGUERA, Bolivia — Irma Rosales, tired after decades of tending her tiny store, sat back one morning with a box full of photos and remembered the stranger who was shot in the local schoolhouse 50 years ago. His hair was long and greasy, she said; his clothes so dirty that they might have belonged to a mechanic. And he said nothing, she recalled, when she brought him a bowl of soup not long before the bullets rang out. Che Guevara was dead. Monday marks a half-century since the execution of Guevara, the peripatetic Argentine doctor, named Ernesto at birth, who led guerrilla fighters from Cuba to Congo. He stymied the United States during the Bay of Pigs invasion, lectured at a United Nations lectern and preached a new world order dominated by those once marginalized by superpowers. His towering life was overshadowed only by the myth that emerged with his death. ..."
NY Times

2010 March: Che, 2010 December: Che Guevara in popular culture, 2012 September: The Motorcycle Diaries, 2015 August: ¡Cuba, Cuba! 65 Years of Photography, 2016 September: Che - Steven Soderbergh (2008)

Sings Reign Rebuilder - Set Fire to Flames (2001)

Wikipedia - "Sings Reign Rebuilder is the debut album of the Canadian band Set Fire to Flames. It was released by Alien8 Recordings, FatCat Records in 2001. An underlying concept in the work is the lyingdyingwonderbody, which consist of spoken word passages dealing with theoretical and political concepts that concern global climate and love. The album was recorded in a century old house (either named or later dubbed 15 Ontario) apparently bound for destruction. From the liner notes: 'your bulldozers and wrecking ball can make match-sticks out of the rickety staircase and crookt/creaking floorboards---but they can't erase the recording that was made here.' As such, several sounds usually edited out of the recording process, including creaking floors, paper shuffling and outside noises, were left intact on the final album. ..."
Wikipedia
Discogs
allmusic (Audio)
YouTube: Sings Reign Rebuilder [Full Album] 1:13:33

One Sky By Women Who Draw

"On August 13, 2017, at precisely 12:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, 88 artists all over the world stopped what they were doing, looked up, and drew the sky. What each artist saw was unique to the time, the weather, and the place. The locations ranged from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn, Buenos Aires to rural Georgia. Some saw different hues of blue. Some saw black, pink, or gray. Some saw stars or clouds or fog or rain. Here it was summer. There it was night. In one place a fire left a heavy brown haze. Whatever sky the artist saw, they captured it on paper in their own unique style. They were, at that exact moment, separate skies. But when we view these drawings together, they become one far-stretching, simultaneous world view. They become a portrait of one shared sky. —Wendy MacNaughton and Julia Rothman, co-founders of Women Who Draw
One Sky By Women Who Draw

How Bernstein shook up the status quo with ‘On the Waterfront’

"In his autobiography A Life (1988), director Elia Kazan outlined the reasons 'On the Waterfront' (1954), universally regarded as his greatest film, was a success. ... Curiously, Kazan failed to mention Leonard Bernstein’s music, the only score that the American composer-conductor ever wrote specifically for a film. 'On the Waterfront' received 12 Academy Award nominations, including one for its score; it won eight Oscars, including best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography, and of course, actor. ... With its tortured history, however, 'On the Waterfront' was a surprising Oscar winner, and remains a polarizing film in some quarters to this day. Many viewed the film’s subject — corruption on the East Coast docks — as Kazan’s allegorical response to his naming names during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1952. Because of Kazan’s pariah status, Brando and Bernstein initially refused to work with him on 'Waterfront.' As newcomers, Eva Marie Saint (as Edie Doyle, Terry’s love interest) and Rod Steiger (as Charley, Terry’s brother, and underling of corrupt union boss Johnny Friendly, played by Lee J. Cobb) presumably were in no position to object to Kazan’s politics. ..."
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Audio)
Leonard Bernstein - On the Waterfront
On The Morality Of 'On The Waterfront' (Video)
LA PHIL: On the Waterfront (complete film with live orchestra)
W - Leonard Bernstein
amazon
YouTube: Symphonic Suite from 'On the Waterfront' 19:41

