Small Worlds: Miniatures in Contemporary Art

Lori Nix / Kathleen Gerber, “Library (detail),” 2007.
"In 'Small Worlds: Miniatures in Contemporary Art'— at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art in Burlington from Feb. 13 to May 10, 2019—artists adopt the techniques of dioramas, model train figures and architectural models to invent tiny worlds that reflect our dreams and fears. 'Miniatures, reminiscent of our childhood playthings, can recall in us that sense of wonder for the world around us, but can also suggest dark forces hidden beneath the seduction of the small,' the opening sign says. 'As our inherent attraction to the miniature pulls us into the imagined world of the artist, real-world traumas such as violence, displacement, and environmental disaster are brought to our attention in intricate and intimate ways.' ..."
In ‘Small Worlds,’ Artists Fashion Tiny Models Of Dreams And Nightmares
SevenDays
Fleming Museum of Art
RETN: Small Worlds: Miniatures from the Collection 41:58

Detail of Mohamad Hafez's "Hiraeth," 2016

The Metamorphosis

"'Literature is fire,' Mario Vargas Llosa declared in 1967, when he accepted a prize commemorating Rómulo Gallegos, the esteemed Venezuelan novelist and former president. Gallegos represented the center-left tradition in Latin America, and Vargas Llosa was determined to challenge his audience from the left. Literature, the Peruvian novelist continued, 'means nonconformism and rebellion…. Within ten, twenty or fifty years, the hour of social justice will arrive in our countries, as it has in Cuba, and the whole of Latin America will have freed itself from the order that despoils it, from the castes that exploit it, from the forces that now insult and repress it.' Nearly 40 years later, in 2005, Vargas Llosa received a very different sort of prize and delivered a very different kind of speech. Accepting the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute, he denounced the Cuban government and called Fidel Castro an “authoritarian fossil,” praised the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises as a “great liberal thinker,” and defended calls for privatizing pensions. It was quite a remarkable transformation. ..."
The Nation
Continental shifts
amazon: Sabers and Utopias: Visions of Latin America: Essays

2015 March: Mario Vargas Llosa

Fame Northern Soul (2019)

"Best-known for producing some of the greatest southern soul from their Muscle Shoals, Alabama studios, FAME was successful at any type of music they turned their hands to. The young writers and musicians were as keen to replicate the sound of Motown as they were to follow the innovative sounds of Stax. This CD spotlights uptempo southern grit with club classics like Clarence Carter's 'Looking For A Fox' and Arthur Conley's 'I Can't Stop; No, No, No', but the label was also capable of chasing on-the-fours dance appeal, with James Barnett's 'Keep On Talking' and Linda Carr's 'Everytime'. They could also ape the big city soul sounds of New York and LA with tracks such as Jimmy Hughes 'I'm Getting Better' and June Conquest's 'Almost Persuaded'. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
amazon
Juno: VARIOUS

Mueller Report Reveals Trump’s Efforts to Thwart Russian Inquiry

President Trump leaving the East Room of the White House on Thursday.
"Robert S. Mueller III revealed a frantic, months long effort by President Trump to thwart the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference, cataloging in a report released on Thursday the attempts by Mr. Trump to escape an inquiry that imperiled his presidency from the start. The much-anticipated report laid out how a team of prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller, the special counsel, wrestled with whether the president’s actions added up to an indictable offense of obstruction of justice for a sitting president. They ultimately decided not to charge Mr. Trump, citing numerous legal and factual constraints, but pointedly declined to exonerate him. ..."
NY Times
***NY Times: A Portrait of the White House and Its Culture of Dishonesty
***NY Times: Mueller Report Shows Depth of Connections Between Trump Campaign and Russians
***NY Times: See Which Sections of the Mueller Report Were Redacted
***NY Times: House Democrats Subpoena Full Mueller Report, and the Underlying Evidence
NY Times: The Mueller Report: Excerpts and Analysis
NY Times: Mueller Left Open the Door to Charging Trump After He Left Office
NY Times: What We Know So Far From the Mueller Report (Video)
NY Times: Barr’s Defense of Trump Rewards the President With the Attorney General He Wanted (Video)
NY Times: Opinion - Don’t Trust Barr. Verify His Redactions.

