New Pedal at Dusk

"This elegant, beautiful video tracks from various angles a test drive by one member of the act Lullatone on a newly acquired reverb pedal. As the sun sets, the pedal is put through its initial paces, segments played on a keyboard and then through the reverb, all set to layer as loops. Those individual layers are barely distinguishable from each other, so peacefully do they accrue as a singular, solitary spaciousness. At times the high notes bring to mind Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ production for U2. Throughout, both the video and the performance it documents are marvels of simplicity. This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at YouTube channel. More from Lullatone, the duo of Shawn James Seymour and Yoshimi Tomida, who are based in Japan, at lullatone.com and lullatone.bandcamp.com."
disquiet (Video)

Windows to the World: At WS Merwin’s Old French Farmhouse

Dordogne River from of the Castle of Beynac
"... Nearly 70 years ago WS Merwin, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and translator, was exploring the south of France when he came across a derelict stone farmhouse in the Midi Pyrenees region between Toulouse and Bordeaux. The rustic building, which was being used for drying tobacco, caught his attention less for its condition than for its location perched high above the Dordogne river, with views to the north and west across the broad valley below. This building and its surroundings would significantly influence his writing—and by extension much of American poetry—for decades to come. The life he started building here offers a model of an alternative literary life perhaps unavailable now. Over the past several years I’ve been incredibly fortunate to spend time at this home, moving for days among its artifacts and old buildings, its gardens, wandering pastures and paths. ..."
LitHub

Paris Burning

People protesting in Paris on Saturday.

"The violent protests of the 'yellow vests' in France have inevitably prompted comparisons with insurrections past, most notably the unrest of 1968 that effectively shut down the French government, and the tribulations of presidents from Charles de Gaulle through François Hollande who have fallen victim to street uprisings. There are similarities, partly expressed in the stereotype that the French favor change in the abstract but abhor it in practice. But it is the differences with the past that pose the major challenge as President Emmanuel Macron tries to find a way to defuse the anger without abandoning his needed reforms. One difference is Mr. Macron himself, who was not yet 40 when he was elected 18 months ago to a five-year presidential term. His own victory and the host of deputies he brought into the National Assembly were the product of a popular discontent with all established parties of right and left. ..."

NY Times
NY Times: How France’s ‘Yellow Vests’ Differ From Populist Movements Elsewhere
NY Times: France Suspends Fuel Tax Increase That Spurred Violent Protests (Video)
Al Jazeera: Hundreds arrested in Paris as 'yellow vest' protests turn violent (Video)
NY Times: Macron’s Moment of Truth***
YouTube: Raw footage as Paris' Yellow Vest protest turns violent

Tear gas surrounds riot police as they clash with “yellow vest” protesters near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on Saturday.

RIP Jean Karakos

"On February 24, 1988, the film To the Extreme hit the cinemas in France – an artificially stylized thriller surfing on the ’80s trend of 'cops in blue jeans.' The movie was hardly a classic and would have quickly been forgotten if the critics had been less harsh. Journalists were already well acquainted with its director, though. Olivier Lorsac had previously been a much-feared press officer with a bad reputation. Journalists had been privately sharpening their claws, waiting for their moment to strike back. When he put down his copy of Libération that day, Lorsac knew he would never make another full-length feature. Crucified in its pages, his dreams of motion picture glory were over. He could only think of one solution to this situation: He was ready to blow his brains out. Before putting his plan into practice, he called up an old friend, Jean Karakos, a man with whom he had worked on projects like the legendary Amougie music festival 20 years beforehand. Karakos, head of New York label Celluloid and a man who had also fallen upon hard times, suggested Lorsac join him in Brazil, where he was looking for artists for a new imprint called Breziloïd. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)
W - Jean Karakos

YouTube: Material - I'm The One, Memories (Hugh Hopper, Whitney Houston, Archie Shepp), Bad Cat Records

2010 June: Celluloid Records

State of the Slice, Part 2: The 27 Pizza Spots That Define New York Slice Culture