2015 January: On the Waterfront - Elia Kazan (1954)

Interview with Lucy R. Lippard

"Lucy R. Lippard interviewed at her summer home in Maine. Lippard discusses the emergence of Conceptual Art and the related exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art. For more, read Lippard’s 500 Words."
vimeo: Interview with Lucy R. Lippard

2012 October: Materializing "Six Years": Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art

K Frimpong & His Cubano Fiestas - The Blue Album (1976)

"Out of the Afrobeat/Highlife capital of the USA – Minneapolis, MN – come two reissues of mid-1970s Ghanian music. Of course, I’m joking in regards to Minneapolis, but in all seriousness, Secret Stash has become a reissue label to look for. Not content to focus on any one genre, they’ve also tackled Peruvian, Persian, and even porno groove titles to name a few. Secret Stash’s output is primarily deluxe vinyl (along with deluxe packaging) and digital only with the one exception being the first Peña which saw the label’s only CD release. K Frimpong And His Cubano Fiestas’ self-titled album and The Blue Album, aptly titled due to the shading on the album cover, were back-to-back titles issued in 1976 (The Blue Album) and 1977 (self-titled). ..."
REVIVE (Video)
amazon
YouTube: The Blue Album 37:46

Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece

"In late 1849, two years after Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond—where he had lived for two years, two months, and two days in a cabin that he had built himself—he began the process of completely reorienting his life again. His hermit-style interlude at the pond had attracted quite a bit of attention in his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. 'Living alone on the pond in ostentatious simplicity, right in sight of a main road,' his latest biographer, Laura Dassow Walls, writes, 'he became a spectacle,' admired by some and belittled by others. Thoreau’s subsequent life change was less conspicuous. Yet it engaged him in a quest more enlightening and relevant today than the proud asceticism he flaunted throughout Walden, a book that has never ceased to inspire reverence or provoke contempt. ..."
The Atlantic (Audio)

2009 April: Henry David Thoreau, 2012 September: Walden, 2015 March: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), 2017 March: Civil Disobedience (1849), 2017 April: The Maine Woods (1864), 2017 June: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, 2017 July: Pond Scum - Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia. By Kathryn Schulz, 2017 July: Walden, a Game

L'Avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni (1960)

Wikipedia - "L'Avventura (English: The Adventure) is a 1960 Italian film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Gabriele Ferzetti, Monica Vitti, and Lea Massari. Developed from a story by Antonioni, the film is about a young woman's disappearance during a boating trip in the Mediterranean. Her lover and her best friend, during the subsequent search for her, become attracted to each other. The film is noted for its careful pacing, which puts a focus on visual composition and character development, as well as for its unusual narrative structure. According to an Antonioni obituary, the film 'systematically subverted the filmic codes, practices and structures in currency at its time.' Filmed on location in Rome, the Aeolian Islands, and Sicily in 1959 under difficult financial and physical conditions, L'Avventura made Monica Vitti an international star. ... L'Avventura influenced the visual language of cinema, changing how subsequent films looked, and has been named by some critics as one of the best ever made. However, it has been criticized by others for its seemingly uneventful plot and slow pacing, along with the existentialist themes. Youngblood has stated that 'very few films in the history of cinema have broken the standard rules of cinematic grammar so elegantly, so subtly, as this film.' Jonathan Rosenbaum has called it a masterpiece. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times - 'L'Avventura':Film by Michelangelo Antonioni Opens (April 5, 1961)
Roger Ebert
amazon
MUBI: L'Avventura (Video)
YouTube: Three Reasons: L'avventura, DEAR ANTONIONI... : from a letter by Roland Barthes (1997)

2011 September: Red Desert (1964), 2014 December: The Passenger (1975), 2017 April: Blow-Up (1966)

Enter the The Cornell Hip Hop Archive: A Vast Digital Collection of Hip Hop Photos, Posters & More