Television screens showing Attorney General William P. Barr’s news conference on Thursday.

Mapping Gothic France

"The Mapping Gothic website (http://mappinggothic.org/) was originally conceived by Stephen Murray, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University, and Andrew Tallon, Assistant Professor of Art at Vassar College, as a space to represent Gothic architecture digitally. Aware of the insufficiencies of a two-dimensional screen for rendering these structures, the site compiles panoramic, gigapan images; exact architectural elevations; timelines; and historical narratives to show these buildings in both time and space. The site derives its guiding Hrinciple from Henri Lefèbvre in seeking connections between what it describes as 'the architectural space of individual buildings, geo-political space, and the social space resulting from the interaction (collaboration and conflict) between multiple agents – builders and users.' Murray and Tallon hope that in addition to providing digital access to these churches, cathedrals, and abbeys, the manipulable platform will allow users to draw their own connections between these Gothic buildings. ..."
Stephen Murray and Andrew Tallon, 2012-. Mapping Gothic France.
Mapping Gothic France
Mapping Gothic France - Map

Tag out

A 1911 American Tobacco Company baseball card illustrating a baserunner being tagged out at third base.
Wikipedia - "In baseball, a tag out, sometimes just called a tag, is a play in which a baserunner is out because a fielder touches him with the ball or with the hand or glove holding the ball, while the ball is live and while the runner is not touching a base. A runner must sometimes advance to the next base because a batter, advancing to first, forces that runner to advance ahead of him to the next base. Two runners are not allowed on one base at one time, so a batter can, in effect, bumper-car a runner forward. Such a runner is spoken of as having been forced to the next base. A defensive play against that runner is called a force play and, if successful, a force out. A tag can put runners out on a forced play as well (in lieu of stepping on a force base). ..."
Wikipedia

Bloomsbury Group

The Studio © Penelope Fewster on behalf of Charleston Trust
Wikipedia - "The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King's College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, 'although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. A well-known quote, attributed to Dorothy Parker, is 'they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles'. ..."
Wikipedia
Tate: Lifestyle and Legacy of the Bloomsbury Group
Decorating secrets of the Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group
Independent: Bloomsbury Set: Love triangles, suicide and Communism
W - List of Bloomsbury Group people
YouTube: Charleston - Bloomsbury Group Bohemia

Photograph of family and friends of Vanessa Bell in the walled garden of her home, Charleston farmhouse, in Firle, Sussex.

The Globetrotter

"Blitz the Ambassador is not your average Bed-Stuy rapper. In a neighborhood that’s birthed generations of kids hoping to be the next Biggie or Jay Z, Blitz is an outlier; a Ghana-bred, Ohio-schooled striver, who moved to the central Brooklyn neighborhood like the rest of us: a 32-year-old cosmopolitan maverick hungry for success in the big city. My fascination with Blitz dates back to last May, when I ventured out to the Soul of Brooklyn festival in Bed-Stuy to see him perform. Crowds of native Brooklynites or recent arrivals had flocked to the daylong event, hosted by the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. They sauntered around tents, swapping Instagram handles and poring over local artisan jewelry and tote bags. As if cued by the setting sun, Blitz took the stage. He wore a simple navy cotton suit and white shirt adorned by a yellow scarf bursting with a bold Ghanaian wax print pattern, and he immediately lit up the audience with a slew of opening songs from his most recent studio album, Native Sun. ..."
BKLYNR (Audio)
Blitz the Ambassador has a new EP: ‘The Warm Up’ (Video)
Bandcamp: The Warm Up EP (Audeo)

Large Magellanic Cloud

Wikipedia - "The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of about 50 kiloparsecs (≈163,000 light-years), the LMC is the second- or third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal (~16 kpc) and the possible dwarf irregular galaxy known as the Canis Major Overdensity. Based on readily visible stars and a mass of approximately 10 billion solar masses, the diameter of the LMC is about 14,000 light-years (4.3 kpc), making it roughly one one-hundredth as massive as the Milky Way. This makes the LMC the fourth-largest galaxy in the Local Group, after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Milky Way, and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33). The LMC is classified as a Magellanic spiral. It contains a stellar bar that is geometrically off-center, suggesting that it was a barred dwarf spiral galaxy before its spiral arms were disrupted, likely by tidal interactions from the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and the Milky Way's gravity. ..."
Wikipedia
1,060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) captured by Amateur Astronomers