".... I wrote that in November of 2002 in the New York Times. The title of the story said it all: 'The State of the Slice.' A few months ago, I started wondering about the state of the slice in 2018. So much has changed in the last 16 years. While we've certainly witnessed a revival of the New York slice, you could also argue that it's been reinvented, all because of five perhaps inseparable factors. ... Take Frank Pinello, who may be one of the best examples of this convergence of most, if not all, of the points above. When he opened Best Pizza in 2010, it set the standard for what I and my like-minded pizza obsessives have come to call the 'revival slice shop'—that is, an establishment that specializes in selling pizza by the slice, the old-school way, but with particular attention paid to the ingredients used and the techniques employed. ..."
Serious Eats

2014 June: Pizza, 2014 October: Viva La Pizza! The Art of the Pizza Box (NYC), 2016 July: Q&A: Antoinette Balzano and Cookie Cimineri of Totonno’s, 2017 September: The Pizza Show, 2017 November: A Priceless Pizzeria in Brooklyn

And the Beat Goes On

Hundreds gather on Sundays at the Branch Brook Roller Skating Center in Newark, N.J.
"NEWARK — 'Clear the floor,' said Nile Ahmid, a D.J. at the Branch Brook Roller Skating Center in New Jersey. It was around midnight on a recent Sunday, and he had been spinning house and hip-hop tracks for the past three hours. 'The next skate is for trains only,' he added. The lights came on, and 400 skaters brought their wheels to a halt. On cue, they linked arms in prearranged groups of three to 10 rollers to form so-called trains, a hallmark of the skating style specific to New York and New Jersey. Rollers ranged in age from late teens to 60s, and were both gay and straight. But in terms of race, about 95 percent were African-American, a demographic that has both defined and given historical context to similar adult-night skating events in scores of cities nationwide. ..."
NY Times
YouTube: The Whispers - And the Beat Goes On (Official Music Video)

Jack (playing card)

Wikipedia - "A jack or knave is a playing card which, in traditional French and English decks, pictures a man in the traditional or historic aristocratic dress generally associated with Europe of the 16th or 17th century. The usual rank of a jack, within its suit, plays as if it was an 11 (that is, between the 10 and the queen). As the lowest face (or "court") card, the jack often represents a minimum standard — for example, many poker games require a minimum hand of a pair of jacks ("jacks or better") in order to continue play. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, Bob Dylan
Soundcloud: Lily Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts (Original New York Session)
YouTube: Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts

The Great Pretender: Fela Kuti

"IT'S AS HOT as hell in here. The heat is on, 12 floors up, mid-80s. A gaggle of colourfully clad-women stare at me, amused by my sweaty pinkness. It could be sun-stroke Lagos, anywhere typically tropical, but it's Paris in October. A big-eyed, very naughty, very small boy continually punches me in the leg; his sister giggles at my discomfort. As if this wasn't enough, the man next to me is wearing only red and blue underpants. Apart from spiritual blasts on his saxophone and scratching his scrotal sac, he assures me he will soon be the President of Nigeria. He is, how you say, a hero; a celebrated musician of some 50 albums; a world famous political dissident; a man who married 27 women in one day; the possessor of a legendary libido. In layman's terms he's a cross between Robin Hood and Bob Marley – a Nigerian James Last, a bandleader whose fame has risen above and beyond the category 'superstar'. For nearly two years, until April 24, he languished in Kirkiri gaol; found guilty of a trumped-up charge of currency smuggling. No jury, no appeal. He was released when the judge, who sentenced him to over five years, admitted the trial was rigged. His detention was politically motivated. ..."
Music Aficionado - 25 October 1986 (Video)

A lawyer-turned-artist’s moody Greenwich Village

"Until recently, I’d never heard of Greenwich Village painter Anthony Springer. But I’ve found myself captivated by his colorful, textural images of a less dense, less luxurious Village and other surrounding neighborhoods. Born in 1928, Springer, a native New Yorker, worked as a lawyer before deciding to make painting his vocation at the age of 40, according to friend and fellow artist Robert Holden in 2013 on his blog, Painting Life Stories. 'Tony was a wonderful, quietly mysterious kind of guy, who played poker all night long, slept until the late morning, and then grabbed his half-box French easel and 16×20 inch stretched linen canvas to go paint the narrow side streets of the Village in the dusty afternoon light, a habit he kept up for 20 years or more,' wrote Holden. ..."
Ephemeral New York
ArtNet

BlacKkKlansman - Spike Lee (2018)

