Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

Romare Bearden: Pittsburgh Memory, 1964, mixed media collage of printed papers and graphite on board, 8½ by 11¾ inches.
"The show opens in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights movement and its dreams of integration. In its wake emerged more militant calls for Black Power: a rallying cry for African American pride, autonomy and solidarity, drawing inspiration from newly independent African nations. Artists responded to these times by provoking, confronting, and confounding expectations. Their momentum makes for an electrifying visual journey. Vibrant paintings, powerful murals, collage, photography, revolutionary clothing designs and sculptures made with Black hair, melted records, and tights – the variety of artworks reflects the many viewpoints of artists and collectives at work during these explosive times. Some engage with legendary figures from the period, with paintings in homage to political leaders Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Angela Davis, musician John Coltrane and sporting hero Jack Johnson. Muhammad Ali appears in Andy Warhol’s famous painting. This landmark exhibition is a rare opportunity to see era-defining artworks that changed the face of art in America."
Tate (Video)
frieze
Guardian
NY Times: A Tate Modern Show Examines Race in the U.S.
amazon
YouTube: Showcase: 'Soul of a Nation' Exhibition

Dream of a House: The Passions and Preoccupations of Reynolds Price

"Reynolds Price (1933–2011), who authored forty-one acclaimed novels, memoirs, plays, and collections of poetry and essays, was one of America's most notable writers of the past half-century. His works have a home on the shelves of millions of admiring readers worldwide. Fueled by a brilliant mind and exuberant spirit, Price’s singular literary voice not only shines a light on the land and people of his native South, but also on the inherent worth of every person. His enduring belief in beauty, courage, grace, and hope transcends time and circumstance. Confined to a wheelchair for the last twenty-seven years of his life, Price surrounded himself at home with art and objects that he loved. ..."
Center for Documentary Studies
Oxford American
The Paris Review: Seeing Reynolds Price Through His Art Collection
New Republic: Dream of a House Remembers One Writer’s “Long and Happy Life”

Reynolds Price's house, Durham, North Carolina, 2011.

"Radio Radio" - Elvis Costello and The Attractions (1978)

Wikipedia - "'Radio Radio' (sometimes written 'Radio, Radio') is a single by Elvis Costello and The Attractions released in the United Kingdom in October 1978. The song had already appeared on the US version of their second album, This Year's Model, released earlier that year. The song is a protest song concerning the commercialisation of radio broadcasts and the restrictions that prevented many punk songs from being played. It includes a reference to the BBC's ban of the Sex Pistols' 1977 single 'God Save the Queen'. The song made waves in the USA after Costello's appearance on Saturday Night Live. ... In the event, Costello began the SNL performance by playing 'Less than Zero.' However, after a few bars, he turned to the Attractions, waving his hand and yelling 'Stop! Stop!,' then said to the audience, 'I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here,' possibly referring to the fact 'Less than Zero' was written as a reply to British fascist politician Oswald Mosley. However, SNL music director Howard Shore attributes the move to Costello's bucking pressure by his music company to play 'Less than Zero' on the show. ..."
Wikipedia
Songfacts (Audio)
YouTube: Radio, Radio (SNL 1977), Radio, Radio (SNL 1977)

2011 August: Get Happy!!, 2011 November: "Watching the Detectives" (1978), 2014 August: This Year's Model (1978)

Found: A Rare Carved Stone That Could Rewrite Art History

The carved seal, at just 1.4 inches, is a remarkable achievement.
"In spring 2016, a team of archeologists from the University of Cincinnati was digging at a Mycenaean site in the Pylos region of Greece when they made a surprising discovery: the intact tomb of a Bronze Age warrior dating to about 1500 B.C. The Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports declared the find the 'most important to have been discovered in 65 years.' Now, almost two years later, the tomb has revealed its most valuable secret, and intricately carved sealstone that researchers are calling 'one of the finest works of prehistoric Greek art ever discovered.' It didn’t look so at first, but once a thick crust of limestone was cleared off it revealed a detailed scene of a victorious warrior, one defeated opponent beneath his feet and another falling at the tip of his sword. And all this was carved in meticulous detail on a piece of stone just over 1.4 inches long. ..."
Atlas Obscura
This Prehistoric "Masterpiece" Could Rewrite The History of Ancient Greek Art
NY Times: In Greek Warrior’s Grave, Rings of Power (and a Mirror and Combs)
W - Minoan civilization
W - Nuragic bronze statuettes