"The music and the culture of hip-hop are inseparable from the Bronx, Queens, Harlem, and Brooklyn, NY. And now that the form is a global culture that exists in online spaces as much as it does where people meet and shake hands, its documentary history may be more valuable than ever. Hip-Hop began, unquestionably, as a regional phenomenon, and its formal qualities always bear the traces of its matrix, a confluence of African-American, Caribbean, and Latin American socio-cultural experiences and creative streams, meeting with new consumer audio technology and a drive toward countercultural experiments that took hold all over New York amidst the urban decay of the 70s. We know the story in broad strokes. Now we can immerse ourselves in the daily life, so to speak, of early hip hop, thanks to a partial digitization of Cornell University’s vast hip hop collection. The physical collection, housed in Ithaca New York, contains 'hundreds of party and event flyers ca. 1977-1985; thousands of early vinyl recordings, cassettes and CDs; film and video; record label press packets and publicity; black books, photography, magazines, books, clothing, and more.' ...”
Open Culture
The Cornell Hip Hop Collection

A History of American Protest Music: This Is the Hammer That Killed John Henry

"In the folktale, a powerful black steel-driving man named John Henry challenges the steam drill to a race, beats it, and dies. In some versions, John Henry is almost seven feet tall. In others, he wears fine clothes and commands any price for his work. In our national consciousness, he stands for the common man, beaten by industrialization, but unbowed. Songs about John Henry became popular in the early 20th century. He is a folk hero in all—by resisting either the dehumanizing effects of technology or a racist power structure. His story helped give rise to an iconic American “blues ballad” as well as the 'hammer song:' a rhythmic style which helped synchronize the work of manual laborers on railroads, prison work farms, and logging camps. Each axe or hammer blow rang out in rhythm to the tune, and as the tempo of that industrialized century increased, this would ultimately become the backbeat of rock and roll. ..."
Longreads (Video)
Longreads: ‘We Have Got Tools and We Are Going to Succeed’ (Video)

Kamasi Washington - Harmony of Difference EP (2017)

"... Instead of a jazz label, that record came out on Flying Lotus’ imprint, Brainfeeder, and Washington’s band got booked to play clubs and festivals that typically host indie rock or rap groups; which is to say that so far, nothing about Washington’s rise fits an established template. His music is very much of jazz, but the context he and his collaborators have created sits slightly outside it. Continuing the trend, Washington’s new EP, Harmony of Difference, comes courtesy of Young Turks, a sublabel of XL that has released music by Jamie xx and FKA twigs, and it contains music written for an exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2017 Biennial. Harmony of Difference was originally part of a multimedia work that illustrated how forces that seem to be working in opposition could come together as a composite of complex beauty...."
Pitchfork
WeTransfer Studios x Kamasi Washington Present (Audio)
The Atlantic: The Nuanced Bluster of Kamasi Washington
Kamasi Washington reveals new Harmony of Difference EP: Stream/download (Audio)
Notey
amazon

2015 December: The Epic - Kamasi Washington (2015), 2016 December: Throttle Elevator Music featuring Kamasi Washington (2016), 2017 April: Harmony of Difference (EP - 2017), 2017 June: "The Rhythm Changes", 2017 August: What's in my Bag?

Baking With Kafka - Tom Gauld (2017)

"Baking With Kafka is another collection of Gauld's strips for The Guardian, and it's Gauld doing riffs and gags. I prefer his long-form work as it's drier and more restrained in its humor, but that's not to say that his pure gag work ins't entertaining as well. This collection of strips isn't so much a collection of strips about literary concerns in the vein of a Kate Beaton, but rather a series of meta-literary strips. That is, they are strips about writing, about the tedious business of publishing, about the cynical nature of advertising, about the way books become product, but most of all about books qua books. It pokes gentle fun at fantasy quests, literary cliches, romance tropes as well as the workshops aimed at writers desperate to get published. ..."
D&Q: Tom Gauld's Baking With Kafka
Tom Gauld
amazon