Wikipedia - "BlacKkKlansman is a 2018 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Spike Lee and written by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott, and Lee, based on the 2014 memoir Black Klansman by Ron Stallworth. The film stars John David Washington as Stallworth, along with Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, and Topher Grace. Set in 1970s Colorado Springs, the plot follows the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs police department, who sets out to infiltrate and expose the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The film is produced by Lee, Raymond Mansfield, Shaun Redick, Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, and Jordan Peele. Redick purchased the film rights to the book in 2015, and Lee signed on as director in September 2017. Much of the cast joined the following month, and filming began in New York State. BlacKkKlansman premiered on May 14, 2018, at the Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won the Grand Prix. ..."
Wikipedia
New Yorker: Spike Lee Does Battle with “BlacKkKlansman”
NY Times: Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’ Journeys Into White America’s Heart of Darkness by A.O. Scott (Video)
Vanity Fair - BlacKkKlansman: The True Story of How Ron Stallworth Infiltrated the K.K.K.
Slate: What’s Fact and What’s Fiction in BlacKkKlansman (Video)
YouTube: BLACKkKLANSMAN - Official Trailer

2009 January: Spike Lee, 2014 June: Do the Right Thing (1989), 2016 June: Clockers (1995)

Unless they’re true

A thoroughfare in Venice
"For nearly four decades I’ve kept what is known as a commonplace book – a bound notebook, and later a long computer file, passed from desktops (1990s) to laptops (2000s) to my cell phone, into which I’ve poured verbal delicacies, 'blasts of a trumpet', as Emerson put it, and bits of scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader. Yea, for I am an underliner, a destroyer of books, and maybe you are, too. Commonplace books are not so uncommon. John Locke kept one, as did Virginia Woolf. W. H. Auden published his, as did the poet J. D. McClatchy. E. M. Forster’s was issued after his death. ..."
Times Literary Supplement

Jon Gibson – Two Solo Pieces (1977), Arnold Dreyblatt and The Orchestra of Excited Strings – Propellers in Love (1986)

"A founding member of both Steve Reich and Phillip Glass’ ensembles, and an early collaborator with Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, Jon Gibson is a seminal figure in the 20th century American avant-garde. Long dedicated to realizing the work of others, and subsequently lingering in the shadows of his famous peers, during the 1970’s he released two albums on Phillip Glass’ tiny imprint Chatham Square, the second being the stunning Two Solo Pieces – an effort of constrained elegance, featuring single sided works for organ and flute. ... Arnold Dreyblatt is one of the great architects of the second wave Minimalism. A student of Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier, and a close friend and collaborator of Ellen Fullman, the bassist and composer was a definitive voice among the early 1980’s New York avant-garde, before relocating to Berlin in 1984. Recording shortly after his arrival and released by the Künstlerhaus Bethanien’s imprint for radical efforts in sound, his second album Propellers In Love stands as one of the most important works of its era – entirely rethinking the meaning and approaches of Minimalism. ..."
on jon gibson’s two solo pieces and arnold dreyblatt and the orchestra of excited strings’ ...  (Video)
Discogs - Two Solo Pieces (Video)
Discogs - Propellers in Love (Video)

Rectangle after Rectangle

Squaring the scroll. Wooden writing tablet made in Byzantine Egypt, ca. 500–700 AD.
"This is about the dominance of the rectangular format in a certain tradition of picture making, a dominance that still holds today and extends well beyond the medium of painting. The book, the photographic print, the screen, and the museum—which has tended to favor this format—all guarantee that we encounter most pictures in rectangular frames. A picture that comprises figure and ground requires an enclosed field. Without an enclosure, the space around its figure(s) will not necessarily read as part of the picture; enclosure is, therefore, the originary act that gives rise to the picture but also limits it. Nothing says this enclosure needs to take the shape of a rectangle, but the history of Western art, at least, makes the rectangle look like a virtually inescapable anatomical limit. What follows are three episodes in the longue durée of this rectangle, each a moment in which the rectangular format moves into an ascendant position over one curvilinear format or another. ..."
Cabinet Magazine

Robert Mueller and His Prosecutors: Who They Are and What They’ve Done

"Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, has marshaled prosecutors, F.B.I. agents and other lawyers to investigate Russia’s 2016 election interference and whether any Trump associates conspired. The team has secured indictments against dozens of people and three companies, one trial conviction and a handful of guilty pleas in the highest-profile political inquiry in a generation. This week alone, Mr. Mueller and his prosecutors accused Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, of breaching his plea deal, and secured a guilty plea from Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer. Each of the core prosecutors has a specialty, like political corruption, hacking or money laundering, many of which have featured in indictments. They come from familiar places: the Justice Department’s criminal division, federal prosecutors’ offices in New York and around Washington and a law firm where Mr. Mueller worked. ..."
NY Times

Listen To An Unheard Raw Studio Mix Of John Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep?’

