Agnès Varda - Vagabond (1985)

"Unapologetically transgressive, righteously bleak and infused with a uniquely feminist sensibility, Vagabond proved to be one of Agnès Varda’s most essential films, winning the Golden Lion at the 1985 Venice Film Festival and a best actress César for Sandrine Bonnaire. Set against the frigid winter landscape of rural France, it follows Mona, a complex and contradictory drifter, who survives on handouts and ephemeral liaisons with strangers. We begin at the end, with the discovery of her corpse in a ditch. Then, through flashbacks and interviews with people who came into contact with her, Varda’s film attempts to reconstruct the final days of her life. Here are five reasons Vagabond deserves your attention. ..."
Five reasons to watch Vagabond, Agnès Varda’s austerely beautiful masterwork
W - Vagabond
Portrait of a Vagabond: An Appreciation of Agnès Varda
NY Times: Archives | 1985
amazon
DailyMotion: Trailer: Vagabond (Sans Toit ni Loi)

Agnès Varda directs Vagabond

August 2010: Agnès Varda, May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000), 2013 September: Cinévardaphoto (2004), 2014 July: Black Panthers (1968 doc.), 2014 October: Art on Screen: A Conversation with Agnès Varda, 2015 September: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), 2017 April: Agnès Varda’s Art of Being There, 2017 April: AGNÈS VARDA with Alexandra Juhasz, 2017 August: Agnès Varda on her life and work - Artforum, 2017 October: Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience, 2018 March: Faces Places - Agnès Varda and JR (2017)

August Wilson - Pittsburgh Cycle

A scene from the August Wilson play “Jitney” on Broadway at the Friedman Theater.
Wikipedia - "Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, also often referred to as his Century Cycle, consists of ten plays—nine of which are set in Pittsburgh's Hill District (the other being set in Chicago), an African-American neighborhood that takes on a mythic literary significance like Thomas Hardy's Wessex, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or Irish playwright Brian Friel's Ballybeg. The plays are each set in a different decade and aim to sketch the Black experience in the 20th century and 'raise consciousness through theater' and echo 'the poetry in the everyday language of black America'. He was fascinated by the power of theater as a medium where a community at large could come together to bear witness to events and currents unfolding. ..."
Wikipedia
August Wilson’s Pittsburgh. As soon as you emerge from the Fort Pitt Tunnel in Pittsburgh the city’s impressive skyline appears, with the 44-story Art Deco Gulf Tower and the glassy, neo-Gothic PPG Place accentuating the view. Those two buildings tell the tale of the city. Once defined by its production of iron and steel, along with the ensuing smog, Pittsburgh now has self-driving cars being tested on its streets and rapid gentrification in many of its historically blue-collar neighborhoods. It may seem as if the city is changing at an unparalleled pace but Pittsburgh has been steadily evolving for generations. August Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, poet, scholar and native son knew this firsthand. Change was something that Wilson brilliantly captured in what is known as the Century Cycle, his collection of 10 plays that reveal the broad African-American experience for each decade of the 20th century. ..."
NY Times
NY Times - August Wilson on Broadway: A History
The Hill District
11 Things You Should Know About August Wilson (Video)

2017 July: Fences (2016), 2017 August: The Ground on Which I Stand, a Speech on Black Theatre and Performance (1992)

The Soul Of Spanish Harlem / El Barrio: Sounds from the Spanish Harlem Streets

"The mid-to-late 60s produced an explosion of Latin soul, emanating a few blocks east of Harlem's Apollo Theater in East or Spanish Harlem. This compilation features the sweet harmony sounds of artists from the area - including Joe Bataan, Ralphi Pagan, the Lebron Brothers and a host of unknowns who recorded for labels such as Fania, Cotique and Speed. It also includes rare 45s by Parrish and 125th Street Candy Store. It gathers up some of the rarest and most sought after recordings of the era, including three-figure singles by Frankie Nieves, Tony Middleton and Harvey Averne which are collected by dancers, as well as Olivieri and Ralphi and the Latin Lovers which are sought-after by vocal group fans. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
amazon: The Soul Of Spanish Harlem
YouTube: THE TERRIBLE FRANKIE NIEVES (TRUE LOVE), TITO RAMOS ( HEAVEN), RONNIE MARKS (SOME LONELY HEART)
Juno: The Soul Of Spanish Harlem (Audio)
"Awesome new installment in the essential 'El Barrio' series of compilations from the great Fania salsa label. Fania is to salsa as Motown is to soul or Studio One is to reggae and this compilation picks fifteen killer tracks from the Fania 'family' of labels that included Tico and Allegre. There's a good mixture of 'classic' tracks alongside well chosen obscurities from some of the rarer releases. Explosive New York latin music that incorporates elements of soul and rock from the 1960s and 1970s with intense percussion, fiery singing, and explosive horns. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
amazon: El Barrio: Sounds From Spanish Harlem Streets
YouTube: Roberto Roena y su Apollo Sound - Consolacion, Pete Rodriguez Y Su Conjunto - Here come the judge, Tito Puente - Safari, Eddie Palmieri = Chocolate ice cream

