Restoring King

"Every year, in January and April, we commemorate the extraordinary career of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. But there is probably no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted, whose message is more bowdlerized, whose powerful words are more drained of content than King. A few years ago, in preparation for a public lecture on 1968, I reread the most important book on King and his politics to come out in the last decade: Thomas F. Jackson’s From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr and the Struggle for Economic Justice. Jackson, a former researcher with the King Papers project at Stanford, has read King’s every last sermon, speech, book, article, and letter. What Jackson finds is that from the beginning of his ministry, King was far more radical, especially on matters of labor, poverty, and economic justice, than we remember. In media accounts, King was quickly labeled the “Apostle of Non-Violence” and, by the mid 1960s, portrayed as the antithesis to Malcolm X. ..."
The Dawn
NY Times: Will America Choose King’s Dream or Trump’s Nightmare?

2008 January: Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther King Jr. - 1, 2013 August: The March at 50 , 2015 January: Freedom Journey 1965: Photographs of the Selma to Montgomery March by Stephen Somerstein, 2015 February: Spider Martin’s Photographs of the Selma March Get a Broader View, 2015 March: Revisiting Selma, 2015 December: Atlanta: Darker Than Blue, 2016 February: Unpublished Black History, 2018 January: The Evolution of Dr. King

William Basinski ‎- The Garden Of Brokenness (2005)

"The sustain pedal was one of the greatest discoveries of my life. I still remember the first few times I ever sat at a piano, holding it down and letting the notes vibrate against each other until they faded to imperceptibility. And then doing it again. Incredibly, the sound of felt hammers on metal strings can be used to express almost any emotion you could name. In 1979, when he first recorded the piano loops used on The Garden of Brokenness, William Basinski says he was attempting capture 'mono no aware,' a Japanese concept whose closest English translation is 'the sadness of things.' 'Things' could be taken two ways, of course-- it may refer to the general state of being alive, or to literal, physical objects. Either way, these sad, slow piano loops are the kind of sounds that poke around in your guts looking for sensitive spots to nestle into. ..."
Pitchfork
YouTube: The Garden of Brokenness

2017 January: The Disintegration Loops (2002-2003), 2017 October: Watermusic II (2003)

The loveliness of New York’s skinny brownstones

"A single-family brownstone has been a New Yorker’s dream home since these “brown stone front” row houses (often made of brick with brown sandstone covering the facade) began appearing on city blocks by the middle of the 19th century. Because building lots during the brownstone era typically measured 25 by 100 feet, the average home came in at about 20 feet across, which allowed for a spacious parlor floor with two or three wide windows with decorative touches spanning each floor. But thanks to profit-driven developers who decided to squeeze two brownstones into one lot, the cityscape of today contains a fair number of slender, narrow, skinny brownstones. The top photo shows one in Gramercy with the same iron balconies and cornice as its wider counterparts. The second photo shows two compressed-looking brownstones on West 30th Street. ..."
Ephemeral New York

2014 April: Brownstone, 2015 May: Park Slope and the Story of Brownstone Brooklyn

Alice Neel, Uptown

Mercedes Arroyo, 1952
"Known for her portraits of family, friends, writers, poets, artists, students, singers, salesmen, activists, and more, Alice Neel created forthright, intimate, and, at times, humorous paintings that quietly engaged with political and social issues. In Alice Neel, Uptown, writer and curator Hilton Als brings together a body of paintings and works on paper of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other people of color for the first time. Highlighting the innate diversity of Neel’s approach, the selection looks at those whose portraits are often left out of the art-historical canon and how this extraordinary painter captured them; 'what fascinated her was the breadth of humanity that she encountered,' Als writes. ..."
David Zwirner
The Atlantic: How Alice Neel’s Sharp, Compassionate Eye Painted Harlem
[PDF] David Zwirner
amazon

2010 October: Alice Neel, 2012 September: Alice Neel: Late Portraits and Still Lifes

Swoop And Cross – Stories Of Disintegration (2018)