"A previously unheard 'raw studio mix' of John Lennon recording ‘How Do You Sleep?’ has been released. Stripped to the raw recording, with no effects like reverb or echo, it brings the listener into the studio during the recording of a classic Imagine track. ... Present at the session were George Harrison, playing electric slide on Lennon’s pale blue Fender Strat; Rod Lynton with Ted Turner from Wishbone Ash, on twelve string acoustic guitars; Lennon and Harrison’s old friend Klaus Voormann on his hand-painted Fender Precision bass; Alan White on drums; John Tout, from Renaissance, on the Steinway upright piano; and Nicky Hopkins improvising on the red-top Wurlitzer Electric Piano, literally days before he leaves for Nellcôte to play on Exile On Main St with The Rolling Stones. Listening to the outtake is like being in the room as the track is captured. ..."
udiscovermusic (Video)

2009 September: John Lennon - Live in New York City (Madison Square Garden 1972), 2014 January: Michael Rakowitz - The Breakup, 2014 April: "Jealous Guy" (1971), 2014 May: Mind Games (1973), 2014 July: Out of the Blue, 2014 December: Double Fantasy - John Lennon/Yoko Ono (1980), 2015 August: John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), 2016 October: "Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)" (1970), 2017 January: Cold Turkey (1969)

The Slave Ship - J. M. W. Turner (1840)

Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on (1840)
Wikipedia - "The Slave Ship, originally titled Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on, is a painting by the British artist J. M. W. Turner, first exhibited in 1840. Measuring 35 3/4 x 48 1/4 in. in oil on canvas, it is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In this classic example of a Romantic maritime painting, Turner depicts a ship, visible in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water and leaving scattered human forms floating in its wake. J.M.W. Turner was inspired to paint The Slave Ship in 1840 after reading The History and Abolition of the Slave Trade by Thomas Clarkson. In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong had ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be collected. This event probably inspired Turner to create his landscape and to choose to coincide its exhibition with a meeting of the British Anti-Slavery Society. Although slavery had been outlawed in the British Empire since 1833, Turner and many other abolitionists believed that slavery should be outlawed around the world. Turner thus exhibited his painting during the anti-slavery conference, intending for Prince Albert, who was speaking at the event, to see it and be moved to increase British anti-slavery efforts. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Zong massacre
[PDF] "Turner's Slave Ship: The Victims of Empire"
John Ruskin on J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship
Khan Academy: Turner, Slave Ship (Video)

French, A. M., Slavery in South Carolina and the ex-slaves; or, The Port Royal Mission. (1862) 

November 2007: J. M. W. Turner, 2009 April: Turner & Italy, 2011 June: J. M. W. Turner - 1, 2014 June: In Which We Find His Theory Of Color Implausible, 2014 September: The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free, 2015 May: Mr. Turner (2014)

The Politics of Food in Venezuela

Photo credit: "overview of food and nutrition security in Latin America and the Caribbean."
"Few countries and political processes have been subject to such scrutiny, yet so generally misunderstood, as Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution. This is particularly true today, as the international media paints an image of absolute devastation in the country, wrought by failed policies and government mismanagement. At the same time, the three national elections of 2017 demonstrated a strong show of support for the continuation of the revolution under its current leadership. This seeming paradox, we are told, can only be attributed to government tendencies of co-optation and clientelism, along with a closing of democratic space. Such messages are reproduced many times over, both in the media and in certain intellectual circles. ..."
Monthly Review
Reactionary Misinterpretations of the Venezuela Crisis
The Nib: What Happened to Venezuela Isn’t So Simple

In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust

The train station at Illiers-Combray, in north central France, which Marcel Proust immortalized in his novel “In Search of Lost Time.”