All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visualized as a Modern Subway Map

"At its peak around the year 117 AD, the mighty Roman Empire owned five million square kilometers of land. It ruled more than 55 million people, between a sixth and a quarter of the population of the entire world. The empire, as classicist and historian Christopher Kelly describes it, 'stretched from Hadrian's Wall in drizzle-soaked northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syria; from the great Rhine-Danube river system, which snaked across the fertile, flat lands of Europe from the Low Countries to the Black Sea, to the rich plains of the North African coast and the luxuriant gash of the Nile Valley in Egypt.' All that power, of course, originally emanated from Italy. The builders of the Roman Empire couldn't have pulled it off without serious infrastructural acumen, including the skill to make concrete that lasts longer than even the modern variety as well as the forcefulness and sheer manpower to lay more than 400,000 kilometers of road. ..."
Open Culture

Funky Destination ‎– Revolution Is Only Solution (2013)

"Funky Destination a.k.a Vladimir Sivc returns with a brand new release for Timewarp. Already counting one album and numerous ep's & singles during the past four years, he finally presents his next, highly anticipated, full length album! 'Revolution Is Only Solution' presents 11 new well made funk tunes and songs plus two remixes on the song 'The Inside Man' from great funksters Soopasoul and Valique. This great album presents Funky Destination's musical skills that blend funk, soul, house and breaks with great party feeling and easy going funk grooves. Plus we agree with him regarding what the album title states: 'Revolution Is Only Solution'. All songs mastered by Angelos Timewarp Stoumpos (except Valique remix). ..."
Timewarp Music (Audio)
Discogs
iTunes
YouTube: The Inside Man (Soopasoul remix), Hollywood Jollywood, Such A Good Feeling, The Inside Man

For the Sake of the Song - Townes Van Zandt (1968)

Wikipedia - "For the Sake of the Song is the debut album by country singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt, released in 1968. The majority of the songs, including the title track, 'Tecumseh Valley', '(Quicksilver Daydreams of) Maria', 'Waiting 'Round to Die', and 'Sad Cinderella', were re-recorded in more stripped-down versions for subsequent studio albums. For the Sake of the Song would be the flagship release on Poppy Records, a label operated by Keven Eggers, with whom Van Zandt would have a long and complex professional relationship. ... Clement, who had been an engineer for Sam Phillips at Sun Records and an established songwriter himself, offered to produce the album with Jim Malloy. ..."
Wikipedia
Townes Van Zandt: For the Sake of the Song
allmusic
amazon
YouTube: For The Sake Of The Song [Full Album] 36:54

2018 Tour de France

Wikipedia - "The 2018 Tour de France is the 105th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's three Grand Tours. The 3,351 km (2,082 mi) race started from Noirmoutier-en-l'Île, in the Vendée department, on 7 July and will finish with the Champs-Élysées stage in Paris, on 29 July. A total of 176 riders across 22 teams are participating in the 21-stage race. The Tour is the shortest of the millennium and will be the fifth time a tour has set out from the Vendée department. ... Defending champion Chris Froome (Team Sky) was generally considered the main favourite for victory. He had won four out of the last five editions, and was also the current defending champion at both other Grand Tours, the Vuelta a España and the Giro d'Italia. However, Froome's participation was cast into doubt when he returned a urine sample at the 2017 Vuelta a España, which contained twice the allowed amount of the asthma drug salbutamol. ... The sprinters considered favourites for the points classification and wins on the flat or hilly bunch sprint finishes are Peter Sagan, Fernando Gaviria, Dylan Groenewegen, Arnaud Démare, Marcel Kittel, Michael Matthews, Mark Cavendish, André Greipel, Alexander Kristoff, Sonny Colbrelli, Nacer Bouhanni, John Degenkolb. ..."
Wikipedia
Le Tour (Video)
Guardian (Video)
Telegraph (Video)
Telegraph - Tour de France 2018: Full starting list and remaining teams and riders (Video)
BBC (Video)
Steephill (Video)
Cycling
twitter, facebook
YouTube: The Route in 3D - Tour de France 2018

2008 July: Tour de France 2008, 2009 July: Tour de France 2009, 2010 July: Tour de France 2010,  2011 July: Tour de France 2011, 2012 July: 2012 Tour de France, 2015 July: 2015 Tour de France, 2015 July: Tour de France 2015: Team Time Trial Win Bolsters American’s Shot at Podium, 2015 July: Tour de France: Chris Froome completes historic British win, 2016 July: 2016 Tour de France, 2017 July: 2017 Tour de France, 2018 May: 2018 Giro d'Italia