"... Up first is this pastoral and nostalgic beauty from Swoop And Cross, aka London based Portuguese composer/musician, Ruben Vale. Like a soundtrack to a melancholic and romantic silent film from long past, the tracks on Stories Of Disintegration wind their way into your subconscious, softly easing you into a state of memory and longing. As though you are watching your life on rewind…and waiting to hear what happens in the music. The languid and dreamy piano motifs are counter balanced by more rhythmic electronic flourishes, and together they form this very contemplative set of sounds. ... Each lidded box is collaged on the cover with unique Japanese prints of temples and gardens, torn, punched and holed, leaving parts of the original album cover showing. Most boxes have a spinning wheel on the cover as well, and each comes with a wraparound stamped obi strip. Each box is then edge stamped, and comes inside with fragments of photos and texts from the originally included librettos and booklets. ..."
Time Released Sound (Audio)
disquiet (Audio)
Soundcloud: Swoop And Cross "Stories Of Disintegration" St. No
YouTube: #Gonzervatory Application - Swoop and Cross

Bill Morrison - The Dockworker's Dream (2016)

"There is a magical new film by Bill Morrison, who has has garnered love and accolades for his films that use archival footage to tell new stories. His work has been shown around the world, recently as part of a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Along with his use of found footage, Bill Morrison often teams up with modern composers. He's made films using music by Philip Glass, Harry Partch, Vijay Iyer and Bill Frisell which gives you an idea of his reach into both the world of classical, avant-garde and jazz. For his new film, The Dockworker's Dream, Bill Morrison did something a bit different, by teaming up Kurt Wagner of the dreamy, country-tinged band Lambchop for music that is both instrumental and vocal. The film is a reflective black and white journey from port to factory that includes a wedding and a hunt. ..."
NPR - Archival Filmmaker Bill Morrison Meets Lambchop: Watch Their Film (Video)
YouTube: The Dockworker's Dream

2012 June: Bill Morrison, 2015 October: Decasia (2002), 2017 December: The Miners' Hymns (2011)

Nuyorican

Miguel Piñero of the Nuyorican literary movement and poet Sandra Maria Esteves on the train in New York City in 1977.
Wikipedia - "Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms 'New York' and 'Puerto Rican' and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York City, or of their descendants (especially those raised or still living in the New York area). This term could be used for Puerto Ricans living in other areas in the Northeast outside New York State. The term is also used by Boricuas (Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico) to differentiate those of Puerto Rican descent from the Puerto Rico-born. The term Nuyorican is also sometimes used to refer to the Spanish spoken by New York Puerto Ricans. ... Ethnic enclaves centered on Puerto Ricans include Spanish Harlem, Manhattan; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and the South Bronx. ... Nuyorican itself dates at least from 1975, the date of the first public sessions of the Nuyorican Poets Café. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Nuyorican Movement
Becoming “Nuyorican” (Video)
W - Nuyorican Poets Café
Nuyorican Poets Cafe

The exterior walls are painted by a local artist "Chico" who has done neighborhood murals for decades. Above the entry doorway hangs Diana Gitesha Hernandez's acrylic painting.

Chaos Is This College Basketball Season’s Only Constant

"This college basketball season is drunk. I know that gets said every year around this point in January, but that’s only because the sentiment always rings true. The entire sport’s landscape feels fuzzy: Unranked teams are beating top-10 teams so often that it’s no longer even surprising; all the blueblood programs are worse than expected; there were no undefeated teams left by New Year’s Day; and four teams — Arizona, Florida, Texas A&M, and Notre Dame — have fallen to unranked status after previously cracking the top five of the AP poll. The SEC and Pac-12 are shitshows, the Big East and Big 12 are bloodbaths, the ACC might be the fourth-best conference in America, and the Big Ten is a thing that also exists. Plus, Wisconsin and Iowa State stink, Auburn and Arizona State don’t, Buzz Williams has hair, and J.P. Macura doesn’t wear sleeves on the court. ..."
The Ringer

2012 July: Doin’ It In The Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC, 2013 March: March Madness 2013, 2014 January: History of the high five, 2015 February: Dean Smith (February 28, 1931 – February 7, 2015), 2015 September: Joint Ventures: How sneakers became high fashion and big business, 2015 December: Welcome to Smarter Basketball, 2016 January: The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams (1994), 2016 January: A Long Hardwood Journey, 2016 March: American Hustle - Alexandra Starr, 2016 July: Photographers in Focus: Ethan Sprague, 2016 November: 2016–17 College Basketball, 2017 November: 2017-18 College Basketball

Bootsy Collins - What's In My Bag?