"I married Jeanne Moreau in 1977 at a town hall in Paris. Moreau was one of the most revered actresses of her generation, and we were attended by a notable group: Jacques Chirac, the city’s soon-to-be mayor, spoke, and our witnesses were the film director Alain Resnais, who had introduced me to Jeanne, and his wife, Florence Malraux, daughter of the writer André Malraux. After sips of Champagne and a brief ceremony, of which I did not comprehend one word, Jeanne and I took a long walk in the Tuileries Garden accompanied by a cluster of paparazzi. It was my first marriage, her second. I’ve seen pictures of myself on our wedding day and I appear shell-shocked and confused. That first year we spent the summer at her chateau in La Garde-Freinet, a medieval village, on 150 acres of farmland in the hills behind St.-Tropez. ..."

NY Times

The bedroom where the young Proust stayed at his aunt’s house in Illiers.

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 August: Paintings in Proust - Eric Karpeles, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: "Paintings in Proust" - View of the Piazza del Popolo, Giovanni Battista Piranes, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online, 2017 December: The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925), 2018 May: Time Regained (1927), 2018 September: Céleste Albaret
 

INTL BLK #6: The state of the Afropean union

"We’re back with INTL BLK radio after a few months hiatus. This episode opens with a mix of Afrobeats and Zouk, and then we review some of the musical cross-overs happening across the Black Atlantic. In the 2nd hour we have an interview with Lamin Fofana, electronic music producer and DJ of Sierra Leonean descent based in Berlin. We discuss his latest album Brancusi Sculpting Beyonce, the phenomenon of negrophilia in 1920s European modernist art, and what’s behind the current moment of the popularity of African culture in Europe. Listen below or on iTunes, Google Play and Stitcher."
Africa is a Country (Audio)
Mixcloud (Audio)

An Echo Of Owls: watching repeats of Twin Peaks eleven years later

"A far-off Smalltown. The heavy branches of an ocean of trees, swaying pale green in dim daylight. A lonesome foghorn across the lake. A dead girl, washed up in the morning, wrapped in plastic, lips turned blue. Her Prom-Queen portrait bright in the high school trophy cabinet. A policeman who cries like Stan Laurel. The lights in the morgue sputtering. A tiny scrap of paper beneath her fingernail. Her mother’s screams. Her grieving father, clicking his fingers to Glenn Miller. A sweater girl dancing by herself in a diner. Sultry cartoon jazz. Coffee, hot and black. Cherry pies. Chocolate bunnies. A woman in an eye-patch, obsessed with her curtain rail. A stag’s head on a table. A llama. Cocaine. A fish in the coffee. Wayward teens, barking in jail. A lady with a log. Logging trucks rolling always out of sight. The trees again. A burned out train-wreck, miles from town. A traumatised girl, what’s left of her clothes in grimy tatters, crossing a lonely bridge, dwarfed by the girders. The unconcerned mountains. Torchlight in a forest at midnight. A dwarf in a red suit, dancing in a room of red velvet curtains. A solitary traffic light at night, suspended over a deserted intersection, buffeted by the wind, changing to red against a pitch black sky. ..."
Damien Love

2008 September: Twin Peaks, 2010 March: Twin Peaks: How Laura Palmer's death marked the rebirth of TV drama, 2011 October: Twin Peaks: The Last Days, 2014 October: Welcome to Twin Peaks, 2015 June: David Lynch: ‘I’ve always loved Laura Palmer’, 2015 July: Twin Peaks Maps, 2016 May: Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played..., September: Twin Peaks Tarot Cards For The Magician Who Longs To See Through The Darkness Of Future Past, 2014 September: David Lynch: The Unified Field, 2014 December: David Lynch’s Bad Thoughts - J. Hoberman, 2015 March: Lumière and Company (1995), 2015 April: David Lynch Creates a Very Surreal Plug for Transcendental Meditation, 2015 December: What Is “Lynchian”?, 2017 March: Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me, 2017 April: Trading Card Set of the Week – Twin Peaks (Star Pics, 1991), 2017 April: Your Complete Guide to Rewatching "Twin Peaks", 2018 February: Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?, 2018 March: Twin Peaks VR Lets You Live Inside A Dream