The Master In Downward-Facing Dog: Sikh Painting And Cultural Appropriation

David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps; Gurbux Singh’s Guru Gobind Singh; A poster based on Gurbux Singh’s painting, with added sword in hand
"A hand points over the mountains to Italy, or Kashmir; a man who is the French Emperor, or a Guru, urges us to follow. David’s painting of Napoleon can look ridiculous to us – the lead-guitarist mid-solo – but that’s because it was painted as propaganda, not as a true likeness. When Gurbux Singh painted Guru Gobind Singh a century and half later, he used David’s Napoleon as a model to convey a different set of ideas; ideas which have refracted into completely different meanings. It is only one exchange in a long history, speaking to the heart of contemporary debates about ownership and cultural appropriation. ..."
The Quietus

Ranjit Singh and the Golden Temple, by Schoefft

Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller (1949)

Wikipedia - "Death of a Salesman is a 1949 play written by American playwright Arthur Miller. It was the recipient of the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. The play premiered on Broadway in February 1949, running for 742 performances, and has been revived on Broadway four times, winning three Tony Awards for Best Revival. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. ... Willy Loman returns home exhausted after a business trip he has cancelled. Worried over Willy's state of mind and recent car accident, his wife Linda suggests that he ask his boss Howard Wagner to allow him to work in his home city so he will not have to travel. Willy complains to Linda that their son, Biff, has yet to make good on his life. Despite Biff's promising showing as an athlete in high school, he failed in mathematics and was unable to enter a university. ..."
Wikipedia
Death of a Salesman at Fifty: An Interview with Arthur Miller
amazon
YouTube: Death of a Salesman - Directed by Elia Kazan
YouTube: Arthur Miller interview on "The Death of a Salesman" (1999)

2011 April: The Misfits (1961), 2012 June: Before Air-Conditioning (1998), 2014 December: The Crucible (1953), 2015 December: A View from the Bridge (1955), 2016 January: Arthur Miller’s Brooklyn

Dave Rawlings Machine With Gillian Welch: Tiny Desk Concert

"David Rawlings is a remarkably gifted producer, session guitarist and singer who's most widely known for his contributions to other musicians' work — particularly his longtime partnership with folk and traditional country artist Gillian Welch. But when he and Welch stopped by NPR for this Tiny Desk Concert, it was to promote Rawlings' own album — the first he's ever recorded under his name (actually, it's under the moniker Dave Rawlings Machine). For A Friend of a Friend, Rawlings took on lead vocals and songwriting duties, and got some of his old friends to help out. Welch appears throughout the album, of course, along with other artists such as Ketch Secor and Morgan Jahnig of Old Crow Medicine Show. ..."
NPR (Video)

2009 February: Gillian Welch, 2012 July: Harrow Harvest, 2012 September: By The Mark (2004), 2014 February: BBC FOUR Sessions: Gillian Welch, 2016 December: Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg (2016), 2017 August: Time (The Revelator) (2001).

Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world

"I pulled my copy of À la recherche du temps perdu off the shelf just last week. There – I've said it. I was looking for the passage right at the beginning where he conjures up that feeling of waking in the middle of the night and not knowing where you are, or indeed at first who you are. It's a feeling which – as the narrator confesses around nine pages into his exploration of this fleeting sensation – never lasts more than a few seconds, but which he finds so unsettling it calls into question the stability of the entire world. ..."
Guardian
TLS: Marcel Proust and the limits of cork lining
Marcel’s Marginalia

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 August: Paintings in Proust - Eric Karpeles, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: "Paintings in Proust" - View of the Piazza del Popolo, Giovanni Battista Piranes, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust ; translated by Lydia Davis.