A France in Turmoil Weeps for a Symbol of Paris’s Enduring Identity

Before the fire, the cathedral had been undergoing an extensive restoration.
"Notre-Dame has occupied the heart of Paris for the better part of a millennium, its twin medieval towers rising from the small central island wedged between the storied left and right banks. Now, France is burning. The fire at Notre-Dame happened on the day that the country’s troubled president, Emmanuel Macron, was supposed to explain how he intended to address the demands of the 'Yellow Vest' movement. An anguished, restless nation has struggled to cope with the monthslong uprising and with the frayed social safety net that spurred the protests. Generations that had come to rely on this social safety net, as a matter of national pride and identity, see it going up in smoke. On Monday, so was the cathedral, which for centuries has enshrined an evolving notion of Frenchness. The symbolism was hard to miss. ..."
***NY Times
******NY Times: Opinion |Why Did Nonbelievers Grieve for Notre-Dame?
****NY Times: Why Notre-Dame Was a Tinderbox
*****NY Times: Notre-Dame Attic Was Known as ‘the Forest.’ And It Burned Like One. (Video)
YouTube: A France in Turmoil Weeps for a Symbol of Paris’s Enduring Identity
***NY Times: Fate of Priceless Cultural Treasures Uncertain After Notre-Dame Fire (Video)
***NY Times: A Miracle of Timing: The Statues That Escaped the Notre-Dame Fire
***NY Times: Opinion | From the Ashes of Notre-Dame
***NY Times: Opinion | Notre-Dame’s Bells Will Toll Again

Patrick Palem, a restoration expert, holding the head of a statue from the spire of Notre-Dame cathedral on Tuesday. Because they had been removed for restoration just days before, the 16 copper figures were spared from the fire.
***NY Times: Notre-Dame Fire Photos: Despair and Grief Amid Smoke and Flame
***Notre-Dame Found Structurally Sound After Fire, as Investigators Look for the Cause (Video)

How the Notre-Dame Cathedral Fire Spread

The fire was first visible in this area of the cathedral in images taken Monday evening.
"It took less than an hour for a fire to spread from the attic of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, race across the wooden rooftop and topple its 300-foot spire. Around 6:30 p.m., Paris time, smoke began to pour out of the cathedral’s roof, near scaffolding that had been put up over the last few months to conduct renovations on the spire. The fire started in the cathedral’s attic, said Jean-Claude Gallet, commander of the Paris firefighters. The attic is an oddly shaped space, seldom visited, that lies above the soaring stone arches visible from the floor of old European cathedrals. ..."
***NY Times: How the Notre-Dame Cathedral Fire Spread
NY Times: Part of Notre-Dame Spire Collapses as Paris Cathedral Catches Fire (Video)
CBS: Notre Dame spire and roof collapse as fire rages at iconic cathedral in Paris (Video)
NY Times: In Paris, Worn-Out Notre-Dame Needs a Makeover, and Hopes You Can Help (Sep. 28, 2017)

Green Book - Peter Farrelly (2018)

"In an Oscar season not wanting for controversy, Green Book made headlines as one of the most divisive Best Picture nominees. It’s a feel-good film about healing the wounds of racism that’s seen not one, but two racism controversies—first when star Viggo Mortensen dropped the n-bomb during a Q&A, and then when co-writer Nick Vallelonga’s Islamophoic tweet surfaced. These controversies are symptomatic of the film itself, a based-on-a-true-story white savior road trip movie that uses fried chicken as its leitmotif. While Mortensen and his co-star Mahershala Ali both turn in fantastic performances, casting is pretty much the only thing the film gets right. In its handling of everything from the biography of one of the men at the heart of the film to the very nature of American racism, Green Book stumbles. ... But the film’s first sin is right in its name. It takes its title from the Negro Travelers' Green Book, and yet gives this important piece of American history little screen time or analysis. The Green Book was an annual guide published by Victor Hugo Green and his family between 1936 and 1966, and listed hotels, gas stations, and restaurants around the nation that would be hospitable to black visitors. ..."
Esquire: The Problems With Green Book Start With Its Title, and Don't Stop Coming (Video)
Vanity Fair: The Truth About Green Book
W - Green Book
YouTube: Green Book - Official Trailer, Green Book: History vs. Hollywood
W - The Negro Motorist Green Book
NYPL: Green Book
YouTube: The real story of the Green Book