"Bootsy Collins is a legendary funk and R&B bassist with a musical legacy spanning four decades. Born in Cincinnati, Collins began his musical career with The Pacemakers, members of which later served as James Brown's backing group under the name The J.B.'s. After moving to Detroit in the '70s, he was introduced to George Clinton and joined Funkadelic. In 1976, Collins and several other members of the Parliament Funkadelic collective formed Bootsy's Rubber Band and recorded five albums together. In the '80s Collins recorded both as a solo artist and with Bootsy's Rubber Band. He has collaborated with Bill Laswell, Fatboy Slim, Deee-Lite, and Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads. His most recent release is 2011's The Funk Capital of the World, which features appearances by Chuck D, Snoop Dogg, George Clinton and Bernie Worrell."
Amoeba Music (Video)

2009 July: Bootsy Collins, 2012 April: Ahh...The Name Is Bootsy, Baby!, 2009 January: George Clinton, 2010 December: Mothership Connection - Houston 1976, 2011 October: Funkadelic - One Nation Under A Groove, 2011 October: "Do Fries Go With That Shake?", 2012 August: Tales Of Dr. Funkenstein – The Story Of George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic, 2015 July: Playing The (Baker's) Dozens: George Clinton's Favourite Albums, 2015 August: Chocolate City (1975), 2016 February: Maggot Brain - Funkadelic (1971), 2016 June: P-Funk All Stars - Urban Dancefloor Guerillas (1983), 2017 March: Up for the Down Stroke - Parliament (1974)

Found Memories - Julia Murat (2011)

"'If bread doesn’t breathe, it gets stiff,' says Madalena (Sônia Guedes), an elderly woman in the fictitious Brazilian village of Jotuombo, whose daily grind involves kneading dough and baking rolls before sunrise. She’s talking to Rita (Lisa Fávero), a young photographer who happens upon the village, and indeed, before Rita’s arrival, Madalena and her neighbors were living a rather airless and rigid existence. The first narrative feature from native Brazilian Julia Murat, Found Memories has all the makings of a turn-this-town-upside-down banality, its plucky drifter softening the crusty locals with her fresh breath of vitality. But Murat holds the reins on blatant convention about as tightly as she does the gaze of her static camera, which, like Rita, is most often a curious visitor of a sleepy haven forgotten by time. ..."
Slant
NY Times: A Dying Village Gets a Curious Visitor
NPR: 'Found Memories' Revealed With Grace And Patience
W - Found Memories
MUBI: Found Memories
YouTube: Interview with Julia Murat in New York - Director of Found Memories

Salon

A Reading in the Salon of Mme Geoffrin, 1755
Wikipedia - "A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, 'either to please or to educate' (Latin: aut delectare aut prodesse). Salons, commonly associated with French literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries, were carried on until as recently as the 1940s in urban settings. The salon was an Italian invention of the 16th century, which flourished in France throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The salon continued to flourish in Italy throughout the 19th century. In 16th-century Italy, some brilliant circles formed in the smaller courts which resembled salons, often galvanized by the presence of a beautiful and educated patroness such as Isabella d'Este or Elisabetta Gonzaga. ..."
Wikipedia
Salon Culture: Network of Ideas
The History and Meaning of Salons
A Renaissance of Salon Culture
Women's Involvement in the French Salons (Early 18th Century)
Getty Center - Comic Art: The Paris Salon in Caricature
[PDF] Shaping the Public Sphere: English Coffeehouses and French Salons and the Age of the Enlightenment

In New York, Drawing Flood Maps Is a ‘Game of Inches’

The Edgewater Park community in the Bronx has had among the most flood insurance claims in New York City in recent years.
"With its 520 miles of coastline and thousands of acres of waterfront development, New York has more residents living in high-risk flood zones than any other city in the country. Hurricane Sandy, the devastating October 2012 storm, did $19 billion in damage to the city, and the pace of development along the water has only increased. Now, after a year in which hurricanes ravaged Houston and the Caribbean, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is substantially redrawing New York’s flood maps for the first time in three decades. It is a painstaking process that will affect tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people, determining how and where buildings can be constructed and the cost of flood insurance on everything from modest bungalows to luxury skyscrapers. New York will be the first major metropolis to be remapped taking into account the realities of climate change, like rising sea levels and increasingly powerful storms. ..."
NY Times