First Album, First Song: The 150 Best Lead-Off Tracks

"Over the years, some bands who've released recording debuts have launched their careers with a single from the album that, in many cases, was the first song on the first side of their record. In the business, these songs are called 'lead-off tracks,' denoting the first in a series of songs on an album. Many of these tracks spawned major hits: from Beyoncé's 'Crazy In Love,' 'Chuck E's In Love' by Rickie Lee Jones and Norah Jones' 'Don't Know Why,' to Foo Fighters' 'This Is A Call' and 'Suite: Judy Blue Eyes' by Crosby, Stills & Nash. Still others, while not major radio hits, have had lasting influence on pop music. 'Radio Free Europe' by R.E.M., 'Illegal Smile' by John Prine, 'Push It Along' by A Tribe Called Quest and 'Sunday Morning' by The Velvet Underground come to mind. From rock and soul to R&B and rap, we've collected 150 of these lead-off tracks into one playlist. Listen below."
NPR (Audio)

The Exquisite Catalog of a Crow Fair

"When Dr. Denene De Quintal arrived at the Denver Art Museum as a curatorial fellow in 2016, one of her first assignments was to dig into the extensive, old-school card catalog that documents objects in the museum’s Native Arts department—a seemingly ordinary task. But De Quintal was greeted by something she describes as both unusual and fascinating. On the backs of the cards were small, exquisitely-detailed watercolor paintings of native objects—baskets, spears, shoes, clothes and more, all rendered in painstaking realism down to the pattern and texture. The volume of the card catalog is staggering: There are over 20,000 artworks in the Native Arts department; of those, 15,000 have illustrated cards. ..."
Topic

The Black and White Cookie at the End of the World

"Last weekend, after 116 years of serving Yorkville’s sweet-toothed populace, Glaser’s Bake Shop permanently closed its doors. Beloved in particular for its lavishly frosted black and whites — perhaps the most iconic example of New York City’s most iconic cookie — the bakery was most recently owned and operated by brothers Herb and John Glaser, the third generation to run the family business. And on Sunday, July 1, it served its final cookie. I’d never been before, despite my twin interests in mom-and-pops (or, as the case may be, sibling-and-siblings) and all things sugar. I woke up early on Saturday morning, Glaser’s second-to-last day in existence, and took the train to the Upper East Side. I expected there might be a line, and if so, I was prepared to wait up to, I don’t know, half an hour? I had no idea what was in store for me. The bakery opened at 7 a.m.; I arrived around 8:15. ..."
Voice
W - Black and white cookie
NYC's Black & White Cookies, Ranked
YouTube: Seinfeld - Black and White Cookie

Holden Caulfield: Egotistical Whiner or Melancholy Boy Genius?

"Here are some things we’ve been talking about in the Literary Hub office lately: Is Holden Caulfield a tragic hero or an unbearable whiny teen? Is he misunderstood? Is he relevant to youth today? Is The Catcher in the Rye even any good? Does it matter, if it has meant something to generations of readers? Do we only like it because our parents did? Why do we talk about it so much more than Nine Stories, which is objectively superior? (To each his own, is my take—but I, having never liked The Catcher in the Rye or its deeply phony narrator, also don’t think we should keep things in the canon just because they’ve always been there.) If nothing else, we can all at least agree that Holden Caulfield is still (though decreasingly) a cultural touchstone in this country, in part because parents keep giving the book to their children and in part because so many students are still required to read it in school. ..."
LitHub

Discovering Black Outsider Art in a Whitewashed World

Margaret’s Grocery by Reverend Dennis
"Their abilities don’t come from any artistic establishment. They didn’t have any formal training and they were not influenced by other mainstream artists. Hailing from places like Mississippi, Tallapoosa, and other rural pockets of the deep south, they’re the African American Outsider and Folk artists whose voices and colour palettes explored a world that wasn’t really documented, but whose legacies have often been pushed to the wayside by history. Their work explores everything from the painful legacy of slavery, to segregation; from the need for intersectional feminism, to the power of a simple gesture of love. And their work is as unique as it comes… ..."
Messy Nessy Chic (Video)

Messy Nessy Chic

The Ballot and the Break

A portrait of Floyd B. Olson, the Farmer-Labor Party governor of Minnesota.
"The oldest political dispute inside the US left isn’t going away anytime soon. Revelations about the Democratic National Committee’s pro–Hillary Clinton intrigues and local victories for leftists in the November elections have added fuel to the fire of that age-old question: how should socialists confront the two-party system? On one side, supporters of 'realigning' the Democratic Party insist that given the constraints of the US political system, transforming the party is the sole viable strategy for progressive politics. On the other side, advocates of a clean break from the Democrats and Republicans see any involvement within capitalist parties as an unprincipled dead end. Proponents of each stance can rightly point to the practical failures of their rivals’ approaches over the past century, especially at the national level. But both sides have ignored the example of the most electorally successful workers’ party in the history of the United States — the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party (FLP). ..."
Jacobin
W - Floyd B. Olson
Who was Floyd Olson?