In Buenos Aires, a Rivalry Stretches Passions to the Limit

Boca Juniors and River Plate tied in the first leg, 2-2. River Plate hosts the second game on Saturday afternoon. As at the first, visiting fans will be barred.
"BUENOS AIRES — No matter what happens, Leonardo Uranga’s tone will remain soft and steady. He will choose his words carefully. He will enunciate them clearly and slowly. At moments of the highest drama, the most exquisite tension, he will keep his head, even as all around him are losing theirs. As half of Argentina erupts in delight and the other sinks into the deepest despair, Uranga will keep his emotions in check. At the culmination of the biggest game of his long broadcasting career, he will not so much as raise his voice. For much of Saturday evening, then, he may well be unique. When the Buenos Aires archrivals River Plate and Boca Juniors meet in the second leg of the final of the Copa Libertadores — the most important game in South American club soccer — Uranga may well be the only calm person in Argentina. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: For Copa Libertadores at a Crossroads, a Weekend to Forget

River Plate fans clashed with the police on Saturday outside the stadium before the final soccer match of the Copa Libertadores between River Plate and Boca Juniors in Buenos Aires was scheduled to begin.

The Impossibly Cool Album Covers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Creative Team Behind These Iconic Designs

"If you stepped into a record store in the 1950s and 60s, you would likely be drawn almost immediately to a Blue Note release—whether or not you were a fan of jazz or had heard of the artist or even the label. 'If you went to those record stores,' says Estelle Caswell in the Vox Earworm video above, 'it probably wasn’t the sound of Blue Note that immediately caught your attention. It was their album covers.' Now those designs are hallowed jazz iconography, with their 'bold typography, two tone photography, and minimal graphic design.' Of course, it should go without saying that the sound of Blue Note is as distinctive and essential as its look, thanks to its founders’ musical vision, the faultless ear of producer and engineer Rudy Van Gelder, and the roster of unbelievably great musicians the label recruited and recorded. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

1876 Ellen Harding Baker's "Solar System" Quilt

"This 'Solar System' quilt was made by Ellen Harding Baker of Cedar County, Iowa, in 1876. The wool top of this applique quilt is embellished with wool-fabric applique, wool braid, and wool and silk embroidery. Included in the design is the appliqued inscription, 'Solar System,' and the embroidered inscriptions, 'E. H. Baker' and 'A. D. 1876.' The lining is a red cotton-and-wool fabric and the filling is of cotton fiber. The maker, Sarah Ellen Harding, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio,June 8, 1847, and married Marion Baker of Cedar County, Iowa, on October 10, 1867. ... Astronomy was an acceptable interest for women in the nineteenth century and was sometimes even fostered in their education. ..."
SI
W - Ellen Harding Baker
Solar System Quilt

The Mystery Font That Took Over New York

Ichi Sushi at 2040 86th Street in Brooklyn.
"Stand just about anywhere on Broadway, or on Canal Street with its sprightly neon and overstuffed souvenir shops, or the long stretch of restaurants, hardware stores, pharmacies, bars, realtors, barber shops, groceries and auto shops that extends through Fifth Avenue in South Brooklyn, and you’ll find a surplus of vibrant and overstated signage — a cacophony of typography. Steven Heller, a co-chairman at the School of Visual Arts’ M.F.A. program, sees it somewhat differently. 'You say cacophony,’ he said. 'I call it chaos.' But amid all of this chaos there is the occasional beacon. Choc, for instance. It’s a typeface that draws the eye with its inherent contradictions. It seems to have been drawn improvisationally with a brush, and yet it’s so hefty it looks like it could slip off a wall. It’s both delicate and emphatic, a casual paradox, like a Nerf weapon. Choc is far from the most popular typeface on the storefronts of New York, but it can still be found everywhere and in every borough. It’s strewn on fabric awnings and etched in frosted glass. It gleams in bright magenta or platinum lighting. ..."
NY Times

Fukuyama Sushi and Ramen at 622 Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn.