15 Wildest Claims From Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury’

"Michael Wolff’s exposé 'Fire and Fury' hit bookstands today after just an excerpt of it prompted panicked, angry tweets and legal threats from President Donald Trump. The publisher, Henry Holt, responded by moving up the publishing date to today, but good luck finding a copy: It’s sold out and backordered in Los Angeles, and in Washington, D.C., bookstores that stayed open past midnight rapidly ran out of their copies. But it is available on Kindle if you’re impatient, and I certainly was. Here are some of the gossipy, tell-all book’s juiciest pieces of internecine strife and bad language. ..."
Variety
New Yorker: Michael Wolff’s Withering Portrait of President Donald Trump
LA Times - Op-Ed Why believe Michael Wolff? Because, for now, this stuff is too good not to
New Republic: Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury Is a Gift to Donald Trump
Guardian - Michael Wolff's explosive book on Trump: the key revelations (Video)
LitHub: Everything You Need to Know About Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury
The Hill: Who is ‘Fire and Fury’ author Michael Wolff? (Video)
amazon

Drawing heavily on quotes from Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, Michael Wolff’s new book describes a dysfunctional and bitterly divided White House. (New Yorker)

The Lake Studies: 1-16 - Lar Duggan (2001)

"If there were an award for best under-recorded jazz artist in Burlington, it would be a toss-up between two long-time regulars on the local scene — James Harvey and Lar Duggan. Harvey recently released his first solo album, and Duggan has just come out with the second in a professional career that has so far spanned 40 years. It’s noteworthy when a pianist of Duggan’s high caliber decides to put out a new album, but his recent release isn’t exactly new. It was recorded before his first album, which was released more than 20 years ago, and features the same title and much of the same material as his first release. Confused yet? Duggan’s sort-of-new collection is mainly a solo piano outing, The Lake Studies: 1-16, recorded by Charles Eller and self-released on Duggan’s own Aerie label. ..." (Anna B.)
Seven Days - Water Music: Navigating the lake-inspired latest from Burlington pianist Lar Duggan
iTunes
Soundcloud (Audio)
Bandcamp (Audio)
YouTube: Lake Study No.17, from his suite "The Lake Studies"

The Age of Graffiti - Jane Stern

An abandoned pier in Philadelphia.
"In Danbury, Connecticut, off Interstate 84, there is an overpass festooned with graffiti scribbles. They have been there for three decades. No one has thought to erase them and, as far as I can tell, no one has added to them. The graffiti is of the basest kind. There is little attempt at artwork, design, or display. It is simply the names of yesterday’s rock-and-roll bands spray painted in black in adolescent calligraphy: the Who, Kiss, Commander Cody, Mountain. I drive under this overpass at least once a week. This is the route to all the big-box stores, supermarkets, and a dozen places that sell cheap cell-phone plans. Exit 7 is not the autumn-leaf splashed Connecticut seen on calendars. It is where you go to load up on paper towels and laundry detergent. ..."
The Paris Review

Brian Eno - Mistaken Memories Of Mediaeval Manhattan (1980-81)

"The first ambient film, at least in the Brian Eno sense of the term, although one can think of other examples prior to this, not least Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) which is possibly alluded to in a sequence showing the Empire State Building in the distance. Eno filmed several static views of New York and its drifting cloudscape from his thirteenth-floor apartment in 1980–81. The low-grade equipment (and NTSC video) give the images a hazy, impressionistic quality. Lack of a tripod meant filming with the camera lying on its side so the tape had to be re-viewed with a television monitor also turned on its side. The assembled videos were later screened in galleries with music from some of the Ambient series of albums, and also two unique pieces. ..."
{ feuilleton }
Discogs (Video)
UbuWeb (Video)

Introducing the Librarian Action Figure: The Caped Crusader Who Fights Against Anti-Intellectualism, Ignorance & Censorship Everywhere

"We've featured action figures that pay tribute to some cultural icons like Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo. But now comes a new action figure that honors a less appreciated cultural force--all of the great librarians, those crusaders for the printed and electronic word, who 'keep it all organized for us and let us know about the best of it.' Standing almost four inches tall and made of hard vinyl, the librarian action figure is based on Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl. She has 'a removable cape that symbolizes how much of a hero a librarian really is.' The action figure should come in handy in your own fights again anti-intellectualism, censorship and ignorance. Enjoy!
Open Culture
W - Nancy Pearl