2018 World Cup Predictions

"The World Cup is back, and so is another edition of FiveThirtyEight’s World Cup predictions. For those of you familiar with our club soccer predictions or our 2014 World Cup forecast, much of our 2018 forecast will look familiar. We show the chance that each team will win, lose or tie every one of their matches, as well as a table that details how likely each team is to finish first or second in their group and advance to the knockout stage. This year, we’ve added a few features to our interactive graphics. We have a bracket that illustrates how likely each team is to make each knockout-round match that it can advance to, as well as its most likely opponents in those matches. ..."
FiveThirtyEight
Metafilter: it's coming to someone's home. (Video)

Dancing plague of 1518

Medieval villagers performing a nose dance during a celebration. In 1518, a dancing plague hit Strasbourg, France.
Wikipedia - "The dancing plague (or dance epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace, in the Holy Roman Empire in July 1518. Around 400 people took to dancing for days without rest and, over the period of about one month, some of those affected collapsed or even died of heart attack, stroke, or exhaustion. The outbreak began in July 1518 when a woman, Mrs. Troffea, began to dance fervently in a street in Strasbourg. This lasted somewhere between four and six days. Within a week, 34 others had joined, and within a month, there were around 400 dancers, predominantly female. Some of these people would die from heart attacks, strokes, or exhaustion. One report indicates that for a period, the plague killed around fifteen people per day. However, the sources of the city of Strasbourg at the time of the events did not mention the number of deaths, even if there were fatalities. ..."
Wikipedia
Guardian - Keep on moving: the bizarre dance epidemic of summer 1518
Mass-anxiety in Strasbourg: what was the dancing plague of 1518?

Dancing fever … people affected by St Vitus Dance.

Free Associations: Collages - Janet Malcolm, with Hilton Als

Temperature of World Cities, 2011.
"Janet Malcolm: Last winter, I came into possession of the papers of an émigré psychiatrist who practiced in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. The archive included a collection of manila envelopes, around six by ten inches, stuffed with folded sheets of thin paper covered with single-spaced typing: the notes the psychiatrist made after seeing patients (many of them fellow émigrés) in his office. As I studied the sheets with their inky typewriting and 60-year-old paper clips holding them together and leaving rust marks on the surface, my collagist’s imagination began to stir. I began to 'see' some version of the collages on view here. The scraps of paper I collect are largely black and white (preferably yellowing white) and have an archaic and melancholy air about them. They hark back to the 19th century and its technological and scientific vernacular. The case studies, with their sad old appearance, were of a piece with this backward-looking aesthetic. Further, in their sometimes almost parodic Freudian interpretations, they summoned a period in psychiatry that is as remote from today’s practice as the manual typewriter is from the Macintosh computer. These collages arose—I’m not sure how—from this encounter with the past. ..."
NYBooks

The Sun with Spots Big Enough to Swallow the Earth, 2011.

Poet of the People: The partisan world of Pablo Neruda

"The poet Pablo Neruda was born in 1920 at the age of 16. It was in October of that year, anyway, that a young man whose unsuspecting parents had baptized him Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto first signed with the name Neruda the poems that he felt he existed in order to write. Already, at 15, Neftalí (as his familiars addressed him until he escaped to college in the big city) had described himself, in excited drafts, not just as a poet but the poet, Mark Eisner points out in his new biography, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling. A sonnet titled 'The Poet Who is Neither Bourgeois nor Humble' alluded to his potent, unknown poet-ness: 'The men haven’t discovered that in him exists / the poet who as a child was not childish.' Neruda as an adolescent poet amounted almost to a parody of the type, worryingly thin, melancholy and shy, and got up, unlike other local boys, all in black. Sickly and frail, he was unsuited to the physical labor done by most of his neighbors, and, a lazy pupil at school, he did not suggest a country doctor or lawyer in the making. He appreciated the splendors of the natural world and mooned over pretty girls but otherwise showed little aptitude or interest for anything outside of books. Among the men who didn’t recognize his promise was the poet’s own father, a former dockworker with a hard demeanor. ..."
New Republic
Pablo Neruda’s Extraordinary Life, in an Illustrated Love Letter to Language

Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People

February 2009: Pablo Neruda, 2011 November: 100 Love Sonnets, 2015 November: The Body Politic: The battle over Pablo Neruda’s corpse, 2015 December: In Chile, Where Pablo Neruda Lived and Loved, 2016 May: Windows that Open Inward - Pablo Neruda. Milton Rogovin, Photographing., 2018 March: What We Can Learn from Neruda’s Poetry of Resistanc

Kamasi Washington - Heaven and Earth (2018)