When “play streets” let New York kids run free

"It’s unusual to see groups of kids playing in the streets of New York City anymore. (At least without an adult supervising.) But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with parents at work and tenements too crowded for game-playing anyway, kids were free to roam the cityscape—running around sidewalks, playing ball in the middle of the road, or just sitting on the curb, horsing around. The street wasn’t a safe place to play, of course. Newspapers headlines of the era tell the stories of countless children being injured or killed by cars or horses. A public playground movement was underway. But by the 1910s, only 30 had been opened, and not always in the poor neighborhoods that needed them most. So park officials and the Police Athletic League came up with a novel alternative so popular, they still exist today: play streets. ..."
Ephemeral New York

An NYC Mambo, Boogaloo and Salsa Family Tree

"... Eddie Palmieri (b. 1936). Palmieri is a Grammy-winning pianist, composer, and bandleader of Puerto Rican heritage. Influenced by jazz as well as by Latin pianists, Palmieri was also inspired by his older brother Charlie to take up piano after starting on timbales. During the 1950s, Palmieri played with various orchestras, most notably with Tito Rodríguez. In 1961 he founded his own conjunto (group) La Perfecta, combining progressive ideas with various Cuban traditions, utilizing the flute (from the charanga) and two trombones (inspired by Mon Rivera) for a heavier sound. Influenced in the 1960s by the civil rights, social justice and anti-poverty struggles, Palmieri became more message-oriented in his lyric content and more experimental musically, culminating in the ultimate synthesis of Latin and soul/funk, Harlem River Drive (including live recordings made at Sing Sing prison), as well as the most progressive salsa track of the time, 'Vamanos Pa’l Monte' and later psychedelic expansions on the album The Sun of Latin Music, recorded at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)
Red Bull Music Academy Daily - An Introduction to Eddie Palmieri: A Revolution on Harlem River Drive (Video)

2011 November: Charlie Palmieri, 2014 March: Harlem River Drive - Harlem River Drive (1971), 2014 October: Fania at Fifty, 2017 December: Nu Yorica: Culture Clash In New York City - Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77, 2018 December: Latin Underground Revolution: Swinging Boogaloo, Guaguanco, Salsa & Latin Funk from New York City 1967-1978, 2017 June: Eddie Palmieri - Unfinished Masterpiece (1976), 2018 July: The Soul Of Spanish Harlem / El Barrio: Sounds from the Spanish Harlem Streets, 2011 June: Mario Bauzá, 2017 June: Rhythm & Power: Salsa in New York, 2012 February: Rubén Blades, 2017 December: Carlos Vera: Barcelona's Boogaloo: Mixes and Mashups

The Long-Lasting Legacy of the Great Migration

An African-American family leaves Florida for the North during the Great Depression.
"In 1963, the American mathematician Edward Lorenz, taking a measure of the earth’s atmosphere in a laboratory that would seem far removed from the social upheavals of the time, set forth the theory that a single 'flap of a sea gull’s wings' could redirect the path of a tornado on another continent, that it could, in fact, be 'enough to alter the course of the weather forever,' and that, though the theory was then new and untested, 'the most recent evidence would seem to favor the sea gulls.' At that moment in American history, the country had reached a turning point in a fight for racial justice that had been building for decades. This was the year of the killing of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, of Gov. George Wallace blocking black students at the schoolhouse door of the University of Alabama, the year of the March on Washington, of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 'I Have a Dream' speech and his 'Letter From a Birmingham Jail.' ..."
Smithsonian
NPR - Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North (Audio)
Vox: Why African Americans left the South in droves — and what’s bringing them back (Video)

In the 1920s, Harlem's African-American population exploded — with nearly 200,000 African Americans inhabiting a neighborhood where there had been virtually no blacks 15 years earlier. Above, a Harlem street in 1942.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent – Eduardo Galeano (1971)