Musicians Backstage in the 1970s: The Photos

Aston 'Family Man' Barrett and Bob Marley of The Wailers playing guitar and keyboards backstage at the Odeon, Birmingham, United Kingdom, July 18, 1975.
"It was the post-Beatles decade—years of soul and rock and disco and punk. The 1970s was the era that fully embraced the change of the '60s counterculture, a time when artists waged their own protests against wars, social injustice, and the rapidly shifting American Dream. Some of the greatest names in contemporary music reached their zenith in the '70s. Here's what was happening behind the scenes."
Esquire

The Case for the Subway

"Long before it became an archaic, filthy, profligate symbol of everything wrong with our broken cities, New York’s subway was a marvel — a mad feat of engineering and an audacious gamble on a preposterously ambitious vision. 'The effect it is to have on the city of New York is something larger than any mind can realize,' said William Gaynor, the New York mayor who set in motion the primary phase of its construction. A public-works project of this scale had never before been undertaken in the United States, and even now, more than a century later, it is hard to fully appreciate what it did for the city and, really, the nation. Before the subway, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that New York would become the greatest city on earth. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution were arriving on its doorstep every year, but most of them were effectively marooned, herded into dark, squalid tenements in disease-ridden slums. The five boroughs had recently been joined as one city, but the farms and villages of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens might as well have been on the other side of the planet from Manhattan’s teeming streets. ..."
NY Times

Nyege Nyege: East Africa's new wave

"Electronic music is booming in East Africa, and a small collective based in Kampala is at the heart of it all. Aaron Coultate travelled to Uganda to hear their story. When she first walked into the Tilapia nightclub, Hibo Elmi had been living in Kampala for about a year. Her childhood had taken her across East Africa. Elmi's parents left Somalia during the early-1990s civil war, and she lived in Kenya and Ethiopia before arriving in Uganda's capital. ... In hope of finding a more welcoming environment, the sisters set out to explore Kampala's party scene. By this point, in 2013, Tilapia was already one of Kampala's best late-night spots, attracting a Pan-African crowd. ... This outsider spirit applied to both Boutiq Electroniq's crowd and its music. While many Kampala club nights are soundtracked by commercial dancehall, reggae or hip-hop, at Boutiq Electroniq you'd hear music from across Africa that didn't get much airtime in clubs—kuduro, tarraxinha, balani, coupé-décalé, soukous—plus Western electronic music like house, techno and grime. ..."
Resident Advisor (Audio)
24 Things to Know Before You Go to Kampala
W - Kampala
Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Tapes are blazing trails for East African outsider music (Audio)
Independent - Nyege Nyege Festival review: The irresistible urge to dance
Nyege Nyege Tapes
Soundcloud: Nyege Nyege Tapes
YouTube: Nyege Nyege Music

Major League Baseball's Statcast Can Break Sabermetrics

"... That’s what Joe Inzerillo—the executive vice president and chief technology officer of MLB Advanced Media—said in a league press release announcing baseball’s revolutionary new player-tracking system, Statcast. It hasn’t quite been a decade since that quote; it hasn’t quite, in fact, been three years. But route efficiency, the metric in question, has already disappeared. Using a combination of cameras and radar to track the ball in every position it reaches as well as every player on the field at all times, offering a theoretically perfect or at least perfectible view of every game played in every major-league season, Statcast offers nearly limitless possibilities for baseball analysis by producing an incredible amount of raw data, some of which is packaged into specific metrics designed by a team of people at MLBAM. ..."
Deadspin (Video)

Podcast 523: Scanner

"It's a challenging task trying to condense a career like that of Robin Rimbaud's into a digestible introduction. For close to 30 years now, Rimbaud has been a major force in sonic art, crafting experimental sound pieces that connect a beguiling array of genres for concerts, installations, and recordings. His commissioned pieces include campaign work for Nike Hyperfuse, Chanel, and Stella McCartney, as well as scores for the UK Olympics' The Big Dance in Trafalgar Square, the re-opening of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the world’s first ever Virtual Reality ballet with the Dutch National Ballet, and collaborations with Bryan Ferry, Wayne McGregor, Merce Cunningham, Mike Kelley, Miroslaw Balka, Torres, Michael Nyman, Carsten Nicolai, Steve McQueen, Laurie Anderson, and Hussein Chalayan, amongst many others. ..."
xlr8r (Audio)

2012 October: Scanner, 2015 December: Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), 2017 September: The Great Crater (2017)

Social Ecology: Communalism against Climate Chaos - Brian Tokar

"Since the 1960s, the theory and praxis of social ecology have helped guide efforts to articulate a radical, counter-systemic ecological outlook with a goal of transforming society’s relationship to non-human nature. For many decades, social ecologists have articulated a fundamental ecological critique of capitalism and the state, and proposed an alternative vision of empowered human communities organized confederally in pursuit of a more harmonious relationship to the wider natural world. Social ecology helped shape the New Left and anti-nuclear movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of Green politics in many countries, the alter-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and most recently the struggle for democratic autonomy by Kurdish communities in Turkey and Syria, along with the resurgence of new municipal movements around the world — from Barcelona en Comú to Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. ..."
ROAR

2014 September: Anarchism in America (1983), 2015 August: The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders, 2016 October: Why Bernie Was Right, 2015 October: The Ecology of Freedom (1982), 2016 July: Murray Bookchin’s New Life, 2017 January: Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model - Eleanor Finley, 2017 February: Socialism’s Return, 2017 April: The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 (1977), 2017 December: Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939.

The hymn of journals, poetic and public

"With today’s ubiquitous social media and all that sharing entails, the idea of poetry that delves into the personal and utilizes actual journals would command an especially astute and unique precision — one that Stacy Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites & Other Journals deftly delivers, reminding us of the raw power of the poetic personal / personal poetic, and how uncommon poetry with this kind of depth is nowadays. Reading this book reminds me that the current Facebook-Twitter-Instagram environment is no match for the curated and hymn-phonic id, as extrapolated through an artistic lens of a writer in high command of a journal she renders and crops into a poetic-nonfiction narrative. This is not 'confessional' poetry, with all that connotes, of Plath et al. This is not even under the tired moniker of 'personal' poetry. Despite the fact that Szymaszek has indeed pulled from her journals, it does not feel like 'mining' journals 'for material.' It is something more chiseled. ..."
Jacket2
amazon

Onyx Collective’s New York City Jazz Odyssey

Onyx Collective, outside Warsaw, December 8, 2017 (L to R) Austin Williamson, Julian Soto, Jack Gulielmetti, Isaiah Barr, Julius Rodriguez, Nick Hakim, Felix Pastorius
"There used to be a club on 51st Street and Lexington Avenue owned by a Japanese gentleman who would greet music fans at the door. The club, which closed last week, was called Somethin’ Jazz, and in 2014 it was the place to see Onyx Collective, at the time a fresh-faced ensemble of young musicians making a name for themselves. You could catch the group on a Saturday night or maybe a Wednesday, depending on the month. Onyx performances were known for being experimental — the group could play an evening of free-form jazz or something soulful laced with soothing vocals, but no one set or lineup was the same. One night they could be a bebop trio, and the next they might blossom into a six-headed funk-soul colossus. With each performance, the group transformed the seemingly conventional space into something new and exciting. The crowds they drew were often an unusual assortment of folks — downtown art types, hip-hop heads from the outer boroughs, hype beasts, straightlaced jazz dudes. In other words, a variety of people not typically found at a jazz spot on the east side of midtown. ..."
Voice (Video)
ONYX Collective Is Injecting Jazz Cool Into N.Y.C.’s Downtown Scene
Discogs
Lower East Suite Part Two (Audio)
YouTube: 'Fruit Stand', "East River", "Color Images", 'Snake Charmer', The Mask, Steam Rooms,

How Not to Impeach

"WORCESTER, Mass. — With Democratic control of Congress after 2018 increasingly plausible, those who most intensely seek the impeachment of President Trump are organizing, agitating — and conducting a veritable clinic in how not to exercise one of the Constitution’s most solemn powers. Investigations are still underway, but 58 House Democrats have already voted to consider impeaching Mr. Trump. Tom Steyer, a Democratic megadonor, is running a multipronged campaign calling for Mr. Trump’s impeachment on grounds ranging from his North Korea policy to allegations of obstruction of justice. It is true that impeachment is a political rather than a criminal device, but not like this. It requires the kind of political judgment concerned with the public good, not with gaining electoral advantage. The prudent path forward lies somewhere between 'fiat justitia, ruat caelum' and 'Vox populi, vox Dei' — 'let justice be done though the heavens fall' on one hand and 'the voice of the people is the voice of God' on the other. ..."
NY Times

