Jazz Deconstructed: What Makes John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” So Groundbreaking and Radical?

"John Coltrane bore an unusual burden. Many experimental artists who radically change their forms of music, and music in general, are so out on the edge and ahead of their time they elude the public’s notice. But Coltrane was responsible for both 'furthering the cause' of free jazz and 'delivering it to an increasingly mainstream audience,' as Lindsay Planer writes at Allmusic. This meant that he achieved the kind of recognition in his short life that most musician/composers only dream of, and that his every attempt was heavily scrutinized by critics, a listening public, and record companies not always ready for the most forward-thinking of his ideas. His immense popularity makes Coltrane’s accomplishments all the more impressive. While 1959 is often cited as the 'year that changed jazz' with a series of landmark albums, two releases by Coltrane in 1960—My Favorite Things and Giant Steps—completely radicalized the form, with repercussions far outside the jazz world. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2011 November: John Coltrane Quartet, Live at Jazz Casual, 1963, 2012 March: John Coltrane 1960 - 1965, 2012 September: "Naima" (1959), 2012 October: Blue Train (1957), 2013 April: The World According to John Coltrane, 2013 November: A Love Supreme (1965), 2014 July: New Photos of John Coltrane Rediscovered 50 Years After They Were Shot, 2014 November: Coltrane’s Free Jazz Wasn’t Just “A Lot of Noise”, 2015 February: Lush Life (1958), 2015 May: An Animated John Coltrane Explains His True Reason for Being: “I Want to Be a Force for Real Good”, 2015 July: Afro Blue Impressions (2013), 2015 September: Impressions of Coltrane, 2015 December: Giant Steps (1960), 2016 January: Crescent (1964), 2016 April: The Church of Saint John Coltrane, 2016 July: Soultrane (1958), 2016 December: Dakar (1957), 2017 July: The John Coltrane Record That Made Modern Music, 2017 October: Live at the Village Vanguard (1962), 2017 December: Interview: Archie Shepp on John Coltrane, the Blues and More, 2018 March: Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago (1959), 2018 June: Lost John Coltrane Recording From 1963 Will Be Released at Last, 2018 July: Stream Online the Complete “Lost” John Coltrane Album, Both Directions at Once

The Seducer’s Diary – Soren Kierkegaard (1843)

"According to Kierkegaard, there are three stages or 'spheres' of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. In The Seducer’s Diary, the author depicts the life of someone who has made a conscious choice for the aesthetic way of life, with all the consequences that implies. I was torn between joy — that this amazing text-within-a-text is in print and available to an English-language audience — and concern, that it is taken out of the context of its intellectual home, the monumental philosophical work Either/Or. Be that as it may, The Seducer’s Diary alone is an entrancing read. The layers of metafiction and seduction are dizzying, the tone and pace wonderfully genteel, and filled with visionary metaphors, which only adds to its beauty, but with a hard and frightening core that has given me an almost ominous pause. The plot is simple, and the book is very short, but all the same I became easily involved with the characters. ..."
Tongue Sophistries
New Yorker: Søren K.’s Two-Hundredth Birthday
The Seducer’s Diary
Princeton University Press: The Seducer's Diary

2011 July: Søren Kierkegaard, 2013 April: Repetition (1843), 2013 December: The Quotable Kierkegaard, 2014 October: Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard (1843), 2014 December: The Dark Knight of Faith - Existential Comics, 2015 July: I still love Kierkegaard, 2015 October: The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 2016 October: Cruel intentions, 2017 July: Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, 2018 January: Either/Or (1843)

Free Man In Paris - Joni Mitchell (1974)

Wikipedia - "'Free Man In Paris' is a song written by Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell. It appeared on her 1974 album Court and Spark, as well as her live album Shadows and Light. It is one of her most popular songs. The song is about music agent/promoter David Geffen, a close friend of Mitchell in the early 1970s, and describes Geffen during a trip the two made to Paris with Robbie and Dominique Robertson. While Geffen is never mentioned by name, Mitchell describes how he works hard creating hits and launching careers but can find some peace while vacationing in Paris. Mitchell sings 'I was a free man in Paris. I felt unfettered and alive. Nobody calling me up for favors. No one's future to decide.' ... The home key of the song is A-major. The frequent substitution of 'flatted' scale degrees (flat-6 and flat-7; that is, in A-major, F-natural and G-natural in place of F# and G#) adds a jazzy folky sound to the song. The time signature is 4/4 except the compound quintuple meter intro counted as 15/8 or simply 2 bars of 6/8 plus 3 eighth notes. ..."
Wikipedia
YouTube: Free Man In Paris (Live London 1983)

2015 July: Blue (1970), 2015 Novemer: 40 Years On: Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Revisited, 2016 August: On For the Roses (1972), 2016 November: Court and Spark (1974), 2017 February: Hejira (1976), 2017 August: Miles of Aisles (1974), 2017 October: Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius, 2018 March: Joni Mitchell: We look back over her extraordinary 50 year career