“Imagine: a proud lion has been chased, shot and trapped by poachers who descended heavy-footed upon his land. The poachers are winged and foreign to the lion’s land, as well as dispassionate, or passionate only to wealth’s nefarious whispers. The lion does not and will never capitulate, yet blood flows from bullet-hole wounds. It is this feeling that Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent embodies: one of anger; of arbitrary and wrongful pillage; a feeling of death that is prolonged and surgical in its keeping the patient alive for as long as the matter dictates; of a raping of beauty, pride and hope. ..."
Sounds and Colours
W – Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Eduardo Galeano Acknowledges the Weaknesses of ‘The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.
[PDF] Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
amazon
YouTube:  New Book “Children of the Days” 1/2

2015 April: Eduardo Galeano (3 September 1940 – 13 April 2015), 2017 August: Soccer in Sun and Shadow (1993), 2018 August: The Pan American

On Believing - Hanif Abdurraqib

"To begin with a fact that is entirely beside the point (unless you are the owner of a Michigan area code and a very particular type of pride): South Detroit is, in fact, not a real place, at least not within the flimsy geographical construct of the United States. Anyone beginning in Detroit and traveling south will, because of how the borders are drawn, end up in Canada. From a geographical standpoint, South Detroit is Windsor, Ontario. The restaurant South Detroit, which is in Windsor, Ontario, was opened by someone with a slick sense of humor and a sharp eye for nostalgia and aesthetics. ... What South Detroit did have was a good jukebox. I like a jukebox that requires labor. ..."
The Paris Review
W - Jukebox

Nick Cave Creates a List of His 10 Favorite Songs–His Favorite “Hiding Songs”

"For all of the indispensable purposes music has served over thousands of years of human history, at no time before the age of mass produced recorded music was it ever a collectible commodity—something we could own, believing it was made just for us, even when it reached millions of other people. Music has, of course, continued to play a significant communal role, and in some ways maybe even a stronger one in the age of global mass media. Yet the experience of listening to music has also become, over the course of the past century, an unprecedentedly private affair. Whether you grew up with LPs, tapes, CDs, or streaming digital, you know what it’s like to have a collection of songs that seem like they were written just for you, summing up your life in some uncanny way: songs that feel like emotional refuges, welcoming some displaced part of yourself. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

How the Shed Can Live Up to Its Hype: Focus on the Artists

"A city’s culture is an ecosystem. Something gets added, something gets taken away and there’s a change in climate that affects everyone. Everything is interconnected; spending more somewhere inevitably means less somewhere else. Every choice contributes to setting prevailing values: What gets supported? What kind of culture do we want? Into the New York ecosystem now comes the Shed, and the more than $500 million in support behind it. Programming at the new Hudson Yards performance space, which looks like an airplane hangar wrapped in a down comforter, starts on April 5. It would hardly be good critical practice to prejudge the opening season’s starry collaborations and blockbuster statements of purpose before they’ve begun. What the Shed will stand for in the long run is still T.B.D. ..."
NY Times

The Shed, which looks like an airplane hangar wearing a down comforter.

Michael Prophet - Gunman (1981)

"Originally issued on LP in 1981, this is a long-overlooked classic of late roots reggae featuring a very good singer backed by one of the best studio bands of all time -- the mighty Roots Radics -- and mixed by the young dubmaster Scientist at King Tubby's studio. Like many of his colleagues, Michael Prophet had vocal skill that far outstripped his lyrical originality; even in a genre with a high tolerance for cliché, songs like 'Hold on to What You Got' and 'Love and Unity' come across on this album as unusually hackneyed. But the heavyweight rhythm section of drummer Style Scott and bassist Flabba Holt give the songs all the ballast they need, and in a couple of cases (notably 'Hold on to What You Got'), Scientist makes the wise choice of dropping Prophet's vocal out early on in the song and filling the remaining space with expert dubwise effects. ... The four 12" remixes that fill out the end of the program are a very nice bonus, though it's too bad the songs' dubwise extensions don't include any scraps of vocal. ..."
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs
W - Michael Prophet
amazon, iTunes
YouTube: Gunman, Gunman Riddim Mix ★1980 -1984★ Michael Prophet,Yellowman,Frankie Paul & More Mix by Djeasy, Help Them Please 12", Love And Unity, Boom Him Up 12", Youthman