"Ilo Abu Chi" - de Celestine Ukwu (1974)

"Most Nigerian pop stars adopt or acquire titles like King, Sir, Lord, Cardinal, etc, but the great Celestine Ukwu was happy to be a humble Professor and his band had the poetic name of the Philosophers. Ukwu began his career in the 1960s in Enugu, capital of the Eastern Region of Nigeria under Mike Ejeagha. He moved back to Onitsha where he formed the Music Royals, but the Biafran war put an end to their career in 1967. After the war he resurrected the band in the early 70s as the Philosophers National. Tragically Celestine Ukwu died in a car crash on 8 May 1977, not yet forty. ..."
CELESTINE UKWU & HIS PHILOSOPHERS NATIONAL
YouTube: "Ilo Abu Chi" 44:03

2,000+ Impressionist, Post-impressionist & Early Modern Paintings Now Free Online, Thanks to the Barnes Foundation

On the Grass, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
"Georges Seurat, Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, Auguste Renoir, Vincent Van Gogh — all of us associate these names with great innovations in painting, but how many of us have had the opportunity to look long and close enough at their work to understand those innovations? To feel them, in other words, rather than just to know about them? The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has just recently made it possible for us to contemplate thousands of works of art including those of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early Modern masters, zoomed in up close and at any length we like, by digitizing their collection and making it free online. ..."
Open Culture

Russian Revolution

A mass meeting in the Putilov Works in Petrograd during the 1917 Russian Revolution
Wikipedia - "The Russian Revolution was a pair of revolutions in Russia in 1917 which dismantled the Tsarist autocracy and led to the rise of the Soviet Union. The Russian Empire collapsed with the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II and the old regime was replaced by a provisional government during the first revolution of February 1917 (March in the Gregorian calendar; the older Julian calendar was in use in Russia at the time). Alongside it arose grassroots community assemblies (called 'soviets') which contended for authority. In the second revolution that October, the Provisional Government was toppled and all power was given to the soviets. The February Revolution (March 1917) was a revolution focused around Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg), the capital of Russia at that time. In the chaos, members of the Imperial parliament (the Duma) assumed control of the country, forming the Russian Provisional Government which was heavily dominated by the interests of large capitalists and the noble aristocracy. The army leadership felt they did not have the means to suppress the revolution, resulting in Nicholas's abdication. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: Red Century - Exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution.
BBC - To the cinema, comrades: The revolutionary age of Soviet film posters
W - Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed, [PDF]
YouTube: Russian Revolutions of 1917 (Revolution in Red) 23:33, The October Revolution

Vladimir Lenin addressing a crowd in Moscow in 1918.

Listening to Kate Williamson’s Comics

"There is a lot of sound, a lot music, in Kate T. Williamson’s 2008 graphic novel At a Crossroads: Between a Rock and My Parents’ Place, but there are few if any actual sound effects. There are some “thump thump thump”s written into the panels during a brief anecdote about a squirrel infestation, and three little musical notes are rendered during a karaoke scene, where they could almost be mistaken for crumbs on the carpet. That’s about it. Yet despite the relative paucity of drawn sound, the book abounds with sound. It appears in the form of the sounds around her that she shares with the reader in keen descriptions that also reveal her state of mind. There are also numerous references to her favorite pop music, which serves as an emotional support structure. ..."
disquiet
Exclusive Comics Excerpt: ‘At a Crossroads’
amazon: At a Crossroads: Between a Rock and My Parents' Place

Patti Smith Group - Pale Blue Eyes/Louie Louie (1976)

Chelsea Hotel, 1971
"What you will likely find remarkable about this early live recording of the Patti Smith Group is the fact that she does so much talking. Recorded in the intimate Cellar Door club in Washington, DC, for the King Biscuit Flower Hour radio series, Smith waxes poetic to audience about nearly everything under the sun, including an interesting observation about performing in Washington during 1976. ... A former college dropout who moved to Greenwich Village in the late 1960s where she developed her skills as a beat poet, Patti Smith eventually discovered that the energetic punk music scene of the mid-1970s could work as the perfect vehicle for her controversial poetry and singing style. ..."
Paste (Audio)
YouTube: Stockholm 1976

Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture

John F. Kennedy Federal Building, Boston, MA.
"The British author Douglas Adams had this to say about airports: 'Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of special effort.' Sadly, this truth is not applicable merely to airports: it can also be said of most contemporary architecture. ... Or take Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Downtown Boston is generally an attractive place, with old buildings and a waterfront and a beautiful public garden. But Boston’s City Hall is a hideous concrete edifice of mind-bogglingly inscrutable shape, like an ominous component found left over after you’ve painstakingly assembled a complicated household appliance. In the 1960s, before the first batch of concrete had even dried in the mold, people were already begging preemptively for the damn thing to be torn down. ..."
Current Affairs

Dennis J. Banks, Naawakamig (1937-2017)

"Naawakamig — 'In the Center of the Universe ' — was his Anishinaabe name. But to most, he was known by his Anglo name: Dennis J. Banks. Born on the Leech Lake Reservation in 1937 — Ojibwe territory in present-day Minnesota — Banks became a force in a world where Native people rarely mattered. He cofounded the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1968 and, along with AIM, played a starring role in the liberation of Wounded Knee in 1973 — a radical, insurgent moment of indigenous revolution. Under Banks’s leadership, AIM became the most powerful Native movement of the twentieth century, galvanizing indigenous people throughout the United States, Canada, and beyond. ..."
Jacobin
Jacobin: Standing Rock and the Struggle Ahead, The Indigenous Revolution, A History and Future of Resistance, A Tale of Two Standoffs
W - Dennis J. Banks
Dennis J. Banks: “Make No Mistake America, We are Going to be on Your Back”

The 10 Best Chess Records Albums To Own On Vinyl

"Of course, the invention of rock ’n’ roll cannot be traced exclusively back to Waters and Chess. Fats Domino, Little Richard and Elvis Presley—artists associated with Imperial, Specialty and Sun Records, respectively—have all been credited as forefathers of the genre. But even though other artists and independent labels released similar sounds around the same time, Chess Records had a profound effect on the musical revolution of the mid-20th century. ... Although Berry left the label for much of the 1960s, he remained indebted to the Chess brothers for kick-starting his career. When he returned to Chess Records in 1970, he titled his next album Back Home. The Chess brothers’ timing happened to be perfect. Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow-era South had been settling in Chicago, resulting in both an influx of talented musicians and an audience eager for blues music. ..." (Joe J.)
Vinyl Me, Please

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World

"Artist and activist Jimmie Durham (b. 1940) has worked as a visual artist, performer, essayist, and poet for more than forty-five years. A political organizer for the American Indian Movement during the 1970s, he was an active participant in the downtown New York City artistic community in the 1980s. In 1987 he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, then to Europe in 1994, where he has lived ever since. Predominantly a sculptor, Durham often combines found objects and natural materials and incorporates text to expose Western-centric views and prejudices hidden in language, objects, and institutions. Calling himself an 'interventionist,' Durham is oftentimes critical in his analysis of society but with a distinctive wit that is simultaneously generous and humorous. Durham's expansive practice spans sculpture, drawing, collage, photography, video, and performance, and the exhibition includes approximately 120 objects dating from 1970 to the present. ..."
Whitney (Video)
NY Times: Coming Face to Face With Jimmie Durham
Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World (Video)

1975-1988: Urban Color

1984 - Dave's Restaurant, New York.
"Born in Chicago in 1946, Wayne Sorce studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and went on to have a distinguished career in photography. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Sorce explored the urban landscapes of New York and Chicago with his large format camera, making precisely balanced compositions of color, geometry, and light that also recorded the era’s particular styles of signage, advertising, and automobile design. Wayne Sorce: Urban Color, an exhibit of cityscapes by Sorce and his contemporaries, is on display at Joseph Bellows Gallery in La Jolla, California through Nov. 30."
mashable

Un Flic - Jean-Pierre Melville (1972)