"The line last Thursday to see Kamasi Washington perform at Leimert Park’s the World Stage wasn’t just around the block. It was the block. Organizers for the sort-of secret show, dubbed the Heaven and Earth Block Party in honor of Washington’s new album, roped off the entire back-alley entrance and parking lot of the saxophonist and composer’s old home-base nightclub. They set up couches and an outdoor projection screen for the hundreds of fans who couldn’t fit inside the tiny jazz venue’s main room. Washington, commanding yet gentle at center stage, led his band of best friends and L.A.’s jazz elite through two different two-hour sets, drawing from his quadruple-LP 'Heaven and Earth,' which was released June 22. The crowd was a mix of veteran L.A. jazz heads, curious hipsters and Leimert Park locals who grew up alongside Washington and this scene. It was sweaty and slammed cheek-to-cheek in a way no one minded. ... The show made the case not just for the continued vitality of L.A. jazz, which has melded with hip-hop, funk and the avant-garde. It was a model for music as the centerpiece of a community. A physical space, but also a mental and spiritual one. That’s the 'Heaven and Earth' of Washington’s album, and in a time when so much of American life seems isolated or irredeemably fractured, it’s a place for hope as well. ..."
LA Times: Kamasi Washington's ‘Heaven and Earth’ proves jazz's vitality and political power
Pitchfork
Kamasi Washington Earns Every Minute of Heaven and Earth (Audio)
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: ''Street Fighter Mas" live on KCRW, "The Space Travelers Lullaby'' live on KCRW


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?, 2017 August: Harmony of Difference EP (2017)

Opening a fire hydrant is a city summer tradition

"The first fire hydrant in New York was installed in 1808 at William and Liberty Streets downtown. By the end of the 19th century, city streets were dotted with iron hydrants, the kind we’re used to seeing today. The hydrants were certainly important when it came to fighting the deadly fires that beset the city in those days. But it didn’t take long for residents of the tenement districts to start wrenching open hydrants during heat waves and using the high-pressure spray for cooling off in blistering heat. Who led these activities? New York kids, of course. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Broadcasting from Home - Penguin Cafe Orchestra (1982)

"The Penguin Cafe Orchestra is as eclectic as prog gets, way beyond the usual parameters of the genre, far removed from bubbly Moog runs, blistering Rickenbacker bass rumbles, laser-guided electric guitar solos and thrashing Hammond organ. Quite the opposite, PCO was formed in that glorious period of 1973, when music from all genres were actively incorporated into the progressive fold, a laboratory of incredible adventure (and stamina) , still ear-friendly in the 21st Century. Not really surprising as the classically trained young 70s musicians flocked to the Rock idiom en masse, wanting to be part of this youthful exuberant cultural movement that had taken over the artistic world. Simon Jeffes was a gifted composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist who wished to put into music the dreams he slept through, very much in a neo-classical mode using an array of stringed instruments (violin, viola, cello) as well as the rare and bizarre such as Harmonium, Spinet, Ukulele, Cuatro, Soloban, Dulcitone, Omnichord etc'..."
Progarchives
W - Broadcasting from Home
amazon
YouTube: White Mischief & In the Back of a Taxi, Music by Numbers, Heartwind, Now Nothing, Isle of View (Music for Helicopter Pilots)

Jorge Amado

Wikipedia - ""Jorge Leal Amado de Faria (10 August 1912 – 6 August 2001) was a Brazilian writer of the modernist school. He remains the best known of modern Brazilian writers, with his work having been translated into some 49 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1978. His work reflects the image of a Mestiço Brazil and is marked by religious syncretism. He depicted a cheerful and optimistic country that was beset, at the same time, with deep social and economic differences. ... On his return to Brazil in 1954, Amado abandoned active political life, leaving the Communist Party one year later. From that period on he dedicated himself solely to literature. His second creative phase began in 1958 with Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, which was described by Jean-Paul Sartre as 'the best example of a folk novel'. Amado abandoned, in part, the realism and the social themes of his early works, producing a series of novels focusing mainly on feminine characters, devoted to a kind of smiling celebration of the traditions and the beauties of Bahia. ..."
Wikipedia
The 12 Best Books By Jorge Amado You Must Read
amazon: Jorge Amado

What It Costs to Be Smuggled Across the U.S. Border

Mr. Cruz crossed into Guatemala legally with his national identity card.
"MATAMOROS, Mexico — Shortly before dawn one Sunday last August, a driver in an S.U.V. picked up Christopher Cruz at a stash house in this border city near the Gulf of Mexico. The 22-year-old from El Salvador was glad to leave the one-story building, where smugglers kept bundles of cocaine and marijuana alongside their human cargo, but he was anxious about what lay ahead. The driver deposited Mr. Cruz at an illegal crossing point on the edge of the Rio Grande. A smuggler took a smartphone photograph to confirm his identity and sent it using WhatsApp to a driver waiting to pick him up on the other side of the frontier when — if — he made it across. The nearly 2,000-mile trip had already cost Mr. Cruz’s family more than $6,000 and brought him within sight of Brownsville, Tex. The remaining 500 miles to Houston — terrain prowled by the United States Border Patrol as well as the state and local police — would set them back another $6,500. It was an almost inconceivable amount of money for someone who earned just a few dollars a day picking coffee beans back home. But he wasn’t weighing the benefits of a higher-paying job. He was fleeing violence and what he said was near-certain death at the hands of local gangs. ..."
NY Times