Black Hole Image Revealed for First Time Ever

The first image of a black hole, from the galaxy Messier 87.
"Astronomers announced on Wednesday that at last they had observed the unobserveable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it. 'We have seen what we thought was unseeable,' said Shep Doeleman, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and director of the effort to capture the image, during a Wednesday news conference in Washington, D.C. The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from Earth, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and malevolence of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity. To capture the image, astronomers reached across intergalactic space to Messier 87, a giant galaxy in the constellation Virgo. There, a black hole several billion times more massive than the sun is unleashing a violent jet of energy some 5,000 light-years into space. ..."
NY Times (Video)
NY Times: What Is a Black Hole? Here’s Our Guide for Earthlings (Video)
NY Times: Sync your calendar with the solar system

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Atacama, Chile, one of several telescopes across the globe that make up the Event Horizon Telescope, below the southern sky.

Veselka Then and Now

"Three years ago today, GVSHP conducted an oral history interview with Veselka owner and GVSHP Trustee Tom Birchard. Tom is the son-in-law of Veselka’s original owner, who in 1954 bought a candy shop from a retiring Italian couple. It became a destination for the growing Ukrainian population, serving them with homemade traditional Eastern European dishes and other items and news from the old country. Tom took over in 1974, experiencing some difficulties until his business model and expanded menu found success starting in the early 1980’s. Since then, Veselka has expanded several times, and recently celebrated its 60th anniversary. GVSHP is lucky to have several old photos of Veselka in our expanding Historic Image Archive. The East Village of the 1970’s and 80’s was a different place than today. ..."
The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation
Veselka Will Close On Christmas, Once Again Changing With the Times
Spotlight on Veselka, The Iconic Family-Run Ukrainian Restaurant in NYC’s East Village
W - Veselka

Behold the Sola-Busca Tarot Deck, the Earliest Complete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

"Whatever you think of the predictive power of tarot cards, the story of how humanity has produced them and put them to use provides a fascinating cultural history of the last 500 years or so. We've featured a variety of tarot decks here on Open Culture, mostly from the past century: decks designed by Aleister Crowley, Salvador Dalí, and H.R. Giger, as well as one featuring the characters from Twin Peaks. But today we give you the oldest extant example, and a highly distinctive one for reasons not just historical but aesthetic: the Sola-Busca tarot deck, dating from the early 1490s, which L'Italo Americano's Francesca Bezzone describes as '78, beautifully illustrated cards, 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana, engraved on cardboard and hand painted with tempera colors and gold.' ..."
Open Culture
Mystery and history of art merge together in the Sola Busca tarots
W - Sola Busca tarot

2009 August: Tarot, 2018 June: Tarot Mythology: The Surprising Origins of the World's Most Misunderstood Cards

Socialism, but in Iowa

Many members of the Central Iowa DSA think that the state’s caucus system is undemocratic, but they are preparing to confront the 2020 candidates at events around the state.
"DES MOINES — Caroline Schoonover has two immediate goals. One of them is to systematically dismantle capitalism. The other is to finish watching all seven seasons of Vanderpump Rules. ... Schoonover, who grew up near Martensdale, Iowa, just south of the state capital, is one of the thousands of Millennials across the country who joined the Democratic Socialists of America after the 2016 election of Donald Trump. I met her one evening in mid-March during a visit to Iowa, my home state, right before she led a monthly chapter meeting. ... Iowa is a state that most Americans associate with straw polls and horse-race politics, and whose residents are generally thrilled to soak up the national-media spotlight every four years ahead of the caucuses. It isn’t, in other words, where most people would expect to find participants of a budding movement to overthrow the country’s political and economic system. One popular perception of socialism in America is that it’s a sort of pastime for affluent and cerebral hipsters. ..."
The Atlantic
Jacobin: A Socialist Wave in Chicago
W - Green Corn Rebellion
The Atlantic: The Myth of Beto O’Rourke
Pinkos Have More Fun
The Atlantic: Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Capitalism (Aug. 2018)

Socialist Chicago city council candidate Rossana Rodriguez hugs campaign volunteer Ken Barrios. Rodriguez's race is too close to call, but she ended the night sixty-four votes ahead of incumbent Deb Mell. Socialist city council member Carlos Rosa (cheering, left), who won his race by twenty points in February, looks on.