"Haunted by death-obsessed men of action, Un Flic (A Cop) is a fitting final act for noir master Jean-Pierre Melville, who died in 1973, a year after this production. The title suggests that film is about Edouard Coleman, Alain Delon’s weary policeman, but the true subject is Coleman’s age. These characters are all worn down by time, and while that doesn’t make them sentimental or sloppy, they are always aware that any screw-up could get them killed. The balletic opening bank heist, a precise, dialogue-free set piece where deferred stares speak louder than the roaring of waves rolling in at a nearby beach, happens at twilight, but the metallic sky looming overhead makes it impossible to be sure of the time of day. ... Their uneasy relationship is at an impasse: At the bars, they sip Scotch, and warily exchange sidelong glances. Feelings are a liability in Un Flic, so Delon’s heartsick detective always looks vaguely distracted, his eyes betraying the character’s sadness. At the end, his partner fidgets while Edouard, trapped in his own head, drives down the Champs-Élysées. The other cop knows he can’t do anything for Edouard, except maybe offer a stick of gum. Un Flic‘s Paris is purgatory; the city’s silvery-blue, halogen-lit miasma is a fact of life."
VOICE
W - Un Flic
Slant
LA Times: Revisit Jean-Pierre Melville's world of crime in 'Un Flic'
Un flic: art and artifice (and also cars and hats and blondes)
YouTube: Un Flic - Trailer, Isabelle Aubert and Michel Colombier

2017 June: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Cinema of Resistance

Mars ‎– 3 E / 11,000 Volts (1978)

"Mars was a New York City No Wave band formed by vocalist Sumner (Crane) Audrey in 1975. He was joined by China Burg (née Constance Burg; a.k.a Lucy Hamilton) (guitar, vocals), Mark Cunningham (bass), and artist Nancy Arlen (drums), and briefly by Rudolph Grey. The band played one live gig under the name China before changing it to Mars. They played a mixture of angular compositions and freeform ambient noise music jams, featuring surrealist lyrics and non-standard drumming. All the members were said to be completely untrained in music before forming the band. In 1978, Mars appeared on the influential No New York compilation LP produced by Brian Eno, along with DNA, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and James Chance and the Contortions, which helped to bring the nascent No Wave genre into the foreground. After the break-up of Mars at the end of 1978, Cunningham was part of the bizarre John Gavanti 'no wave opera' project with Crane, Arto Lindsay, and others. ..."
popsike
YouTube: 3E, 11,000 Volts

2015 November: The Complete Studio Recordings NYC 1977-1978

Tenements, Towers & Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City - Julia Wertz

"New York City can be the place where you go to 'make it,' but as cartoonist Julia Wertz points out in her new book, it's as storied for its failures as its successes. A 300-page visual epic, Tenements, Towers & Trash captures the New York that's risen up by stacking failure upon failure as implacably as residents toss bags onto curbside garbage piles. This isn't The City That Never Sleeps, it's The City Where Dreams Go To Die. But as far as sweeping histories of dead dreams go, Wertz's is a pretty upbeat one. She has a passion for abandoned places (her urban exploration blog, Adventure Bible School, offers plenty of photographic evidence) and she adores uncovering tangible remnants of fizzled ambitions and cockamamie schemes. She sketches page after page of charming flops. There are long-closed businesses whose signs lend charisma to generically gentrified neighborhoods. There are phased-out technologies that once provided cleanliness, safety and transit. There are notorious citizens whose spectacular acts of moral nihilism included theft, arson and murder. In Wertz's hands, even these people have some appeal — they're pathetic, but scary. ..."
NPR: 'Tenements, Towers & Trash' Brings Clean Lines To The City Of Failure
amazon

The Impressionist Line: From Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec

"In 1874 French artists Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were among the founding members of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, Etc., an artist cooperative dissatisfied with the conservative annual state-sanctioned art exhibition known as the Salon. The independent-minded collective—the Impressionists—defied academic tradition with their innovative artistic practices as well as their public presentation strategies. Prints and drawings made up nearly half of the works included in the eight Impressionist exhibitions—a series of independent, artist-organized events held in Paris between 1874 and 1886—that defined the movement. Today Impressionism is usually understood as celebrating the primacy of oil painting rather than the drawn or printed line. The Impressionist Line challenges this perception, exploring the Impressionists’ substantial—and often experimental—contributions to the graphic arts. ..."
The Clark
Radicals at work: New exhibit at The Clark turns around common thinking about the Impressionists
The Clark: Image Gallery
amazon

Two Series Highlight the Competing American Visions of Sam Shepard and Dennis Hopper