The 2017 Jacobin Mixtape

"Let’s not kid ourselves: 2017 was a weird year. Since Inauguration Day, things have been kind of a blur at your neighborhood socialist magazine. As the first year of the Trump presidency, 2017 brought an endless onslaught of awful delivered from on high. But it also brought a groundswell of popular resistance, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time. And no, we’re not talking about the tuxedoed cadre of #TheResistance, bunkered at their year-end office parties, giddily recapping twelve months of subtweets and talk-show zingers. We’re talking about the thousands of ordinary people who stood up to Trump and his noxious coalition this year. We’re talking about those who flooded airports in defense of Muslim travelers, who braved alt-right violence in Charlottesville and Boston, who put their careers on the line to expose sexual violence in American workplaces. And, yes, we’re talking about whatever hero of socialist labor sent a box of rank shit to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s new Washington digs, just in time for Christmas. For our part in 2017, we think we did a pretty good job. ..."
Jacobin

Old New York’s sleigh carnival began in January

"Imagine a city where every January, when winter is at its most brutal and bone-chilling, New Yorkers parked their stages and omnibuses and excitedly hitched their horses to sleighs (like these in Central Park in the 1860s). What was dubbed the 'sleighing carnival' was an annual event in the 19th century metropolis (below, on Wall Street in 1834). Once snow was on the ground and it was packed hard into the road, large sleighs were brought out for public transportation; 'light' sleighs appeared too, kind of a personal carriage for joyriding, according to the Carriage Journal. ... 'The rapidity with which they are driven, at the rate of 10 or 12 miles an hour, is very delightful, and so exciting, that the most delicate females of New York think an evening drive, of 10 or 20 miles, even in the hardest frost, conducive to their amusement and health.' The sleighing carnival last through the end of the century. (Above left, in Prospect Park.) Snow arrived in New York mid-January 1892, recalls the Carriage Journal, 'and a regular sleighing carnival was the result.' ..."
Ephemeral New York

Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction

Aello. 1930
"Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction is a comprehensive survey of Picabia’s audacious, irreverent, and profoundly influential work across mediums. This will be the first exhibition in the United States to chart his entire career. Among the great modern artists of the past century, Francis Picabia (French, 1879–1953) also remains one of the most elusive. He vigorously avoided any singular style, and his work encompassed painting, poetry, publishing, performance and film. Though he is best known as one of the leaders of the Dada movement, his career ranged widely—and wildly—from Impressionism to radical abstraction, from Dadaist provocation to pseudo-classicism, and from photo-based realism to art informel. Picabia’s consistent inconsistencies, his appropriative strategies, and his stylistic eclecticism, along with his skeptical attitude, make him especially relevant for contemporary artists, and his career as a whole challenges familiar narratives of the avant-garde. ..."
MoMA (Video)
NY Times: Francis Picabia, the Playboy Prankster of Modernism
Voice: Picabia, Nihilism, and Searching for Meaning In Art in 2017 by Richard Hell
amazon

Catalonia’s Elections Take Spain Back to Square One

"'Could either of you tell me the unemployment rate in Catalonia?' Jordi Évole asked Inés Arrimadas and Marta Rovira on his TV show Salvados in what became the inaugural debate of Catalonia’s December 21 regional-election campaign, held just nine days before the vote. ... Évole continued with his opening round of questions, asking for the number of refugees currently given asylum in Catalonia, the number of temporary buildings used in Catalan schools, and the number of Catalan women murdered by their partners in the year to date. Neither of the candidates could provide any of the answers. And that, it quickly became clear, was the point of the exercise: One issue—Catalan independence—had so polarized an entire region of Spain that many other important issues, from corruption to austerity, were being completely ignored. And the rhetoric on both sides had reached such a fever pitch that it had managed to distort the basic picture of reality. ..."
The Nation
Guardian - 'I voted with my conscience': Catalans more resigned than expectant on election day
Spain’s crisis re-ignited as Catalan separatists win vote

2017 October: Catalonia Leaders Seek to Make Independence Referendum Binding, 2017 October: Catalonia: Past and Future - Luke Stobart, 2017 October: Spain moves to take over Catalonia after region declares independence, 2017 November: Spain’s Conflict Over Catalonia Is Covering Up Massive Political Corruption