Operation Infektion

"Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. 'Operation InfeKtion' reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue."
NY Times

Antilles Méchant Bateau (2018)

"Fifteen track compilation of deep biguines and Gwo Ka from the ‘60s French West Indies. 'Biguine is a rhythmic style of music that originated in Guadeloupe and Martinique in the 19th century, which fuses 19th-century French ballroom dance steps with African rhythms. Gwo Ka is found among all ethnic and religious groups of Guadeloupean society. It combines responsorial singing in Guadeloupean Creole, rhythms played on the Ka drums and dancing. Gwo Ka is the musical and cultural product of the region’s African ancestry, forcibly brought to the Caribbean through slavery. Gwo Ka exists only in Guadeloupe, which is a very different island from much of the Caribbean, in that it remains a ‘department’ of its original colonial master, France. Here the currency is the Euro and the baker sells croissants and café au lait. This constant ‘European-ising’ of the island means that Gwo Ka plays a fundamental and important role in the defining of Guadeloupean identity. 'Antilles’ Méchant Bateau', a low-tempo number with a bolero feel, indeed a pure case of the blues, and a terrific saxophone solo. What else would you expect to set the tone for this selection, in which beguine regains its original colours, in the darkness of the Gwo Ka drums. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
YouTube: Various Artists - Antilles Méchant Bateau 15 videos

Where Have College Basketball’s Star Point Guards Gone?

"I don’t mean to melt your brain right out of the gate, but a reader pointed something out to me a month ago, and it’s stuck with me ever since. Now, I can’t help but share that observation with the world. Try to think of the best point guard in college basketball heading into this season. No, seriously. Take as much time as you need to come up with a name. Got it? Cool. Let me guess: You came up with Carsen Edwards? That would make sense given that the Purdue junior averaged 18.5 points per game and shot 40.6 percent from 3-point range last season and is probably the best player, at any position, returning to college basketball in 2018-19. Edwards was so good for the Boilermakers last season that he was named third-team AP All-American and presented with the Jerry West Award, an honor given annually to the nation’s best … shooting guard. ..."
The Ringer (Audio/Video)
W - 2018–19 NCAA Division I men's basketball season
Duke tops, Kentucky plummets in Andy Katz's Power 36 college basketball rankings (Video)
College basketball: Why North Carolina’s gutsy non-conference schedule is the toughest this year (Video)
College Basketball Preseason Top 25
SI: Ranking Every Team in College Basketball, From Kansas (No. 1) to Delaware State (No. 353)
The Ringer: The 2018-19 College Basketball Preseason Enthusiasms (Video)
CBS Sports: College basketball rankings: The top 100 (and one) best players for the 2018-19 season (Video)
College basketball: A-10 predictions for the 2018-19 season (Video)

2011 June: American Basketball Association, 2012 July: Doin’ It In The Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC, 2012 November: Your Guide to the Brooklyn Nets, 2013 March: March Madness 2013, 2013 October: Rucker Park, 2014 January: History of the high five, 2015 February: Dean Smith (February 28, 1931 – February 7, 2015), 2015 June: Basketball’s Obtuse Triangle, 2015 September: Joint Ventures: How sneakers became high fashion and big business, 2015 October: Loose Balls - Terry Pluto (2007), 2015 November: The Sounds of Memphis, 2015 December: Welcome to Smarter Basketball, 2015 December: New York, New York: Julius Erving, the Nets-Knicks Feud, and America’s Bicentennial, 2016 January: The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams (1994), 2016 January: A Long Hardwood Journey, 2016 March: American Hustle - Alexandra Starr, 2016 November: 2016–17 College Basketball, 2017 November: 2017-18 College Basketball, 2017 March: N.C.A.A. Bracket Predictions: Who the Tournament Experts Pick, 2017 June: The Rise and Fall of the High-Top Sneaker, 2018 January: Chaos Is This College Basketball Season’s Only Constant, 2018 February: Heaven is a Playground, 2018 March: The End of March Madness?, 2018 March: The 2018 March Madness Cinderella Guide, 2018 August: Ancestor Work In Street Basketball

Walking - Henry David Thoreau (1862)

"Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist, philosopher, and author of such classics as Walden and 'Civil Disobedience,' contributed a number of writings to The Atlantic in its early years. The month after his death from tuberculosis, in May 1862, the magazine published 'Walking,' one of his most famous essays, which extolled the virtues of immersing oneself in nature and lamented the inevitable encroachment of private ownership upon the wilderness. ..."
The Atlantic
W - Walking (Thoreau)
[PDF] Walking
amazon