"It’s probably pure coincidence that BAM is presenting a week of Sam Shepard films right as the Metrograph screens five days of Dennis Hopper–directed titles. The mini-Hopper retro has been prompted by the release of Along for the Ride, a documentary about the troubled actor-filmmaker’s career, as seen through the eyes of his longtime assistant and friend, Satya de la Manitou. The Shepard movies are presumably screening because of the actor-writer’s recent passing. And yet, there’s serendipity here, too: No two actors of their generation better expressed the modern iteration of the lonesome cowboy — that dying myth of the all-American wanderer. Their careers regularly threatened to intersect, but the two almost never worked together. (When they did, on 2002’s prison pen-pal drama Leo, Shepard said Hopper was 'like a crazy brother.') Maybe that’s understandable, too: They were, in some way, opposites — separate sides of the same coin. ..."
VOICE

2017 August: Sam Shepard (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017), 2009 November: Easy Rider (1969), 2010 May: Dennis Hopper (May 17, 1936 – May 29, 2010), 2010 November: The American Friend (1977), 2012 November: Dennis Hopper Documentary (90s), 2013 May: The Lost Album, 2013 December: On the Road, 2016 November: Dennis Hopper: Colors, The Polaroids

Albert Camus - The Stranger (1942)

Wikipedia - "L’Étranger (The Outsider [UK], or The Stranger [US]) is a 1942 novel by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus' philosophy of the absurd and existentialism, though Camus personally rejected the latter label. The title character is Meursault, an indifferent French Algerian described as 'a citizen of France domiciled in North Africa, a man of the Mediterranean, an homme du midi yet one who hardly partakes of the traditional Mediterranean culture'. He attends his mother's funeral. A few days later, he kills an Arab man in French Algiers, who was involved in a conflict with a friend. Meursault is tried and sentenced to death. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative view before and after the murder, respectively. ... The Stranger's first edition consisted of 4,400 copies and was not an immediate best-seller. But the novel was well received, partly because of Jean-Paul Sartre's article 'Explication de L'Etranger,' on the eve of publication of the novel, and a mistake from the Propaganda-Staffel. ..."
Wikipedia
New Yorker - Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be
Smithsonian: Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His Native Algeria?
New Republic: The Camus Investigation
[PDF] The Stranger (1942)
amazon

Luchino Visconti's The Stranger (1967) - "Beware the movie based on literature, or, in that showbiz term of art, a 'literary property.' Not because adaptations are an inferior form of cinema—I don’t believe that for a moment—but because they create an added layer of copyright issues for the film. When a movie stays long out of sight, and the studio still has prints, very often the reason you’re not seeing it has to do with the rights to its literary source. This is most likely why Lo Straniero, from 1967, directed by the great Luchino Visconti and starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina, has gone missing for so many years—never on VHS, never on DVD, unseen on TV, and infrequently revived in cinemas. ..."
Film Comment
W - The Stranger (1967 film)
senses of cinema - To Shoot at the Impassive Stillness: Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti’s The Stranger (Lo straniero, 1967)
W - Luchino Visconti
YouTube: The Stranger(movie footage) based on Albert Camus' masterpiece
YouTube: "The Stranger" by Albert Camus - 1967 - Dir. Luchino Visconti 1:42:52

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, 2016 April: Algerian Chronicles (2013).

The Story Behind the Chicago Newspaper That Bought a Bar

"Journalists will go far for a story and they’ll go far for a drink—but would they buy a bar? In Chicago, that’s exactly what a newspaper did. An oral history of an incredible experiment. By 1976, reporter Pam Zekman was well-acquainted with the everyday corruption that permeated Chicago. After all, the city was so well-known for shady dealings it birthed its own shorthand: 'Chicago-style politics' was used with frequency to describe boss-style rule and graft in government. ..."
Topic
W - Mirage Tavern
W - Category:Drinking establishments in Chicago
"The Mirage" - Pamela Zekman, Zay N. Smith - Chicago Sun Times
amazon: The Mirage

Alternative ’80s: Club 57 and New York's Downtown Scene

Kenny Scharf is one of the artists whose early work ...
"In conjunction with Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983, Sunday Sessions presents a program of film, poetry, performances, discussion, and music rooted in the counterculture synonymous with downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s. Club 57, like MoMA PS1 in the same era (then known simply as P.S.1), was a hive of interdisciplinary creation in which music, performance, film, theater, and art came together. Reuniting legends including Strange Party, fronted by Joey Arias, Adele Bertei, and Bob Holman of the Poetry Project, this program recaptures the spirit of the club scene and celebrates the legacy of New York’s alternative spaces alongside the art and artists they embraced. ..."
MoMA
MoMA - Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983 (Video)
NY Times: Club 57, Late-Night Home of Basquiat and Haring, Gets a Museum-Worthy Revival
artbook - Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983