The Year in Illustration 2017

“A year of Trump-related articles requires a year's worth of Trump-related imagery. How do we avoid repeating the same images over and over? Brilliant illustrators to the rescue.” — Nathan Huang, art director
"Every year The New York Times commissions thousands of original illustrations from independent artists around the globe. Artists are asked to distill the most compelling aspects of stories and create a powerful experience. They often have just hours to make images that move, provoke and enrich the act of reading. During years of tumult and uncertainty, illustrators use the medium’s inherent flexibility to comment on a rapidly evolving social, political and economic landscape. When a single subject dominates the news, artists find new ways to elaborate on it without succumbing to dull repetition. They clear away the noise and get to the point, using pen, pencil, brush, stylus, cut paper, clay, motion and raw code to produce indelible images that resonate. Below is a selection of notable art The Times published in 2017."
NY Times

Sun Ra’s ‘Happy New Year to You’ doowop single (and a Christmas song too!)

"Sun Ra had his share of offbeat and amusing records—his Batman and Robin album and his limbo album spring to mind as typical (atypical?) Sun Ra curiosities.Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount, but he was universally known as Sonny in the first decades of life. Sonny Blount moved from Birmingham, Alabama. to Chicago in 1945—it was there that his interest in Egyptology and Afrofuturism took root. ... El Saturn released two LPs during the 1950s, Super-Sonic Jazz and Jazz In Silhouette, but before either of those, Sun Ra released an amusing doowop holiday single by a combo called the Qualities on Satur Records (sic). The single was super basic and clearly manufactured with the intention of making a quick buck. The A side was called 'It’s Christmas Time' and the B side was called 'Happy New Year to You.' ..."
Dangerous Minds (Audio)
YouTube: The Qualities (Sun Ra) ‎- Happy New Year To You!, Sun Ra Presents The Qualities (Single) (1960)

Oonops Drops - Jazz'n'Beats 2

"Oonops drops the second part of his Jazz’n’Beats episode. He blends a selection of jazz cuts in a smooth combination with jazzy beats and raps by acts like Digable Planets, DJ Mitsu The Beats, Twit One, FilzFlo, Gagle and many more. This time he gets supported in an exclusive guest mix by Soundtrax (360° Records), a german producer and the tour DJ of german rap legend Torch. He presents a well chosen mixture of tunes by A Tribe Called Quest, Kendrick Lamar, Joey Bada$$, US3 and many more. And now lay down and enjoy these musical treats. Check out the first volume here: www.mixcloud.com/brooklynradio/oonops-drops-jazznbeats and don’t forget to visit your host Oonops on Mixcloud and Facebook and his guest Soundtrax here. ..."
Brooklyn Radio (Audio)

Vieux Silence - Elodie (2017)

"Elodie is a band that operates at the point where silence and sound come together. When I saw the core duo of guitarist Andrew Chalk and flautist Timo van Luijk perform at London’s Café Oto some years ago, you could have heard the proverbial pin hit the deck as Chalk caressed the quietest of notes out of his acoustic six-string and van Luijk breathed softly into his flute. These days, and notably for this release, Vieux Silence, on Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ imprint, Elodie have expanded their line-up to include pianist Tom James Scott (who has already appeared on two Elodie LPs this year), Jean-Noël Rebilly on clarinet and some pedal steel guitar at times from Daniel Morris. But true to the ethos that has animated Elodie from day one, the results remain muted, quiet and, for Vieux Silence, decidedly nocturnal. ..."
The Quietus (Video)
Brainwashed
Boomkat (Audio)
Soundcloud: 'Au Point du Jour' (SOMA027)
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YouTube: Vieux Silence 8 videos

Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939.

"The Spanish Social Revolution has been long neglected in English language works. Its importance as a revolutionary event and model, and as a concrete example of workers’ self-management by the people is just not recognized. My purpose in this collection is to provide an introduction to this unique experience. In my first chapter and friend Bookchin’s introductory essay, a general overview and context is presented. Most important, of course, is that this was a real experience for the people who took part. Through their words and deeds and the observations of the authors used in this collection, it is hoped that the reader will gain a meaningful understanding of the aims and organization of the anarchist collectives. The material has been divided into two main sections. ..."
The Anarchist Library
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2014 September: Anarchism in America (1983), 2015 August: The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders, 2016 October: Why Bernie Was Right, 2015 October: The Ecology of Freedom (1982), 2016 July: Murray Bookchin’s New Life, 2017 January: Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model - Eleanor Finley, 2017 February: Socialism’s Return, 2017 April: The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 (1977).