"Habibi Funk 001 Mix" by Jannis of Jakarta Records (Mix of Arabic 60s & 70s)

"Thru the "Sawtuha" project and Blitz The Ambassador playing quite some shows in Morocco I've had the pleasure to travel North Africa quite frequently lately and whenever possible I did some record shopping. This is a selection of some of the finds, music from the 60s and 70s from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. Some known, some not yet. Here is the tracklist: 01. Assa'd Khoury - Al Gaba 02. Sabah - Dek El Kaff 03. Karim Shourhy & Andrea Rayder - Take Me Back To Cairo 04. Fadoul - Sid Redad (Papa's Got A Brand New Bag)* 05. Ziad Rahbani - Intro Instrumental 2 06. Sharifa Fadel - Mawal El Ashak 07. Salah Ragab and The Cairo Jazz Band - Egypt Strut 08. Golden Hands - Take Me Back 09. Elias Rahbani & His Orchestra - Moonlight Melody 10. Mahmoud Megri - Tefham 11. Elias Rahbani - Dance Of Maria 12. Abdou El Omari - Rajaat Laayoun ..."
YouTube: "Habibi Funk 001 Mix"
Soundcloud: "Habibi Funk 001 Mix"

2017 June: Ahmed Malek and Other Treasures From Habibi Funk’s North African Crate - Digging Expeditions, 2017 July: Lebanon: Various artists - Jakarta Radio 010 Mix, 2017 December: From the Counter: Beirut

Private Gestural Language, Unfolding Poetically

Trisha Brown Dance Company, with Dai Jian, center, Elena Demyanenko, left, and Tamara Riewe, in “Foray Forêt” at Dance Theater Workshop.
"About halfway through Trisha Brown’s 'Foray Forêt,' two men and a woman suddenly run from different corners of the stage toward the center and simultaneously jump and collide, legs splitting in the air. The woman is spun around, midflight, as if caught in a revolving door, while the men rush seamlessly offstage. It’s a moment, seen on Wednesday night when the Trisha Brown Dance Company began a two-week engagement at Dance Theater Workshop, that sums up a great deal about Ms. Brown’s work and its effects. It is unexpected, virtuosic, funny, arbitrary, subtle, detailed, poetic. It shows how movement uninflected by personal drama or emotional content can resonate with both of those by virtue of juxtaposition and association. And it reveals, too, that while Ms. Brown’s slippery, silky style can look so casual as to feel pedestrian, it’s full of precise intention. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Trisha Brown: Simplicity Within Complexity By Anna Kisselgoff
Trisha Brown Company - Foray Foret
vimeo: Foray Forêt (1990), performed in 1993, Workshopshowing Trisha Brown Repertoire: Foray Forêt

2008 May: Trisha Brown, 2010 December: “A Walk Across the Rooftops”, 2011 January: Trisha Brown - Floor of the Forest (1970), 2011 March: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s, 2012 February: Dance/Draw, 2016 January: Dance, Valiant & Molecular, 2016 February: Set and Reset (1983), Newark (1987), Present Tense (2003), 2017 March: Trisha Brown, Choreographer and Pillar of American Postmodern Dance, Dies at 80, 2017 April: From Stage to Page: Unpacking a Shelf of New Dance Publications, 2017 June: Accumulated Vision: Trisha Brown and the Visual Arts By Susan Rosenberg

Tarot Mythology: The Surprising Origins of the World's Most Misunderstood Cards

A selection of trump cards (top row) and pip cards (bottom row) from the first edition of the Rider-Waite deck, circa 1909.
"The Empress. The Hanged Man. The Chariot. Judgment. With their centuries-old iconography blending a mix of ancient symbols, religious allegories, and historic events, tarot cards can seem purposefully opaque. To outsiders and skeptics, occult practices like card reading have little relevance in our modern world. But a closer look at these miniature masterpieces reveals that the power of these cards isn’t endowed from some mystical source—it comes from the ability of their small, static images to illuminate our most complex dilemmas and desires. Contrary to what the uninitiated might think, the meaning of divination cards changes over time, shaped by each era’s culture and the needs of individual users. This is partly why these decks can be so puzzling to outsiders, as most of them reference allegories or events familiar to people many centuries ago. Caitlín Matthews, who teaches courses on cartomancy, or divination with cards, says that before the 18th century, the imagery on these cards was accessible to a much broader population. But in contrast to these historic decks, Matthews finds most modern decks harder to engage with. ..."
Collectors Weekly

’77 Music Club

"After Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize, the Washington Post blubbered that 'Kids aren’t starting garage bands' anymore, and 'Electric guitar sales are down 30 percent over the past decade!' Rock and Roll is not dead, former Rolling Stone writer Marc Weingarten declared, but it 'continues to lose traction with anyone under 40,' and 'it seems unmoored from its commitment to social engagement, especially among the young….' But to Carly Jordan and Carrie Courogen, both 26, rock and roll, particularly that music created three to five decades ago, still resonates. Their podcast, ’77 Music Club, is an homage to the music from roughly 1965 to 1985, with ’77 chosen as the name 'because 1977 is our favorite year in music history, period,' said Carly. I met them at former Television guitarist Richard Lloyd’s show at Bowery Electric, where they were singing along to the classic Television song, 'See No Evil', from Television’s debut album, 'Marquee Moon', often considered one of the greatest 'punk' albums of all time. ..."
Quiet Lunch (Video)

Recycled Funk Episode 14 (Live @ APT 2.9.04)

"If you lived in NYC in the early 2000’s and were part of the 'in-crowd', chances are you experienced a night or two, or twelve at APT. For several years APT was 'the' spot to be at on any night of the week. An indiscreet black door at 419 W.13th st. with no name or address. If you were lucky enough to get it, it might change your life. It did for me… The two nights that really put APT on the map where Monday and Wednesday nights. Every week Bobbito Garcia aka Cucumber Slice held court on Monday’s with his 'Waffles & Falafel’s' party (they actually sold waffles at the party). On Wednesday nights the almighty Rich Medina reigned supreme with his 'Lil Ricky’s Rib Shack'. Ad the that the likes of supremely talented DJ’s, Akalepse, Emskee & Monk One, who graced the decks on the upper level, and you were in for a musical treat all night long on either floor. ..."
Brooklyn Radio (Audio)
mixcloud (Audio)

Iraq's First Archeologist

Hormuzd Rassam
"When Hormuzd Rassam went to work in January of 1846 as an assistant to Austen Henry Layard, Rassam was 19 years old and eager to help the man who had come from England to dig out a buried palace near Rassam’s home town of Mosul. Six years earlier, while en route to visit an uncle in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Layard had passed through Mosul, in northern Iraq and then under Ottoman control. There Layard met the British vice-consul for Mosul, Christian Rassam, who showed his guest around the area. The men got along well. Of all he saw, Layard wrote, nothing intrigued him more than the two great sets of mounds called Nabi Younis and Koyunjik that lay across the Tigris river from Mosul, on its east bank, said to be the ruins of ancient Assyrian Nineveh. Days later and a few kilometers downriver, Layard saw the towering cone of Assyrian Nimrud, 'and the impression that it made upon me was one never to be forgotten.' The scenes were so compelling, he wrote, that 'my thought ran constantly upon the possibility of exploring with the spade those great ruins.' ..."
Aramco World
W - Hormuzd Rassam
BBC: The men who uncovered Assyria

This artist’s depiction of the grand entrance to a four-chambered temple built by Ashurnasirpal II at the northwest part of Nimrud was excavated under Layard and Rassam in 1846. It shows the human-headed lions that today stand on display in London (next); the artist also showed the palace in the vivid colors that may have resembled its original condition.

The Death of a Once Great City

"New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the 'paper economy' of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great. As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring. ..."
Harpers

2018 FIFA World Cup

Wikipedia - "The 2018 FIFA World Cup is the 21st FIFA World Cup, a quadrennial international football tournament contested by the men's national teams of the member associations of FIFA. It is currently ongoing in Russia starting from 14 June and will end with the final match on 15 July 2018. Russia was awarded the hosting rights on 2 December 2010. This is the first World Cup to be held in Eastern Europe, and the eleventh time that it has been held in Europe. For the first time the tournament takes place on two continents – Europe and Asia. All but one of the stadium venues are in European Russia in order to keep travel time manageable. ... Of the 32 teams, 20 make back-to-back appearances following the last tournament in 2014, including defending champions Germany, while both Iceland and Panama make their first appearances at a FIFA World Cup. ... The English Football Association and others raised concerns of bribery on the part of the Russian team and corruption from FIFA members. They claimed that four members of the executive committee had requested bribes to vote for England, and Sepp Blatter had said that it had already been arranged before the vote that Russia would win. The 2014 Garcia Report, an internal investigation led by Michael J. Garcia, was withheld from public release by Hans-Joachim Eckert, FIFA's head of adjudication on ethical matters. ..."
Wikipedia

Ambient Framework - Anna Martinova

"A slowly undulating sine wave of an undercurrent. Synthesized strings that echo to infinity. And lots of sonic space in between. That combination, that provisioning of an audio environment, is the elegant framework of the track 'Noir' by Amsterdam-based Dusha. That distinct combination alone could provide a gentle, soothing — yet still potent with drama — background listen. Martiova, however, doesn’t stop there. She eventually insinuates the space with a soft melody, efficiently in that it doesn’t so much intrude as emerge, like a slowly cycling carousel coming out of the receding mist. ... Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/tulpa-portal. More on the proposed school at kickstarter.com. More from Martinova at chipeky.com and tudu.bandcamp.com."
Disquiet (Audio)

Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes - Astral Traveling (1973)

"Lonnie Liston Smith was familiar to Bob Thiele through his role as the pianist in Pharoah Sanders’ group, but it wasn’t until Lonnie had become a member of Miles Davis’ band that Thiele decided it was time to sign him to his own deal. By this time Lonnie had been on the scene for the best part of a decade playing with Art Blakey and Roland Kirk. He had come into his own with Sanders but there was nothing in jazz to compare with being in the piano seat for Davis’ group. For his Flying Dutchman debut Lonnie went into the studio with George Barron on saxophone, Cecil McBee on bass and a host of percussionists including two Indian players. The sound was atypical of his later recordings in that it was a largely acoustic set – featuring electric piano but no synths – but it fitted in with Lonnie’s cosmic jazz philosophy. The title track set the scene for an album with a mellow, spacey feel that today would be called spiritual jazz. The album was an immediate success and led to a long term contract with Flying Dutchman. -Dean Rudland ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
allmusic
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: Astral Traveling (1973) full album

Flags in the Dust - William Faulkner (1973)

Wikipedia - "Flags in the Dust is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, completed in 1927. His publisher heavily edited the manuscript with Faulkner's reluctant consent, removing about 40,000 words in the process. That version was published as Sartoris in 1929. Faulkner's original manuscript of Flags in the Dust was published in 1973, and Sartoris was subsequently taken out of print. ... In the autumn or winter of 1926, William Faulkner, twenty-nine, began work on the first of his novels about Yoknapatawpha County. Sherwood Anderson had told him some time before that he should write about his native Mississippi, and now Faulkner took that advice: he used his own land, and peopled it with men and women who were partly drawn from real life, and partly depicted as they should have been in some ideal mythopoeic structure. A year later, on September 29, 1927, the new novel was completed. It was 596 pages long in transcript, and he called it Flags in the Dust. ..."
Wikipedia
[PDF] Flags in the Dust
amazon

2011 September: Southern Gothic, 2014 February: William Faulkner, 2015 October: William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels, 2015 November: Interviews William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12, 2016 April: Absalom, Absalom!! (1936), 2016 May: The Sound and the Fury (1929), 2016 October: The Snopes Trilogy (1940, 1957, 1959), 2016 December: Light in August (1932), 2017 February: As I Lay Dying (1930), 2017 June: The Wild Palms (1939), 2017 August: Sanctuary (1931). 2017 September: The Unvanquished (1938), 2017 October: 20 Pieces of Writing Advice from William Faulkner, 2017 November: Yoknapatawpha County, 2018 February: Go Down, Moses (1942)

The British jazz explosion: meet the musicians rewriting the rulebook

"Every so often, British jazz pops its head above the parapet, gets a Mercury nomination, and has a noodle on telly to remind everyone that it’s still there, like it’s always been, parping away from mainstream view. For many of us, jazz has seemed like something other people listened to. But in the past few years, the genre has had a serious overhaul. When Kendrick Lamar released his landmark album To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, one of its most extraordinary aspects was its liberal use of jazz, which dovetailed with hip-hop and opened it up for a new generation. Not only did it immediately feel more accessible but, played by the likes of strikingly cosmic characters such as Thundercat and Kamasi Washington, it looked commandingly cool. In the UK, a new and thrilling jazz movement has evolved. ..."
Guardian (Audio)

A City at the Crossroads Examines Migration, Through Art

“Theater of the Sun,” a mixed-media installation by Fallen Fruit, is among the works presented at Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Sicily. Human interaction with nature is one of the event’s central themes.
"PALERMO, Sicily — Political art and world politics seldom dovetail in real time, but as the twelfth edition of the Manifesta contemporary art biennial approached, its host city of Palermo found itself walking its talk. Titled 'A Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence,' the exhibition, which opened June 16, takes migration as one of its themes. And days before the international art crowd descended on the Sicilian capital, Italy’s new interior minister, Matteo Salvini, closed the country’s ports to rescue boats — including the Aquarius, a ship looking to dock in Italy with 629 migrants aboard. Resisting the national announcement, Palermo’s mayor, Leoluca Orlando, offered to open the local port to the vessel, but the Italian Coast Guard declined to escort it in and the migrants were rerouted to Spain. Mr. Orlando, who often personally greeted migrants who arrived in Palermo’s harbor before Mr. Salvini’s decision, is famous for fighting the Sicilian mafia in multiple terms as mayor since the 1980s. ..."
NY Times

“Pteridophilia” by the Chinese artist Zheng Bo, also emerges from the foliage at the botanical garden.