The Astros Tanked Their Way To The Top

"It took 56 years, three stadiums, a name change, a league change, a couple of heart-breaking near misses and some of the ugliest jerseys in sports history, but this morning the Houston Astros can finally call themselves world champions. After beating the Dodgers 5-1 in Wednesday night’s World Series Game 7, the Astros made the list of teams to never win the title a little smaller and capped one of the most exciting World Series in history. The series had some of everything, from record-breaking home runs to crazy twists and even a marriage proposal in the postgame celebration. After the dust settled, the Astros were left standing as very worthy champions of a season in which all the best teams were unusually good. The Astros earned every bit of their first championship. ..."
Five Thirty Eight
NY Times: How the Astros Won World Series Game 7, Inning by Inning

Roland Barthes - A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977)

"Guessing what’s on a lover’s mind might seem an easy task: a romantic infatuation, being in love – these common psychological states are familiar to most of us. However, if we look at love from a theoretical point of view, we might ask ourselves: if love is indeed so common, can one find a shared inner emotional language? Is there even such a thing as an emotional language? These are the questions that Roland Barthes addresses in his A Lover’s Discourse – a philosophical meditation at times bordering on fiction. The first-person narrative is split into short fragments, each focusing on an idea or an image that could emerge in a lover’s mind and develop into a fantasy. Barthes, however, does not aim to compile a full list of the thoughts that could spring to a lover’s mind. ..."
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
W - A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
The Lectern
[PDF] A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
amazon

2010 March: Roland Barthes, 2014 March: Semiotext(e), 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2016 December: Can We Criticize Foucault?, 2017 June: The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left

Tour November’s Sky: Predawn Planets

"As you'll hear in this month's astronomy podcast, Venus and Jupiter are putting on quite a show low in the east before dawn. The return to standard time (November 5th in the U.S. and Canada) means that most of us are still heading home from work as evening’s twilight sets in. but that's a good thing, because it means you can sneak in a little stargazing before dinnertime. Look low in the east before dawn to watch Venus and Jupiter draw closer and closer together. Make sure your horizon is clear in that direction. These shorter days also mean it'll likely be dark when you get up, and this month the predawn sky features some drama. Venus has been dazzling the past few months, but now it’s dropping fast. It rises about 90 minutes before sunrise as November opens but only 45 minutes ahead of it at month’s end. ..."
Sky & Telescope (Audio)
Night Sky: Visible Planets, Moon Phases & Events, November 2017 (Video)

Secret Music: On Duke Ellington’s The Queen’s Suite.

Ella, by Max Ferguson, 1989
"The first time I heard The Queen’s Suite, I was at work, listening to a collection of piano music to drown out the sounds of the office. I hadn’t been paying particular attention to the music until a solo piano—Duke Ellington—began to play a phrase, a single figure of just a few lilting notes, repeated slowly at first, then more quickly, finally building into a kind of berceuse. The song, 'The Single Petal of a Rose,' was among the most beautiful and personal melodies Ellington ever wrote. It was the centerpiece of The Queen’s Suite, six songs he and his collaborator Billy Strayhorn composed for Queen Elizabeth II in 1958. Five of the six songs represent different musical landscapes—a grove full of fireflies, or a mockingbird singing at sunset—seen by Ellington in his travels around the world. ..."
Laphams Quarterly (Audio)
W - The Ellington Suites
YouTube: Duke Ellington: Queen's Suite Sunset and the Mocking Bird; Lightening Bugs and Frogs; Le Sucrier Velours; Northern Lights; The Single Petal of a Rose; Apes and Peacocks. Recorded April 4, 1959

2011 November: Duke Ellington - "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", 1943, 2011 September: "Take the A Train" - Duke Ellington, 2013 May: Duke Ellington’s Symphony in Black, Starring a 19-Year-old Billie Holiday, 2015 January: Home Movies of Duke Ellington Playing Baseball (And How Baseball Coined the Word “Jazz”)

On Ed Dorn, 'The Newly Fallen'