47Soul

"Last month, something special happened. 47Soul – a supergroup uniting four alternative-music figureheads who share roots in Palestine – performed in the West Bank. For the musicians, it was an emotional homecoming. Despite having rocked huge crowds across Europe – including at the UK’s Glastonbury Festival and Womad (World of Music, Arts and Dance) – the group’s headline slot on July 27 at the Palestine International Festival marked the first time the four members were permitted to perform their twisted electro take on the country’s street music to a native audience. Why? Passports. The band members share Palestinian heritage – but due to population displacement, they are scattered and none have Palestinian Authority papers. ..."
Palestinian supergroup 47Soul stay true to their roots
Is Shamstep a Made-Up Genre For Hipsters—or a Defining Movement of Arab Youth Culture?
Soundcloud: 47SOUL | السبعة و أربعين
facebook, twitter
YouTube: "Intro to Shamstep", "Don't Care Where You From", Mo Light, Dabeekeh, Every Land
YouTube: 47Soul

Finding Ashbery

"With the passing of poet John Ashbery, we have been reflecting on where we've found him in the collection—not just as author, but as translator, editor, interviewee, blurb writer, and even lyricist. With this blog series, we hope to share with you the lessor-known periodicals featuring Ashbery and expose you to our rich collection. In this post, we highlight three literary journals which feature his early work. ..."
New York Public Library
RealityStudio: John Ashbery at the Folger Library

In the Jungle Groove - James Brown (2003)

Wikipedia - "In the Jungle Groove is a compilation album by American funk musician James Brown, released in August 1986 by Polydor Records. Originally issued to capitalize on the popularity of Brown's music in hip hop circles at the time, it includes the first album release of the much-sampled single 'Funky Drummer' (1969), along with a selection of previously unreleased tracks, alternate takes, and remixes. The original recordings were produced by Brown, while the reissue was produced by Cliff White and Tim Rogers. A similar follow-up compilation, Motherlode, was released in 1988. The album's title is taken from a song Brown recorded in the studio in August 1970. ... A remastered and expanded 2003 reissue of In the Jungle Groove added a bonus track, an extended version of 'Blind Man Can See It' from the Black Caesar soundtrack album. ..."
Wikipedia
amazon
YouTube: In the Jungle Groove

Catalonia Leaders Seek to Make Independence Referendum Binding

"BARCELONA, Spain — A day after a referendum on independence for Catalonia that was marred by clashes between supporters and police officers, the Spanish region’s leaders were meeting on Monday to determine how to convert the vote into a state free from the rest of the country. Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan leader, said late Sunday that Catalans had won the right to have their own state and that he would soon present the result of the referendum to the regional Parliament to make it binding. The Catalan government announced that 90 percent of almost 2.3 million voters had voted in favor of independence. But several issues stood in the way of a consensus on the vote: The figures could not be independently verified, the voting registers were based on a census whose validity is contested and — most importantly — Spain’s constitutional court had ordered that the referendum be suspended. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Catalonia’s Independence Referendum, in Photographs
W - Catalonia
NY Times: Catalonia’s Independence Vote Descends Into Chaos and Clashes (Video)
YouTube: Catalonia Independence Referendum 2017: FC Barcelona & Catalan Independence, Catalonia Wants Independence From Spain, Catalonia independence referendum

Aidan Baker – The Sea Swells A Bit/Triphstyc (2006)

"... The Sea Swells a Bit serves as a wonderful elucidation as to what is on offer here, which is to say, almost nothing, but a strangely captivating nothing that extends far beyond the sum of its parts. The opening ten seconds of the title track sound like any one of million post-rock interludes — a light, overtly ghostly plucking of an evocative chord lost in the grasp of a well-used E-bow — but then, where you’d fully expect a crescendo or further variation rendered in some form of anthemic distortion, Baker instead does … nothing. Or nothing perceivable, at any right. Whilst it’s true that at some point drums creep into the mix, and that the delay swells into a subtle and formless cacophony, these events — and these events alone — are introduced slowly over the course of twenty-plus minutes, a inconceivably measured drift from one state to another, abundantly similar state. ..."
freq (Video)
YouTube: The Sea Swells A Bit 2006 (Full Album)

Theoretical Girls - U.S. Mille / You Got Me (1978)

Wikipedia - "Theoretical Girls were a New York-based no wave band formed by Glenn Branca and Jeff Lohn (a conceptual artist and composer) that existed from 1977 to 1981. Theoretical Girls played only about 20 shows (three of which took place in Paris). It released one single ('U.S. Millie'/'You Got Me'), which had some attention in England where it sold a few thousand copies. The band was never signed by a record company, but is well regarded as an early leading No Wave group that mixed classical modern ideas of composition with punk rock. This experimental music was mostly supported by the New York art world and minimal art music audience. ..."
Wikipedia
YouTube: U.S. Mille, You Got Me