Earth & Stone - Kool Roots: The Classic 1977-79

"Albert Bailey and Clifton Howell were an obscure vocal duo who cut several Jamaican hit singles for Channel One producer JoJo Hookim under the name Earth & Stone in the mid-1970s. Kool Roots, which compiles most of the group's Channel One output, was originally released in 1978 as a double album (standard vocal mixes on one LP, dub versions on the other) in a gatefold sleeve -- an almost unheard-of packaging extravagance for a reggae act at the time. Little more is known about the duo, and they dropped from sight after Kool Roots was released. But the haunting single 'In Time to Come' has endured, and this reissue, which combines both LPs on a single CD, shows that Earth & Stone was capable of producing consistently high-quality material. Bailey and Howell's sweet harmonies are the main attraction, but a good portion of the credit for this album's success must also go to the Revolutionaries, Channel One's crack house band. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: Earth & Stone - Kool Roots - 1978 (Full LP) 1:06:16

Director Bill Morrison

"This mini-documentary focuses on the artistry of director Bill Morrison, who leverages decaying film stock from years past to tell new stories that are relevant to today's audiences. The decaying film lends brilliant visuals which add to Morrison's concept of storytelling. FilmStruck brings you the best indie, foreign, cult, classic, silent and hard-to-find films and is the exclusive streaming home of The Criterion Collection."
YouTube: Director Bill Morrison

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

Peeling Back the Paint to Discover Bruegel’s Secrets

A woman drags a cart in a detail of “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent,” 1559.
"What would happen if you peeled back the layers of a masterpiece by one of art history’s greatest painters? Dead bodies might suddenly appear. Take, for example, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s large-scale festival scene, 'The Battle Between Carnival and Lent,' which he painted in 1559. If we look at his first drafts of the painting, using X-ray photography, we can see a corpse inside a cart that an old woman is dragging behind her. Then we see another dead body on the ground, its face turned to the viewer; he is lying ominously close to a sick child. ... The project was developed along with the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, for 'Bruegel' a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, featuring 87 of the painter’s works, and which runs through Jan. 13, 2019. ..."
NY Times

Detail of “The Battle Between Carnival and Lent,” which shows two fish on a baker’s peel.

2010 May: Peasant, 2011 March: "The Harvesters", Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 2012 February: The Mill and the Cross - Lech Majewski, 2012 December: The Lord of Misrule and the Feast of Fools., 2013 July: Netherlandish Proverbs, 2014 August: Children's Games (1560), 2016 May: The Hunters in the Snow (1565)

Cabaret Voltaire - Red Mecca (1981)

"It isn't without reason that Red Mecca is often referred to as one of Cabaret Voltaire's most cohesive and brilliant records. There are tangible bumpers (the record is buttressed by squealing/wheezing interpretations of Henry Mancini's music for Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), so by that aspect there's a tangible center. And taken as a whole, the record contains all the characteristics that have made the Sheffield group such an influential entity when it comes to electronic music of the untethered, experimental variety that isn't afraid to shake its tail a little. Unlike a fair portion of CV's studio output, Red Mecca features no failed experiments or anything that could be merely cast off as 'interesting.' It's a taught, dense, horrific slab lacking a lull. Dashes of Richard H. Kirk's synthesizer are welded to Chris Watson's tape effects for singed lashes of white noise, best heard on the lurching 'Sly Doubt' and the jolting 'Spread the Virus.' ..."
allmusic (Audio)
Brainwashed
W - Red Mecca
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Red Mecca [Full Album] 40:20

How populism became the concept that defines our age

"'Populism' as a term was rarely used in the 20th century; it was limited to US historians describing, in highly specific terms, the original agrarian populists of the mid-19th century. Latin American social scientists (often Marxists) focused it primarily on the Peronists in Argentina. I only started to really engage with the term in the mid-1990s, while researching my dissertation on what was then still predominantly called 'rightwing extremism'. The German political scientist Hans-Georg Betz had just published what is still the best book on the topic, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe, and I dived into Leiden University’s library to find anything I could find on this odd term. The great British political theorist Margaret Canovan had written an excellent overview, simply titled Populism, in 1981, but argued that, while there were seven different subtypes, populism itself could not be defined. So I delved deeper, trying to engage with the work of the late Ernesto Laclau, an Argentinian post-Marxist theorist, undoubtedly the most influential scholar of populism for academics and politicians alike. ..."
Guardian
Guardian - Revealed: one in four Europeans vote populist
Guardian - Why is populism suddenly all the rage?
Guardian - How populism emerged as an electoral force in Europe
Guardian - How populist are you?