"I’d like to insert Dorn’s first book, The Newly Fallen (Totem Press, 1961), into the Symposium to address an element I felt missing in the original presentation of texts. Senses of space and seemed crucial to the new news about poetry I encountered at age twenty-one, living in Vancouver and having grown up in the Kootenay mountains in the southeast of British Columbia. The New American Poetry anthology tapped into a need to identify the 'local' as an aesthetic that was just blossoming in the northwest, and was of great interest to us Canadian postcolonials. Olson’s poetic mapping of Gloucester was as overwhelming as our concurrent discovery of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. But younger, and more western poets like Dorn, Whalen, and Snyder suggested a geographically closer-to-home and local flavour. ... The Newly Fallen was published by Leroi Jones’s Totem Press in January 1961, just before Dorn turned thirty-two. ..."
Jacket2
NY Times: Black Mountain Breakdown
BeatBooks

2007 December: Edward Dorn, 1929-1999, 2014 September: Tom Clark - Edward Dorn (1929-1999), 2015 November: The Collected Poems 1956 - 1974, 2015 December: Recollections of Gran Apachería (1974), 2016 April: By the Sound (1965), 2016 July: Gunslinger, 2016 November: The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), 2017 June: Hands Up! (1964).

The Souljazz Orchestra - Under Burning Skies (2017)

"Canada’s fastest moving and hardest working collective are back with one of their finest albums to date, a brand new journey into tropical, soul and jazz styles on their scorching new release, ‘Under Burning Skies’. Turbulent times call for strong voices and The Souljazz Orchestra’s new set packs a suitably heavy lyrical punch, with wry observations and an urge for progressive change. Musically, the band continue to push the limits, dusting off ‘80s vintage synthesizers and early drum machines for the first time, bringing lo fi disco, boogie and electro touches to their trademark horn arrangements and earthy analogue sound. The fruits are a-plenty and the group sound at their confident and versatile best from start to finish. ..."
The Souljazz Orchestra (Audio)
Discogs
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: Dog Eat Dog (Official Video), Holla holla, Lufunki, Oublier pour un jour

Blank Tape: Electronic Cassette Culture

"Experimental and avant garde music has always sought release through peripheral channels. Where in the past that might have been via a number of hand-painted records handed out at concerts or between friends within local scenes, independent labels with creativity (rather than cash) to burn are turning to cassettes as an available, affordable and more immediate medium to release music on. And where in the past, DIY cassette culture may have been more central to grassroots punk and hip-hop culture, electronic music producers are now exploiting the analogue texture of tape for its sonic qualities too. Rather than make a film about the so-called 'tape revival', we wanted to hear from the makers themselves to understand what it is about tape that remains so attractive. It features labels like Sacred Tapes, Tesla Tapes and Astro:Dynamics, Warp distributors Bleep and producers Helm and Ekoplekz whose music has sprung the underground to find a home on PAN and Planet Mu. A film by Sam Campbell & Sonal Kantaria."
The Vinyl Factory (Video)

2008 September: Tellus Audio Cassette Magazing, 2015 August: Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture - Thurston Moore (2005), 2015 September: OP Magazine / Tape Op, 2015 December: Cassette culture, 2016 April: The idea of the cassette: A gallery with musings, 2017 October: Spool's Out

Cabaret Voltaire

Wikipedia - "Cabaret Voltaire was the name of a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland. It was founded by Hugo Ball, with his companion Emmy Hennings on February 5, 1916, as a cabaret for artistic and political purposes. Other founding members were Marcel Janco, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp. Events at the cabaret proved pivotal in the founding of the anarchic art movement known as Dada. Switzerland was a neutral country during World War I and among the many refugees coming to Zürich were artists from all over Europe. ... The cabaret featured spoken word, dance and music. The soirees were often raucous events with artists experimenting with new forms of performance, such as sound poetry and simultaneous poetry. Mirroring the maelstrom of World War I raging around it, the art it exhibited was often chaotic and brutal. ..."
Wikipedia
UbuWeb: Cabaret Voltaire
DADA & Modernist Magazines: Cabaret Voltaire
WSJ - Dada: 100 Years Later
Cabaret Voltaire: the Dada House
Welcome to Cabaret Voltaire, birthplace of Dada.
The Art Story: Hugo Ball
YouTube: WWI, Cabaret Voltaire & the beginnings of Dada, Dada Art Movement History - "Dada on Tour"

The First International Dada Fair, held in Berlin, June–August 1920.