Mystical Symbolist Poetry and the Salon de la Rose+Croix

Fernand Khnopff, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, 1891
"Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897 celebrates the series of six annual Salons organized by the writer, critic, and Rosicrucian Joséphin Péladan. In his Salons de la Rose+Croix, Péladan featured works by an international group of artists—part of the Symbolist movement, a late 19th-century trend that reacted against the literalness of Naturalism and Realism and rejected what they perceived as the ugliness of modern life. Symbolist poetry held great appeal for these artists, who sought to provoke allusive moods and visionary states of mind. Below, listen to poems by Charles Baudelaire, Christina Rossetti, and other writers who may have inspired the Rose+Croix artists, read by poet Tom Healy. ..."
Guggenheim (Soundcloud)
Brooklyn Rail
New Yorker: The Occult Roots of Modernism
NY Times: Mystical Symbolists in All Their Kitschy Glory
NY Times: What It’s Like to Hear the Same Piece of Music for 19 Hours (Video)
W - Salon de la Rose + Croix
VOICE: Explore the Weird World of the Symbolists at the Guggenheim
Soundcloud: Symbolist Poetry and the Salon de la Rose+Croix

The Usual - Photos by Emily Frances

Kellogg's Diner, Williamsburg
"To step into a diner is to step into a time warp, offering a glimpse inside a world of pay phones, grandma’s chocolate cake, and jukeboxes with 2001’s Billboard Top 40. You can buy the chance to grab a stuffed animal with a claw, or you can rely on the certainty of getting a rubber ball for twenty-five cents. You can order a Western omelette at 6 p.m. This standstill is part of their charm. There is something familiar about these establishments that draws us back to them. And something a little strange. Below, we present snapshots of four diners of Brooklyn." (August 21, 2014)
BYLYNR

Don Van Vliet - Works on Paper

"Objectively critiquing the visual art works of a famous musician (or actor, or novelist, etc.) is no small order. How do you not immediately view the work through the lens of the music that you already know well and potentially love and/or loathe? When the artist in question is none other than Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, already iconic for his wildly unpredictable approach to blues and rock n’ roll, that subjectivity gets mired in even more layers of preexisting opinion, and in my case, a deep and long-standing love and appreciation. But in the case of Van Vliet’s paintings and sculptures, an understanding of the man’s music actually helps understand what he was trying to do with visual art. ..."
The Quietus - Look At My Beef Art: Works On Paper By Don Van Vliet
Michael Werner
artnet

2009 October: Captain Beefheart, 2010 December: Captain Beefheart, Art-Rock Visionary, Dead At 69, 2011 October: Interview with Captain Beefheart, 2013 August: This Is The Day (1974-Old Grey Whistle Test), 2014 July: Safe as Milk (1967), 2014 August: Some YoYo Stuff: An observation of the observations of Don Van Vliet by Anton Corbijn (1993), 2015 January: It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper, 2016 November: Doc at the Radar Station (1980).

Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops

La Closerie des Lilas, Paris
"Writers and coffee go together like espresso and steamed milk. Everywhere you look, there's a writer plugging away on their laptop in a cafe, usually with a steaming cup of joe by their side. Caffeine stimulates the brain and increases productivity—something I know because I drank three cups of coffee before writing this blog post—but that's not the only reason why writers huddle in coffeehouses. Cafes all over the world have long been hubs for writing communities, like the Beats or the Lost Generation, to discuss ideas, read poetry, and of course, write. Many of these historical sites are still around, serving coffee and tea to the next generation of young writers in Paris, New York, and Rome, who, like their bohemian forebears, are looking for a cheap place to hang out that's not their apartment. Here are seven of our favorite literary cafes from around the globe. ..."
The New York Public Library

2010 September: Espresso, April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business.