The Handwritten Heritage of South Africa’s Kitabs

Da Costa's heirloom kitab, handwritten by her father, is one of a few remaining today.
"In an orange house along one of the sloped lanes of Bo-Kaap, Cape Town’s Muslim neighborhood, 92-year-old Abdiyah Da Costa deftly climbs the stairs to the second floor to what essentially has become a personal museum. Meticulously dressed and made up—she used to own what she describes as four 'high-fashion' clothing shops—she’s been waiting to show us around. Outside her window is a view of Cape Town’s iconic, flat-topped Table Mountain, which overlooks the city and the Atlantic Ocean. Inside, her walls are covered with black-and-white photos of her husband, parents, siblings and other relatives long gone. Her beaded wedding dress is on display, as are souvenirs from her pilgrimage to Makkah as well as awards and certificates received over the years. But we didn’t come to see these things. We came to see her kitabs. ..."
AramcoWorld

Ebraheim holds one of many kitabs he has collected from self-taught families over the years, which he donates to the Simon's Town Heritage Museum.

The man in a concrete wall in the tenement city

Office in a Small City, 1953
"Edward Hopper spent four decades chronicling the isolation of modern urban life: people unconnected to each other in a cafe, a lone person on an elevated train, and building facades almost empty of humanity. Yet perhaps none of his paintings are as haunting as Office in a Small City, from 1953. Here, Hopper gives us a symbolic everyman with his shirtsleeves rolled up—sitting at a desk inside an office with windows so large it almost resembles a zoo exhibit. He’s gazing past the tenement tops across the street, ostensibly imagining a bigger life for himself, one not confined by the low-rise cityscape he’s part of right now. ..."
Ephemeral New York

2008 July: Edward Hopper, 2010 October: Finding Nighthawks, 2010 December: Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, 2012 Wednesday: Through Edward Hopper's eyes: in search of an artist's seaside inspiration, 2013 July: Hopper Drawing, 2014 May: INTERVIEW: “An Interview with Edward Hopper, June 17, 1959″., 2014 September: How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks, 2015 February: Edward Hopper's New York: A Walking Tour, 2015 September: Edward Hopper life and works, 2016 May: "Night Windows," 1928, 2016 July: Sunday (1926), 2016 September: Drug Store (1927), 2018 January: Seven A.M. (1948), 2018 February: Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun

Dark Ambient 101: Understanding the Technicalities

Pär Boström with analog devices.
"Dark ambient is a genre that is still quite a mystery, even to many dedicated fans, though it’s been around for several decades. An important factor in the dark ambient scene is the minuscule number of followers, in comparison to many other genres, scattered over the entirety of the globe. From Argentina to Siberia, dark ambient listeners seek something unique, something that is wholly outside the lines of modern trends. During my own personal discovery of the genre, I waded through numerous interviews and live performances, trying to discern exactly what the hell is going on, how these musicians were creating such beautifully blackened ambient soundscapes. Years later, I understand a whole lot more than I did in the beginning. But it is still a daunting task, attempting to understand the machinations and sorcery of these musicians. Dark Ambient 101 was born of this search for understanding. ..."
This Is Darkness (Video/Audio)

Pär Boström’s creation: The Shipwreck Device

Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture

"Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture is the first major exhibition in the United States to focus on the portraiture of Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520/24–1579/80). A painter of portraits and religious subjects, Moroni is celebrated as an essential figure in the northern Italian tradition of naturalistic painting that includes Leonardo da Vinci, the Carracci, and Caravaggio. This exhibition, shown exclusively at The Frick Collection, brings to light the innovation of the artist, whose role in a larger history of European portraiture has yet to be fully explored. His famous Tailor (National Gallery, London), for example, anticipates by decades the 'narrative' portraits of Rembrandt, and his Pace Rivola Spini (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo), arguably the first independent full-length portrait of a standing woman produced in Italy, prefigures the many women that Van Dyck would paint in this format in the following century. The Frick presents about twenty of the artist’s most arresting portraits together with a selection of complementary objects — jewelry, textiles, armor, and other luxury items — that evoke the material world of the artist and his sitters and reveal his inventiveness in translating it into paint. ..."
The Frick Collection
The Frick Collection: All Objects
The Frick Collection: Lecture Video (Video) 48:43
YouTube: Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture