Mur Murs - Agnès Varda (1980)

Wikipedia - "Mur Murs is a 1980 documentary film directed by Agnès Varda. The film explores the murals of Los Angeles, California. The vast majority of the scenes of the film are shots of murals, all of which are located in the city of Los Angeles, often with the mural's painter or model staged in front of the mural for dramatic effect. The film alternates between voiceover narration by Agnès Varda and commentary about the murals provided by the murals' creators, as well as commentary provided by locals living in the area. The film also includes several musical performances, including by Chicano punk band Los Illegals. A significant amount of the film's attention is focused on work by Chicano artists, although artists from other backgrounds are also covered extensively. The film also dwells on the role of state violence, both as it affects the communities the murals are situated in and the murals themselves. The film's title is a pun: literally 'Wall Walls' in French, Varda suggests that the murals on the walls are in fact murmuring to each other. ..."
Wikipedia
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Marshall Shaffer on Agnès Varda’s ‘Mur murs’
NY Times: AGNES VARDA'S MURALS (Oct. 2, 1981)
MUBI: Mur Murs

May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000), 2013 September: Cinévardaphoto (2004), 2014 July: Black Panthers (1968 doc.), 2014 October: Art on Screen: A Conversation with Agnès Varda, 2015 September: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), 2017 April: Agnès Varda’s Art of Being There, 2017 April: AGNÈS VARDA with Alexandra Juhasz, 2017 August: Agnès Varda on her life and work - Artforum, 2017 October: Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience, 2018 March: Faces Places - Agnès Varda and JR (2017), 2018 July: Vagabond (1985), 2019 March: Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90

J. Greinke / Pierre Perret ‎– Fragment 1 (1989)

"Pierre Perret - French environmentalist working with Musique concrète and collage techniques to create dreamscapes of environmental sounds with field recordings, female vocals, ethnic music recordings, electronic sounds, library tapes... Jeff Greinke is a musician, composer, performer, sound sculptor, and visual artist. Jeff Greinke began composing and performing music in 1980 while studying meteorology at Pennsylvania State University. After moving to Seattle in 1982, Jeff formed the production company and recording label, INTREPID, through which he produced his first LP, Cities in Fog. He has since released twenty other recordings on various U.S. and European labels. He has composed music for film, video, dance, theatre, radio, and art installations."
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Fragment 1 39:23

2009 December: Jeff Greinke, 2012 September: Cities in Fog, 2013 May: Timbral Planes, 2015 March: Lost Terrain (1992)

At Eternity’s Gate - Julian Schnabel (2018)

"In 'At Eternity’s Gate,' a vivid, intensely affecting portrait of Vincent van Gogh toward the end of his life, the artist walks and walks. Head bowed, he looks like a man on a mission, though at other times he seems more like a man at prayer. Often dressed in a blue shirt, he carries an easel, brushes and paint strapped to his back, trudging in light that changes from golden to wintry blue. One day in 1888, he puts his battered boots on the red tile floor of his room in Arles, France. He quickly begins creating a simple painting of them; the original now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The journey of those shoes from humble floor to museum wall tells a familiar story about van Gogh, whose painful life is part of a lucrative brand known as Vincent the Mad Genius. In 'At Eternity’s Gate,' the director Julian Schnabel imagines a different Vincent. This Vincent — a magnificent Willem Dafoe — is not defined by that brand but by the art with which he at once communes with the world and transcends it. ..."
NY Times - ‘At Eternity’s Gate’ Review: An Exquisite Portrayal of van Gogh at Work (Video)
W - At Eternity’s Gate
NPR - 'At Eternity's Gate': Dafoe Is Van Gogh, And You Should Go
amazon
YouTube: AT ETERNITY'S GATE - Official Trailer - HD

2010 March: Van Gogh Museum, 2010 May: Why preserve Van Gogh's palette?, 2012 April: Van Gogh Up Close, 2015 May: Van Gogh and Nature, 2016 January: Van Gogh's Bedrooms, 2016 November: Wheat Fields - Van Gogh series

Listen to Last Seen, a True-Crime Podcast That Takes You Inside an Unsolved, $500 Million Art Heist

"In the early morning of March 18, 1990, two thieves entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and stole 13 pieces of precious art, including paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt. To this day, those paintings, valued at $500 million dollars, have never been recovered. The story of the bold heist and the various attempts to recover the paintings--they get told in a 10-part series of podcasts called Last Seen. Created by WBUR and The Boston Globe, the true-crime podcast 'takes us inside the ongoing effort to bring back the jewels of the Gardner collection.' You can listen to the engrossing episodes online, or via iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify. Or simply stream the episodes below. And if you know anything that cracks the case, there's a $5 million dollar reward. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2012 April: Renzo Piano’s Addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, 2013 March: Gardner Museum Heist Case Might Crack, 2014 April: Carla Fernández: The Barefoot Designer: A Passion for Radical Design and Community, 2015 December: The Scandalous Legacy of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Collector of Art and Men

NIGHT OF 100 SOLOS: NEW YORK - Deborah Jowitt on the New York celebration of Merce Cunningham's 100th birthday

Night of 100 Solos: A Centenary Event. Performance view, Brooklyn Academy of Music, April 16, 2019.
"On April 16, One Hundred Years Ago, Merce Cunningham was born. On April 15, 2019, I was sitting in the balcony of the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House among the hundred or so people watching the final run-through of the 'Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event.' Can I say that I assisted at the memorial’s birth? Probably not. The program took even more risks than the patchworked material that his company used to perform worldwide as Events. Each of the seventy-five dancers celebrating his birthday (twenty-five in New York, and the same number in London and in Los Angeles) learned short passages culled from his pieces. In New York, these were taught by a bevy of former Cunningham company members and staged by two of them: Patricia Lent and her associate, Jean Freebury. Chance procedures, rather than choices, surely governed some of their decisions. Talk about a rainbow coalition. None of the people onstage had been members of Cunningham’s company, although many had taken classes in his technique or been influenced by his ideas. ..."
ARTFORUM (Video)
Harkness Dance Fest celebrates 2 milestones

2009 July: Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies, 2012 November: Dancing around the Bride

Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (2018)

"The names of the women pioneers of Abstract Expressionism were often eclipsed by those of the men. Only in recent years has the work of artists like Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, and Lee Krasner been reassessed, not as a footnote to a mostly male narrative, but in its own right, for its radicalism and impact on art history. These women, along with Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler, made up the movement as much as men like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell did. To a greater extent than their male counterparts, they also made larger sacrifices. Their struggles were personal but also public. They were often uncompromising in their resistance to the status quo. That’s what’s clear in author Mary Gabriel’s new book Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, an epic narrative of these five artists who challenged art world expectations. ..."
Women on the verge of Abstract Expressionism
Grace and Will: An Excerpt from Mary Gabriel’s New Book ‘Ninth Street Women’ on Painter Grace Hartigan and Art Market Changes in the 1950s
NY Times: ‘Ninth Street Women’ Shines a Welcome New Light on New York’s Postwar Art Scene
amazon
YouTube: Ninth Street Women: Mary Gabriel in conversation with Deborah Solomon | Live from the Whitney

Grace Hartigan circa 1951 on the roof of her studio.

Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore - Blowing in From Chicago (1957)

"Both born in 1931 and raised in Chicago, tenor saxophonists Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore scaled the heights of hard bop style motifs with a 1957 collaborative project that served as their shared album-length debut. A touch less intense than contemporaneous blowin’ sessions (like, uh, A Blowin’ Session [1957]), the aptly named Blowing in From Chicago showcases both the fluid phrasing of its constituent soloists and the deep, almost unfathomably tight rhythmic pocket generated by bassist Curly Russell, pianist Horace Silver, and ever-propulsive drummer Art Blakey. Doubling up on a particular instrument in a performance context almost always engenders an element of competitiveness, but this album finds each performer totally at ease with themselves and with their fellow musicians. Jazzwax.com tells me that Jordan is the one who mellows out whereas Gilmore plays with a more aggressive tone, and that befits their statuses as, respectively, roots-oriented narrator of human consciousness and adventurous Sun Ra associate. ..."
Clifford Jordan and John Gilmore, Blowing in From Chicago (1957)
W - Blowing in from Chicago
Doc Wendell’s Prescription For Bop
W - Clifford Jordan, W - John Gilmore
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Blowin in From Chicago 7 videos

2016 August: Sun Ra - The Cry of Jazz (1958)

Sebastien Waknine: “Learning from Migrants and Refugees” In Barcelona

"Owing to the scarceness of resources that are usually allotted to those who arrive as refugees, Street Artist and muralist Sebastien Waknine relies solely upon the thinnest piece of charcoal as he works on this new wall. “Learning from Migrants and Refugees” is the name of the collection of scenes that document the situations that people can be in when escaping from strife and fear – the human aspect of appealing to the help of another society. After five weeks of intensive work, Waknine stood aside during a public introduction as a Syrian man held the microphone and described the scenes to an assemble crowd in Barcelona. ..."
Brooklyn Street Art
Instagram

Judah Eskender Tafari

"The seventies was the so called ‘golden era’ where reggae flourished with innovation, inspiration and power. Roots music was at its very peak during most of that period, and the activities down at Sir Dodd’s 13 Brentford Road, the address for Jamaica Recording Ltd AKA Studio One, was perhaps not in the same productive scheme as it had been a decade earlier, but the creativity was nonetheless extraordinary. Albums by names like Jennifer Lara, Sugar Minott, Pablove Black, Johnny Osbourne and Freddie McGregor springs to mind, as well as several brilliant 45’s by a plethora of artists. ... The songwriter, Ronald Merrills, known to one and all as Judah Eskender Tafari, was a shadowy figure in the music until the long-serving Small Axe fanzine gave us a more detailed history of the man about twelve years ago. It was a long overdue piece to say the least, but indeed very welcome. ..."
Reggae Vibes
YouTube: "Ta Fa Ri" & Sound Dimension - Danger In Your Eyes + Version, Danger In Your Eyes Riddim Megamix - Revolutionary Brothers Music, Jah Light + version

From the Purveyors of New York’s Best Mozzarella, a New Cafe

The main Di Palo’s shop, on the corner of Grand and Mott Streets, where you can buy Italian cheeses, prosciuttos, salamis, pastas and olive oils, as well as freshly made ricotta and mozzarella.
"With the new Di Palo osteria getting ready to open, there was excitement on Mott Street last week. This is a 21st-century addition to Di Palo’s 109-year-old Italian food shop just around the corner, on Grand Street, and the enoteca (wine store) next to it. At the new place, which will open officially on Monday, you can drink wine, nibble cheese — deep blue Gorgonzola, a creamy ricotta, pecorino studded with fresh peppercorns — or an ephemerally light slice of prosciutto, and there will be events and talks about Italian food and wine. I’ve been coming to Di Palo’s all my life, and I rarely make it out of the store without biting into the mozzarella made there, the milk dripping down my chin. ...  There are no pushcarts on Mott now, but according to Lou Di Palo, who owns Di Palo’s with his sister Marie and brother Sal, the street was jammed with them in 1910, when his great-grandfather Savino Di Palo opened a tiny dairy, where he made ricotta and mozzarella, at 131 Mott. In 1903, Savino fled poverty and oppression in the Lucania region of Italy, where he was a farmer and cheesemaker; when he arrived in New York, he did what he knew. ..."
NY Times
W - Mozzarella
YouTube: How Italy’s Biggest Mozzarella Balls Are Made

Savino Di Palo, the current owners' father, in front of the store on Grand Street in 1948.

The People’s Emergency

"In France, the neon-yellow vests known as gilets jaunes are like proverbial opinions: Everyone has one, or at least every motorist does. In case of a breakdown, drivers are supposed to don these reflective garments and lay a high-visibility 'warning triangle' (also provided in one’s kit de sécurité) on the road in front of their vehicles. When men and women wearing yellow vests began slowing down traffic at hundreds of ronds-points (traffic circles) throughout the countryside last November, and then massing by the thousands on Saturdays in Paris, Bordeaux, and Toulouse, it was hard to dismiss them as a bunch of radical-fringe demonstrators. They were wearing the uniform the government itself had asked good citizens to wear to make themselves visible in an emergency.
 ..."
New Republic (Audio)
W - Yellow vests movement

2018 December: Paris Burning

Kologbo ‎– Africa Is The Future (2017)

"Guitar legend Oghene Kologbo was born in Warri, Nigeria in 1957. His father was the well known highlife musician Joe King Kologbo. When Kologbo was a teenager, he began performing with the revolutionary Afrobeat master Fela Kuti. Kologbo went on to record more than 50 sides with Africa 70. He played the hypnotic tenor guitar lines, but often recorded bass and rhythm guitar too. Kologbo was Fela's personal assistant and 'tape recorder'. That is, it was his job to remember the melodies Fela would sing to him late at night, then teach them to the band at rehearsal the next day. In 1978, after a show at the Berlin Jazz Festival, Kologbo left the band (along with Tony Allen and a few others) and stayed in Berlin. ..."
ParisDJs (Video/Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Don’t Mind Them

Notes from an Exiled Revolutionary

"The writer and revolutionary Victor Serge was one of the few prominent opponents of Stalin to escape the despot’s wrath. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Terror, Serge fled the Soviet Union for France. When the Nazis took Paris, in 1940, he fled to Mexico, where he spent the rest of his days in an exile rife with poverty and grief. In a sense, his notebooks became his new home, a place where he felt comfortable to contemplate everything from World War II to Russian literature, from the aftermath of the Revolution to the beauty of an erupting volcano. A new volume from New York Review Books Classics, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman, presents for the first time in English Serge’s notebooks in their entirety. Below, in a series of entries from 1944, Serge marvels at the brilliance of his daughter’s art critiques, mourns his friends Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Max Jacob, and muses on the darkness of a world at war. ..."
The Paris Review
W - Victor Serge
NYRB: Notebooks 1936–1947 by Victor Serge

Minton's Playhouse

"Minton's Playhouse is a jazz club and bar located on the first floor of the Cecil Hotel at 210 West 118th Street in Harlem and is a registered trademark of Housing and Services, Inc. a New York City nonprofit provider of supportive housing. The door to the actual club itself is at 206 West 118th Street where there is a small plaque. Minton's was founded by tenor saxophonist Henry Minton in 1938. Minton's is famous for its role in the development of modern jazz, also known as bebop, where in its jam sessions in the early 1940s, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Christian, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, pioneered the new music. Minton's thrived for three decades until its decline near the end of the 1960s, and its eventual closing in 1974. After being shuttered for more than 30 years, the newly remodeled club reopened its doors on May 19, 2006, under the name Uptown Lounge at Minton's Playhouse. However, the reopened club was closed again in 2010. Remodeling began again in 2012. ..."
Wikipedia
NY Times: The Harlem Jazz Club Where the Spirit of Billie Holiday Lives On
Minton's Playhouse - About (Video)
YouTube: The History Of Minton's Playhouse

Billie Holiday at Minton’s Playhouse, 1953.

The Sensual Sound Studies of Annea Lockwood

"The 78-year-old performance artist and tape music composer Annea Lockwood grew up at the end of the world, in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she was immersed in the power and interconnectedness of the wild forces of nature. As a young woman, Lockwood traveled to Europe to study classical composition, but ended up falling in with what became known as the Darmstadt School, where she began composing electronic music and experimental pieces. But instead of focusing on the particulars of wires and oscillators, Lockwood’s work would draw out the innate qualities of the natural world and the human experience. Whether in her sound studies of rivers, recordings of conversations or dramatic stunts like burning a piano, Lockwood’s art is about listening deeply to what surrounds us. Recently, the composer reissued Tiger Balm, a sensual sound collage of tiger purrs, breaths, gongs and the drone of airplanes that was influenced by indigenous trance music and set the tone for much of her career. Sophie Weiner spoke to Lockwood about the experiences that formed her sensibility as an artist, her enduring interest in deep listening and what she’s learned in her half-century of composing avant-garde works. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily (Video)
W - Annea Lockwood
Lovely

2017 March: Source: Music of the Avant Garde, 1966-1974

America’s Original Socialist

Pins from Eugene Debs's various presidential campaigns.
"One hundred years ago this month, the American Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, reported to a penitentiary in Moundsville, W.V., to begin a 10-year prison term. Debs had been convicted the previous fall of violating the Espionage Act, which had been enacted shortly after the United States entered World War I with the ostensible aim of punishing citizens who provided aid to the enemy. By the time Debs went to prison, scores of his fellow Socialists had already been imprisoned under the act’s provisions. Approaching his 64th birthday in ill health, depressed and dreading separation from family and friends, Debs did not crave martyrdom. But he knew he had a role to play, one he had freely chosen, and thus remained outwardly defiant. 'Tell my comrades,' Debs declared on beginning his sentence in April 1919, 'that I entered prison doors a flaming revolutionist, my head erect, my spirit untamed and my soul unconquered.' ..."
NY Times
New Yorker: Eugene V. Debs and the Endurance of Socialism
W - Eugene V. Debs

Eugene Debs speaking in Chicago in 1912.

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