UR New York at Pop International Galleries on the Bowery

La Bodega, Mixed media on wood panel
"Few artists capture the soulful grit of NYC as strikingly as Fernando Romero aka Ski and Mike Baca aka 2Esae, collectively known as UR New York. Their most recent exhibit, A New York Story — a captivating ode to NYC — has graced the walls of Pop International Galleries since early October. Pictured above is a work of mixed media on canvas simply titled URNY. What follows are several more artworks that will remain on view through mid-week. Pop International Galleries is located at 195 Bowery at Spring Street and is open Mon-Sat 10-7 | Sun 11-6 and by appointment. ..."
Street Art NYC
Pop International Galleries

Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online

The First Known Footage of Marcel Proust Discovered: Watch It Online
"Marcel Proust’s legions of fans have obsessed about the meaning of his sometimes impenetrable prose, fetishized his tatty fur coat and bed, parsed his manuscripts and, fairly or not, lauded 'Remembrance of Things Past' as the greatest literary work of the 20th century. Now, Proustians the world over are eagerly awaiting two events that may shed new light on the self-consciously eccentric writer and master excavator of memories who arguably out-Joyced Joyce in his epic modernism and whose prose Nabokov once called 'translucid.' Some 6,000 letters written by Proust, many of which had been collected and published by the scholar Philip Kolb of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will be put online and made available free to scholars and general readers alike. ..."
NY Times

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, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world.

At the Whitney, a Vision of Africa—Without the Colonialist Meddling

Toyin Ojih Odutola (left), originally from Nigeria, and Yaa Gyasi, born in Ghana, photographed in February at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York.
"In the summer of 2016, the poet Claudia Rankine published an essay in Aperture magazine about drawings made by the artist Toyin Ojih Odutola. Ojih Odutola was born in Nigeria, immigrated to the States with her family at age 5, and spent her formative years in Huntsville, Alabama. 'Individuals populate her portraits,' wrote Rankine, 'but remain in conversation with something less knowable than their presumed identity. To settle down her images, to name them, is to render them monolithic.' Rankine was writing about Ojih Odutola’s pen ink drawings, for some time the signature of her practice. These were, in her own telling, 'conceptual portraits' of anonymous subjects (though if you looked close, the faces often resembled that of the artist) depicted unclothed and decontextualized in blank space. What distinguished them was both medium—pen and paper is not often associated with fine art—and style. Ojih Odutola’s subject, principally, was black skin, which she drew shimmering and undulating and alive, sometimes in monotones, sometimes with prismatic bursts of color. ..."
Vogue
NY Times: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young African Immigrant
Whitney - Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined
NOWNESS (Video)

2016 December: Toyin Ojih Odutola

Elodie Lauten - "Transform EP" (2014)

"Wilde Calm Records is honored to present new work from the late Elodie Lauten, New York City composer and recipient of the 2014 Robert Rauschenberg Award. Lauten had been exploring microtonality and alternative temperament since working on a Fairlight CMI synthesizer in the early 1980s and up until her untimely death, had been continuing these explorations with the Klio, her custom modular Reaktor software synthesizer. Many Wilde Calm fans will be familiar with Lauten’s music from her numerous collaborations with fellow downtown luminary Arthur Russell. Lauten and Russell met through their mutual poet friend Allen Ginsberg and shared a similar sensibility of musical openness and possibility as evident in their spiritual club classic 'In the Light of the Miracle' and Russell’s appearance on Lauten’s seminal post- minimalist masterwork The Death of Don Juan. Five remastered selections from her most recent album Transform feature on the EP in addition to a Wilde Calm remix. For fans of Laurie Spiegel and Suzanne Ciani, Lauten’s synth explorations are essential."
Soundcloud: "Transform EP" (Video)
deejay (Audio)
iTunes

2010 July: Elodie Lauten, 2013 February: Piano Works Revisited, 2016 July: Orchestre Modern (EP - 1981)

Ngọc Bảo – Cô Tú, a Vietnamese 78rpm

"Finding Vietnamese 78rpm records is not that easy, even though a lot of them were pressed here in France during the colonial period, when Vietnam was still part of French Indochina. This one comes from a lot I bought from another collector in Paris. Thanks to Haji Maji and Excavated Shellac blogs, I was already familiar with some 78rpm recordings of Vietnamese folk music, but it was the first time I heard early popular music from this country. Most of the songs from that lot are based on western instruments, with male and female vocals. To be honest, they sometimes sound a little too sweet for my ears, but this one is really special! I was immediately stunned by the beauty of this voice, accompanied only by a guitar. …"
Ceints de Bakélite (Soundcloud)