2009 April: Henry David Thoreau, 2012 September: Walden, 2015 March: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), 2017 March: Civil Disobedience (1849), 2017 April: The Maine Woods (1864), 2017 June: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, 2017 July: Pond Scum - Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia. By Kathryn Schulz, 2017 July: Walden, a Game, 2017 October: Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece, 2017 December: Walden on the Rocks - Ariel Dorfman, 2018 March: A Map of Radical Bewilderment, 2018 April: On Tax Day, Reread Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’, 2018 October: Against Everything: Thoreau Trailer Park

Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound - Tara Rodgers

"Tara Rodgers, a composer and scholar, rightly perceives a lack of academic and mainstream media attention towards women creating electronic music, and in 2000 she created the website pinknoises.com as a collective space for female artists to promote their work, get tips and information regarding production methods, and discuss the trials and tribulations of working in a field where men often dominate the discussion. The book Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound is an expansion of Tara Rodgers’ website and contains far more extensive interviews with twenty-four female electronic musicians, composers, sound artists, and DJs whom Rodgers has come in contact with during her research and career. ..."
Ethnomusicology Review
“Pink Noises” Showcases Women In Electronic Music
Archive: Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound
Interview: Analog Tara
amazon

The artist and scholar gargoyles on 121st Street

"Copper bay windows, grand arches, juliet balconies and a sloping roof: As university housing goes, the 8-story Bancroft Apartments are pretty fanciful. Preeminent architect Emery Roth designed the building, which opened at 509 West 121st Street in 1910. By 1920, it had been acquired by Columbia University’s Teachers College, just a block away in the city’s new Acropolis neighborhood, so named for the many schools in the area. Considering that what’s now called Bancroft Hall ended up housing educators, it makes sense that the gargoyles decorating the facade are nods toward higher learning. Behold the building’s wonderful painter and scholar (a writer perhaps, pointing to letters in a book?). I don’t think these characters represent any specific people but instead symbolize creativity, education, and imagination. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Paris Was a Woman (1996)

"At the beginning of her elegant and illuminating Paris Was a Woman, documentarian Greta Schiller declares that in the first quarter of the 20th century, the Left Bank of the City of Lights was a magnet for women from all over America and Europe, with its 'promise of freedom,' of 'a life filled with literature and art.' Schiller goes a long way toward balancing the image of Paris between the wars as a male paradise for the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Starting with Gertrude Stein, whose experimental writing influenced Hemingway, and her lover Alice B. Toklas, virtually all of the key figures in Schiller's film were lesbians, yet Schiller and her writer Andrea Weiss acknowledge this with a reticence bordering on reluctance. ..."
LA Times
W - Greta Schiller
amazon
YouTube: Paris Was a Woman trailer, Sylvia Beach Interview

The Webcam as Instrument - A performance by Sideband on Jeff Snyder's audio-video toolkit

Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) performs Ghost Line by Jeff Snyder.
"'Ghost Line' is a thoroughly compelling audio-video performance by Sideband (Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson, Seth Cluett, and Mika Godbole) of music by Jeff Snyder, from Snyder’s forthcoming album, Concerning the Nature of Things. The album is due on November 9th on the Carrier Records label, with one preview track, the title cut, already up on Snyder’s Bandcamp page. But the real way to experience 'Ghost Line' arguably isn’t the audio on its own; it’s the audio as a component of the video (on vimeo.com). In most music videos, the video part of the equation is either a complement (whether a narrative or just associative imagery) or a document (of the performance, whether simulated or live). In the case of 'Ghost Line,' the 12-minute video is, quite literally, both performance and score. And while the images may tend toward abstraction, those abstractions directly inform the music we hear. ..."
disquiet (Video)

Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry (John Huston - 1984)

"By the time Malcolm Lowry had finished filling Under the Volcano with 'signs, natural phenomena, snatches of poems and songs, pictures, remembered books and films, shadowy figures appearing, disappearing, and reappearing,' according to Douglas Day, Mr. Lowry's biographer, the book 'finally became not a novel at all but a kind of monument to prodigality of vision.' Certainly it evolved, as Mr. Lowry expanded his short story of the same name into the 1947 novel, into one of the most haunting and difficult works of modern fiction. That this densely allusive work is also tantalizingly cinematic has made it an Everest of sorts, from the film maker's standpoint. The book, aside from an opening chapter that dissolves into flashback, spans only a 24-hour period (the Day of the Dead, in November 1938) and involves few principal characters: Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic former British Consul living in a small Mexican town; Yvonne, the Consul's estranged wife, who has just returned to him, and Hugh Firmin, Geoffrey's rakish young half-brother, with whom Yvonne has had an affair. ..."
NY Times
W - Under the Volcano (film)
Roger Ebert
Criterion
YouTube: trailer - John Huston Films

John Huston

New York’s Finest: Paying Tribute to the Beastie Boys in the Pages of the Voice

"Though we may never again be treated to new music from the Beastie Boys — those three impish young New Yorkers, Adam Yauch (MCA), Adam Horowitz (Ad Rock), and Michael Diamond (Mike D), who went on to become one of the most original and longest-lasting groups in the history of rap — fans this week were treated to some new material from the group with the release of its Beastie Boys Book. A Beasties-style oral history, the book features the Boys’ two remaining members, Ad Rock and Mike D, swapping written reminiscences that span their pre-Beastie days growing up in New York to MCA’s death in 2012, at the age of 47, from cancer. Interspersed are a mini-cookbook, a graphic novella, and essays from numerous famous writers and artists, including several Voice contributors, such as Colson Whitehead, Luc Sante, and Ada Calhoun. ..."
Voice
amazon: Beastie Boys Book

Tangled Up in Blue: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece

Wikipedia - "'Tangled Up in Blue' is a song by Bob Dylan. ... The Telegraph has described the song as 'The most dazzling lyric ever written, an abstract narrative of relationships told in an amorphous blend of first and third person, rolling past, present and future together, spilling out in tripping cadences and audacious internal rhymes, ripe with sharply turned images and observations and filled with a painfully desperate longing. 'Tangled Up in Blue' is one of five songs on Blood on the Tracks that Dylan initially recorded in New York City in September 1974 and then re-recorded in Minneapolis in December that year; the later recording became the album track and single. The New York version of this song is in open E tuning.'Tangled Up in Blue' is one of the clearest examples of Dylan's attempts to write 'multi-dimensional' songs which defied a fixed notion of time and space. Dylan was influenced by his recent study of painting and the Cubist school of artists, who sought to incorporate multiple perspectives within a single plane of view. As Neil McCormick remarked in 2003: 'A truly extraordinary epic of the personal, an unreliable narrative carved out of shifting memories like a five-and-a-half-minute musical Proust.' ..."
Wikipedia
Tangled Up in Blue: Bob Dylan’s utterly transformed “Real Live” version
YouTube: Tangled Up in Blue: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece, Tangled Up In Blue (Live), Tangled Up In Blue - NYC Session - Lyrics in description (7:01)

An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More

"Plot, setting, character… we learn to think of these as discrete elements in literary writing, comparable to the strategy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what if this scheme doesn’t quite work? What about when the setting is a character? There are many literary works named and well-known for the unforgettable places they introduce: Walden, Wuthering Heights, Howards End…. There are invented domains that seem more real to readers than reality: Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex… There are works that describe impossible places so vividly we believe in their existence against all reason: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, China Miéville’s The City and the City, Jorge Luis Borges' 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius'. ... A new book, The Writer’s Map, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones, offers lovers of literary maps—whether in non-fiction, realism, or fantasy—the opportunity to pore over maps of Thomas More’s Utopia (said to be the first literary map), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Branwell Brontë’s Verdopolis (above), and so many more. ..."
Open Culture
amazon: The Writer's Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a DIY Hip-Hop Incubator

"On the night of Halloween 1989, Bob Holman brought slam poetry to the newly reopened Nuyorican Poets Cafe. An intimate 120-person venue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Nuyorican had been shuttered for much of the ’80s due to the fallout from 'crack, AIDS and gentrification,' says Holman. The revamped style of poetry performance – which encouraged audience participation as poets competed against each other – kick-started the Nuyorican’s transformation into a sandbox environment that attracted a wave of revered writers and artists raised under the influence of hip-hop: Paul Beatty, Reg E. Gaines, Tracie Morris, Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Erykah Badu all came to use the open mic spot to figure out their artistic voices. At the apex of the movement was Saul Williams, whom Holman remembers as the 'flashpoint' for a ’90s spoken word scene that mixed hip-hop vernacular and attitude with poetical delivery. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily

2018 January: Nuyorican

Trump Is About to Get a Rude Awakening

"In the lead-up to the midterm elections, President Donald Trump tried to have it both ways. 'I’m not on the ballot, but in a certain way, I’m on the ballot,' he told supporters, yet he also made clear that he wouldn’t take the blame if Republicans did poorly. And in the end, he sort of got it both ways. Democrats handily won the House of Representatives, picking up about 34 seats. But Republicans gained seats in the Senate and limited losses in governors’ races. Anyone hoping that Tuesday’s results would deliver a clean verdict on the Trump presidency, either up or down, was disappointed, even as voters told exit pollsters that Trump was the dominant factor in the election. Yet the outcomes still tell us something about the strengths and weaknesses of the president’s campaign strategy—and, more important, about the slog that’s ahead for the next two years in Washington, as Democrats harry Trump from their perch in the House. ..."
The Atlantic
NY Times: Democrats Capture Control of House; G.O.P. Holds Senate (Video)
Guardian: Blue wave or blue ripple? A visual guide to the Democrats’ gains in the midterms
NY Times: Despite Loss of House, Trump Claims ‘Big Victory’ and Threatens Democrats (Video)

Les Stances a Sophie - Art Ensemble of Chicago (1970)

"In 1970, the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago were living as expatriates in Paris. The group had only recently expanded to its permanent quintet status with the addition of drummer/percussionist Don Moye when they were asked by New Wave director Moshe Misrahi to provide the soundtrack for his movie, Les Stances a Sophie. The music was never used in the film but, luckily, it was recorded. The result was one of the landmark records of the burgeoning avant-garde of the time and, simply put, one of the greatest jazz albums ever. ... Their extensive knowledge of prior jazz styles, love of unusual sound sources (the so-called 'little instruments') and fearless exploration of the furthest reaches of both instrumental and compositional possibilities came into full flower on this record."
allmusic
W - Les Stances a Sophie
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Les Stances a Sophie 7 videos

Why Undocumented Immigrants Should Be Allowed to Vote

Voting booths are set up at a 2018 Minnesota primary election polling place inside the Westminster Presbyterian Church on August 14, 2018 in Minneapolis.
"Imagine: what if today, instead of being consigned to the shadows, the more than 22 million noncitizen immigrants in the US were heading to the polls? Sound preposterous? Voting by non-citizens is actually as old America itself. From the founding of the American Republic, voting rights were determined not by citizenship but by other criteria, such as race, gender, and property holdings. When women, post-emancipation African Americans, and poor white men were denied voting rights, it was due to elite antipathy — not because they lacked citizenship. Non-citizens in those years picked electoral winners and losers, and even held political office. What brought this period of 'alien suffrage' to a close was simple nativism. ..."
Jacobin

Jazz on 45 Vol. 5 Mixape – Hugh Masekela Special Edition

"Trumpeter/arranger/producer/bandleader Todd Simon brings his fifth installment of #JazzOn45 celebrating the life and music of his longtime hero: the South African trumpeter/bandleader/vocalist/humanitarian Hugh Masekela. 'No other musician has impacted the way I hear, create, and perform than Bra Hugh has,' explains Todd. 'His unique sound—blending gorgeous lyricism with immense-percussive rhythm on the trumpet and flügelhorn—is that of no other. I hope you enjoy this small collection of Hugh Masekela’s as much as I am presenting it for you. Note that this is just a small glimpse into an incredible catalog of material that Hugh left us with. I will definitely be posting some non-45 mixes featuring the music of Bra Hugh so we can continue to celebrate his genius! Thank you for listening and reading.' ..."
WaxPoetics (Audio)
W - Hugh Masekela

Sparrows

Wikipedia - "Sparrows are a family of small passerine birds. They are also known as true sparrows, or Old World sparrows, names also used for a particular genus of the family, Passer. They are distinct from both the American sparrows, in the family Passerellidae, and from a few other birds sharing their name, such as the Java sparrow of the family Estrildidae. Many species nest on buildings and the house and Eurasian tree sparrows, in particular, inhabit cities in large numbers, so sparrows are among the most familiar of all wild birds. They are primarily seed-eaters, though they also consume small insects. Some species scavenge for food around cities and, like gulls or rock doves will happily eat virtually anything in small quantities. Generally, sparrows are small, plump, brown and grey birds with short tails and stubby, powerful beaks. The differences between sparrow species can be subtle. ..."
Wikipedia
House Sparrow Identification (Video)
Song Sparrow Identification (Video)
Audubon: House Sparrow (Video)
How the house sparrow made its home with humans

The house sparrow’s closeness to humans might have changed its genes, giving it a larger beak and a tolerance for a starchy diet.

No Free Walls: a Mini-Documentary on How Street Art and Gentrification Collide in Bushwick

"The Bushwick Collective is a non-profit organization which organizes and curates a collection of street art murals in a rapidly-gentrifying former industrial area of Bushwick, Brooklyn. This great mini-documentary from Complex titled No Free Walls shines a spotlight on the intersection of street art and gentrification in Bushwick. NO FREE WALLS is an in-depth look at Brooklyn's changing landscape, through the eyes of Joseph Ficalora, the founder and inadvertent art curator of The Bushwick Collective. Joe, son of Italian immigrants, grew up in Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn once ravaged by drugs, neglect and violence."
Complex (Video) 31:58

The Man Who Turns Back New York City’s Clocks, Hand by Hand

"Marvin Schneider, 79, flashed his New York City employee identification badge — 'clock repairer' — and walked into City Hall in Lower Manhattan on Friday morning. The end of daylight saving time was approaching — clocks are supposed to be turned back Sunday at 2 a.m. — and Mr. Schneider had gone to City Hall to turn back time. Mr. Schneider’s actual title is a bit more grandiose than his badge description. He is the city’s official clock master and he has been tending some of the city’s grandest public clocks since the late 1970s. His year-round maintenance includes timing adjustments — although these old clocks are surprisingly accurate, he said — and repairing the gears, levers and chains behind those giant clock faces that some people still rely on even in the smartphone age. ..."
NY Times

The Color of Pomegranates - Sergei Parajanov (1968)

Wikipedia - "The Color of Pomegranates (Armenian: Նռան գույնը) is a 1969 Soviet art film written and directed by Sergei Parajanov. It is a poetic treatment of the life of the 18th century Armenian singer Sayat-Nova. It has appeared in some scholarly polls of the greatest films ever made. The Color of Pomegranates is a biography of the Armenian ashug Sayat-Nova (King of Song) that attempts to reveal the poet's life visually and poetically rather than literally. The film is presented with little dialogue using active tableaux which depict the poet's life in chapters: Childhood, Youth, Prince's Court (where he falls in love with a tsarina), The Monastery, The Dream, Old Age, The Angel of Death and Death. ... Soviet censors and Communist Party officials objected to Parajanov's stylized, poetic treatment of Sayat-Nova's life and complained that it failed to educate the public about the poet. As a result, the film's title was changed from Sayat-Nova to The Color of Pomegranates, and all references to Sayat-Nova's name were removed from the credits and chapter titles in the original Armenian release version. The noted Armenian writer Hrant Matevosyan wrote new, abstractly poetic Armenian-language chapter titles. Officials further objected to the film's abundance of religious imagery, although a great deal of religious imagery still remains in both surviving versions of the film. Initially the State Committee for Cinematography in Moscow refused to allow distribution of the film outside of Armenia. It premiered in Armenia in October 1969, with a running time of 77 minutes. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: In ‘The Color of Pomegranates,’ the Cinema of the Cryptic By J. Hoberman
Guardian - The Colour of Pomegranates: a chance to savour a poetic masterpiece (Video)
senses of cinema
Criterion (Video)
amazon
YouTube: The Color of Pomegranates. Trailer

Digging in Ghana with Frank Gossner

"Many things made me want to start Dust & Grooves: my love of vinyl, the loss of most of my own record collection, my desire to develop a fun and meaningful photography project—and a handful of really inspiring people. One of those people is Frank Gossner, also known as the man behind VoodooFunk. Soon after moving to New York City in the summer of 2008, I read a Village Voice story about Frank, a very serious record collector originally from Germany. Frank has literally spent years crate digging in Africa for the Afrobeat, Funk, and Disco records that are the main focus of his collection. Immediately after reading about him, I wanted to meet him, and contacted him through his mighty blog, Voodoo Funk. Frank graciously agreed to see me over coffee, and the conversation we had that day led many places, including to the beginning of Dust & Grooves. In the months that followed, Frank kept encouraging me to start the vinyl photography project that had been germinating in my head for some time, and also helped introduce me to the people and places at the heart of the New York digging scene. One of the first acquaintances I made through him was Joel Stones, owner of the gorgeous East Village record shop Tropicalia in Furs. ..."
Dust and Grooves (Audio)

"This Machine Kills Fascists" message Woody Guthrie

Wikipedia - "'This Machine Kills Fascists' is a message that Woody Guthrie placed on his guitar in 1941, which inspired many subsequent artists. Soon after moving into a small fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Manhattan, Guthrie wrote the war song 'Talking Hitler's Head Off Blues'. This was printed in the Daily Worker newspaper: then 'In a fit of patriotism and faith in the impact of the song, he painted on his guitar THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.' ... This recalled a protest strategy he had used 'during the Great Depression, when social, political and economic inequality had been engendered by a small rich elite.' ... In this, Guthrie cast those opposing fascism not as mere outlaws in a fascist state, but as heroes rising 'in times of economic turmoil and social disintegration' to fight 'a highly illegitimate criminal endeavor intended to exploit the common people.' ..."
Wikipedia, YouTube: Tear the fascists down
“This Machine Kills Fascists - The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie (Video)

In The Moment Is The Best Record Store In Vermont

"Nestled among a string of independently owned shops stretching modestly along a literal Main Street, In The Moment isn’t exactly the sort of record store I grew up frequenting. As a born-and-raised New Yorker, I spent the ‘90s and ‘00s in decidedly more downtown digs, commuting from Queens apartments to cop at establishments like the infamous snob boutique Other Music or the utilitarian underdog Mondo Kim’s or niche techno favorite Sonic Groove—notably, all now closed. I narrowly avoided overpriced tourist trap Bleecker Bob’s as I prowled East Village dub dispensary Jammyland, occasionally squeezing down its narrow staircase to finger through the bespoke noise CD-Rs and cassettes at Hospital Productions. ... In The Moment is not at all like these places. For starters, it is located in Brattleboro, Vermont, about a 200 mile drive from Generation Records, one of the few surviving Greenwich Village outposts. ..."
Vinyl Me, Please
In The Moment
facebook
YouTube: Making It Here: In the Moment Records | Connecting Point

Literary Magazines Are Born to Die

"Literary magazines are born to die. Radical passion often meets practical reality. Sometimes the fire behind great literary magazines is the exact thing that causes them to burn out. Other magazines lose institutional funding, fold because of scandal, or vanish along with their masthead. Whatever the reason, the literary world is full of defunct magazines you shouldn’t forget about. Here are five that are worth remembering. ..."
LITHUB

‘I Like Your Photographs Because They Are Beautiful’ - Orhan Pamuk

A landing stage in the Salacak neighborhood on the Asian shore of the Bosporus, 1968.
"Ara Guler, who died on Oct. 17, was the greatest photographer of modern Istanbul. He was born in 1928 in an Armenian family in Istanbul. Ara began taking photographs of the city in 1950, images that captured the lives of individuals alongside the city’s monumental Ottoman architecture, its majestic mosques and magnificent fountains. I was born two years later, in 1952, and lived in the same neighborhoods he lived in. Ara Guler’s Istanbul is my Istanbul. I first heard of Ara in the 1960s when I saw his photographs in Hayat, a widely read weekly news and gossip magazine with a strong emphasis on photography. One of my uncles edited it. Ara published portraits of writers and artists such as Picasso and Dali, and the celebrated literary and cultural figures of an older generation in Turkey such as the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. ..."
NY Times

Nightfall in the Istanbul district of Zeyrek, 1960.

2012 April: The Museum of Innocence (2008), 2017 September: Istanbul: Memories and the City

The Bridge - Sonny Rollins (1962)

"Between 1953 and 1959, the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins released twenty-one full-length albums. This kind of prolificacy seems absurd now, during an era in which new musical material is meted out on a preordained, market-friendly schedule—a few weeks of recording, a year or two of touring, a cashed paycheck, repeat. But music rushed out of Rollins, like an overfed river. Miles Davis described Rollins’s output circa 1954 as 'something else. Brilliant.' In his book 'Black Music,' the critic and poet Amiri Baraka—then writing as LeRoi Jones—called his music 'staggering.' Baraka suggested that Rollins, along with John Coltrane and the pianist Cecil Taylor, was doing the necessary work 'to propose jazz again as the freest of Western music.' Then, in 1959, Rollins stopped. He was twenty-eight years old. According to 'Who Is Sonny Rollins,' a short BBC documentary from 1968, Rollins—who had been addicted to heroin in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties but sweated it out at the Lexington Narcotics Farm, a combination federal prison and rehabilitation facility, in Lexington, Kentucky—was exhausted by what he understood as a culture of nonstop degradation. Unsavory promoters, seedy clubs,'the whiskey.' ..."
New Yorker: A Quest to Rename the Williamsburg Bridge for Sonny Rollins
W - The Bridge (Sonny Rollins album)
NY Times: Sax and Sky by Sonny Rollins
Discogs
amazon: The Bridge, Black Music - LeRoi Jones
vimeo: Sonny Rollins with Paul Jeffrey 28:16
YouTube: The Bridge (Live)
YouTube: The Bridge (1962) (Full Album), SONNY ROLLINS on Monk and The Bridge

2012 September: The Singular Sound of Sonny Rollins, 2012 December: Village Vanguard, 2015 September: Rollins Plays for Bird (1957), 2016 February: Saxophone Colossus (1956), 2016 May: Plus 4 (1956), 2017 June: Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem, 2018 April: Tenor Madness (1956), 2017 May: Moving Out (1954)

The Insult - Ziad Doueiri (2018)

Wikipedia - "The Insult (Arabic: قضية رقم ٢٣‎, translit. Qadiyya raqm 23, lit. 'Case No. 23', French: L'insulte) is a 2017 Lebanese drama film directed by Ziad Doueiri and co-written by Doueiri and Joelle Touma. It was screened in the main competition section of the 74th Venice International Film Festival. At Venice, Kamel El Basha won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. It was selected as the Lebanese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Oscar at the 90th Academy Awards. Tony Hanna is a Lebanese Christian and devoted member of the Christian Party, with a pregnant wife, Shirine. Not wanting workers near his property when Shirine is there, Tony discovers contractors modifying the gutter on his balcony. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: In ‘The Insult,’ the Dispute Is Personal. And Political. by A.O. Scott
Roger Ebert
Film Comment
amazon
YouTube: THE INSULT (2018) - Official HD Trailer - A film by Ziad Doueiri

Just A Simple Soul - Bert Jansch

"... From his 1965 iconic debut album, Bert’s peerless musicality, songwriting and interpretation of traditional song has held generation after generation spellbound and inspired musicians in all genres. Just A Simple Soul (Out on 26th October) – named after the closing track on his 1998 album Toy Balloon – is the first collection of Jansch’s entire solo career, with insightful liner notes by Bernard Butler (Suede) who compiled this selection with the Bert Jansch Estate. ... Presented chronologically the collection begins by drawing from his prolific 1960s period, during which he released six albums between 1965 and 1969. His self-titled debut, sometimes referred to as The Blue Album, is listed at #3 in NME’s Best Folk Albums Of All Time, and this collection plucks three tracks including the harrowing ‘Needle Of Death’; about the tragic passing of Bert’s friend, folk singer Buck Polly. ..."
Folk Radio
amazon
YouTube: Just A Simple Soul, Reynardine (live), Needle of Death, Blackwaterside (Live Norwegian TV '73)

April 2010: Bert Jansch, 2011 October: Bert Jansch (November 1943 – October 2011), 2011 September: Faro Annie,  2011 April: Cruel Sister (1970) - Pentangle, 2014 February: Bert & John (1966)

Democrats, Don’t Take Native American Voters for Granted

A polling station on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Fort Yates, North Dakota in 2016.

"Ahead of the midterm elections, the state of North Dakota is using one of the most restrictive voter identification laws in the country to engage in that most American of traditions: excluding and discriminating against indigenous people. Thanks to the state’s Republican Party, all who want to take part in the democratic process must have a residential address on their identification cards. However, many tribal citizens in North Dakota don’t have residential addresses or postal service. There are five federally recognized tribes in the state, with five reservations. More than 31,000 indigenous people live in North Dakota, and around 60 percent of that population lives on reservations. ..."

NY Times

2011 July: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown, 2012 September: The Ghost Dance, 2016 September: A History and Future of Resistance, 2016 November: Dakota Access Pipeline protests, 2016 December: Police Violence Against Native Americans Goes Far Beyond Standing Rock, 2016 December: Dakota Protesters Say Belle Fourche Oil Spill 'Validates Struggle', 2017 January: A Murky Legal Mess at Standing Rock, 2017 January: Trump's Move On Keystone XL, Dakota Access Outrages Activists, 2017 February: Army veterans return to Standing Rock to form a human shield against police, 2017 February: Standing Rock is burning – but our resistance isn't over, 2017 March: Dakota Access pipeline could open next week after activists face final court loss, 2017 April: The Conflicts Along 1,172 Miles of the Dakota Access Pipeline, 2017 May: 'Those are our Eiffel Towers, our pyramids': Why Standing Rock is about much more than oil, 2017 June: Dakota pipeline protesters won a small victory in court. We must fight on, 2018 February: PHOTOS: Since Standing Rock, 56 Bills Have Been Introduced in 30 States to Restrict Protests, 2018 November: Dennis J. Banks, Naawakamig (1937-2017), 2018 April: The Next Standing Rock? A Pipeline Battle Looms in Oregon

Dawson City: Frozen Time - Bill Morrison (2016)

"Bill Morrison’s films straddle film history and avant-garde expressionism, mining the wealth of silent film history and exploring the abstract beauty of decaying nitrate film, a particularly volatile medium that breaks down over time. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) celebrates the 'Dawson Film Find' of 1978, thousands of reels of film buried in the permafrost, and tells the history of the Yukon town. Founded in the 1890s Gold Rush, it grew from a muddy collection of buildings to a bustling city of 40,000 at its peak, and back down to a town of under 1000 inhabitants by the 1970s. Morrison frames the documentary with the discovery of the buried trove of silent films. Dawson City was the end of the line for film distribution and the studios wouldn’t pay the freight to return prints that were essentially worthless by time they reached the Yukon, so the films were stored and finally buried in an old civic swimming pool. Decades later, they were unearthed during a redevelopment project. ..."
Stream On Demand
W - Dawson City: Frozen Time
NY Times: In ‘Dawson City: Frozen Time,’ Early Movies Lost and Found
amazon
YouTube: Dawson City: Frozen Time – Official Trailer, Music out of time in "Dawson City: Frozen Time" (in stereo), Dawson City: Frozen Time | Clip: Gymnasium Movie Theater | NYFF54

2012 June: Bill Morrison, 2015 October: Decasia (2002), 2017 December: The Miners' Hymns (2011), 2018 January: The Dockworker's Dream (2016)

A Fate Worse Than Slavery, Unearthed in Sugar Land

Prints depicting enslaved people producing sugar in Antigua, 1823

"The blood-drenched history that gave the city of Sugar Land, Tex., its name showed its face earlier this year, when a school construction crew discovered the remains of 95 African-Americans whose unmarked graves date back more than a century. The dead — some of whom may have been born in slavery — are victims of the infamous convict leasing system that arose after Emancipation. Southerners sought to replace slave labor by jailing African-Americans on trumped-up charges and turning them over to, among others, sugar cane plantations in the region once known as the Sugar Bowl of Texas. A bitter debate has erupted in Sugar Land, a fast-growing suburb southwest of Houston. Sugar Land officials, who want to move the remains to a nearby cemetery, are at odds with members of a city-appointed task force who rightly argue that a historical find of this magnitude should be memorialized on the spot where it was discovered. ..."

NY Times
W - Sugarcane

A display at the Sugar Land Heritage Museum and Visitor Center. At center, convicts harvesting sugar cane circa 1900.