MADONJAZZ From the Vaults vol 26: Spiritual Jazz, Afro & Eastern Sounds

"MADONJAZZ From the Vaults Vol. 26: Spiritual Jazz, Afro & Eastern Sounds: An 1hr recording including music from Pharoah Sanders, Henri Texier, Sun Ra & his Arkestra, Brother Ah, Badal Roy, Lori Vambe and many more. Recorded live at a London venue in 2016. Enjoy
MixCloud (Audio)

Nublu

Nublu Jazz Festival 2015 - Sun Ra Arkestra
"The chronology of an evening: Latin American food and Modelo consumed in abundance. I forget my hat and mittens in the restaurant, but it won’t be until much later that I realize my ears and hands are cold. The last of my lip balm pops out of its tube and rolls into the gutter. We stand on the sidewalk on Avenue C, outside the jazz club Nublu, for half an hour, waiting for someone to arrive. Once inside, my martini arrives soiled by lime juice. Life happens at a familiar pace, until at ten thirty the set begins and the Sun Ra Arkestra appears, bedecked in gold and sky-blue sequins and outrageous hats, their leader enrobed in satiny vermilion. They hold their instruments like crosiers, a saxophone or trumpet cool against the hot vibrancy of their vestments. The Arkestra was originally conceived and fronted by the great figure of avant-garde jazz Sun Ra, who has been dead twenty-five years now. The group is now under the direction of Marshall Allen, a ninety-four-year-old former sideman of the composer. ..."
The Paris Review - Staff Picks: Singing, Sequins, and Slaughterhouses
W - Nublu
NY Times: Club Mixes Old, New and Blue
Nublu

The White Goddess - Robert Graves (1948)

Wikipedia - "The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth is a book-length essay on the nature of poetic myth-making by author and poet Robert Graves. First published in 1948, the book is based on earlier articles published in Wales magazine, corrected, revised and enlarged editions appeared in 1948, 1952 and 1961. The White Goddess represents an approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly creative and idiosyncratic perspective. Graves proposes the existence of a European deity, the 'White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death', much similar to the Mother Goddess, inspired and represented by the phases of the moon, who lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European and pagan mythologies. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Robert Graves
amazon
YouTube: Robert Graves and the White Goddess - Documentary Preview

How Friendsgiving Took Over Millennial Culture

"Every year for the past five or so, the Emily Post Institute—long considered the leading authority on matters of manners and courtesy—fields at least one or two etiquette questions about 'Friendsgiving.' Usually they come from people in their 20s and 30s, says Lizzie Post, the co-president of the institute and the eponymous etiquette authority’s great-great-granddaughter. The advice seekers are often anxious about exactly how to host a Friendsgiving party, a Thanksgiving-themed meal for their close friends. ..."
The Atlantic

24 Amazing, Homemade Dungeons & Dragons Maps

Laureth Ruined
"Last week we asked Atlas Obscura readers to send us their greatest DIY Dungeons & Dragons maps. It was a critical success. We received dozens of fantasy adventure maps illustrating the amazing worlds in our readers’ imaginations. From a hand-drawn city nestled inside a giant turtle shell, to a computer-illustrated continent, to a 'Paraelemental Plane of Ooze' that’s honestly a little too real, your D&D maps are more incredible than we could have imagined. Every single one calls out for exploration. We’ve collected a number of our favorite submissions below. So tighten your sword belts! Shine your pauldrons! Ready your wards and enchantments! The adventure begins below! ..."
Atlas Obscura

The RH Factor - Hard Groove (2003)

"A new musical vision for ace jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove has manifested itself in the form of Hard Groove. This neo-soul/jazz project showcases Erykah Badu, Common, D'Angelo, Marc Cary, and jam band icon saxophonist Karl Denson on a 14-track set that is laden with funk, groove, freestyle rap poetry, and sultry hip-hop/R&B mood swings. Hargrove's interesting horn and keyboard improvisations stem from extensive knowledge of each musician's work and, perhaps even more importantly, from close personal friendships developed as an underground club jam session warrior in N.Y.C. He also plays flügelhorn and percussion, and adds background vocals on several compositions. ... In any case, the ultra-hip trumpeter manages not to alienate his die-hard jazz fans by intersecting with many of the icons of hip-hop, R&B, and neo-soul. Highly recommended."
allmusic
W - Roy Hargrove
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: the RH Factor, "Hardgroove" 11 videos