U.S. Wins World Cup and Becomes a Champion for Its Time

Megan Rapinoe, center, holds up the World Cup trophy at the end of the tournament.

"LYON, France — The chant was faint at first, bubbling up from the northern stands inside the Stade de Lyon. Gradually it grew louder. Soon it was deafening. 'Equal pay!' it went, over and over, until thousands were joining in, filling the stadium with noise. 'Equal pay! Equal pay!' Few sports teams are asked to carry so much meaning on their shoulders, to represent so many things to so many people, as the United States women’s soccer team. Few athletes are expected to lead on so many fronts at once, to be leaders for equal pay and gay rights and social justice, to serve as the face of both corporations and their customers. Fewer still have ever been so equipped to handle such a burden, so aware of themselves, so comfortable in their own skin, as those American women. Yes, they had acknowledged as the World Cup got underway last month, anything less than a trophy would be a failure. Yes, they were willing to be made symbols of different fights for equality around the world. Yes, they would be as spectacular on the field as they unabashedly insisted they were. ..."

NY Times (Video)
NY Times: Stars and Stripes (and Wins) Forever
NY Times: What’s a World Cup Title Worth? For U.S. Women, Six Figures and Counting
NY Times: U.S. Wins Record Fourth World Cup Title (Video)
NY Times: With No Argument on Substance, Critics Take Aim at U.S.’s Style
NY Times: Opinion - The Women’s World Cup Team Is the Most American Thing Out There
YouTube: USA v Netherlands - FIFA Women’s World Cup France 2019™ - THE FINAL

Rapinoe receives congratulations from FIFA President Gianni Infantino and French President Emmanuel Macron after the match.

2019 June: Women's World Cup: Record-breaking feats, empty seats -- the story so far

Mapping the Whitney Biennial

"The first Whitney Annual in 1932 was transgressive. The museum was a one-year-old fledgling, set in a rowhouse on West Eighth Street. Its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was a collector and heiress, but also a serious sculptor. Invited artists chose what work they showed. In 1973, the exhibition became a Biennial, and its history is the history of American modern and contemporary art. Or, at least one version of that history: one centered in New York City, one heavily white and male. That is no longer the case. This year, a majority of the show’s artists are women, and they are racially and ethnically diverse. New York, however, remains home to nearly half of them. Until 1975, the exhibition catalogs listed the addresses of the artists who were included each year. Mapping these locations tells a story of influence and power — but also one of friendships and creative communities, of housing prices and economic change, of landscape and light. Here are some of its facets. ..."
NY Times

Dave Bartholomew - Shrimp And Gumbo/Ah Cubanas (1955)

"In conjunction with London's Jukebox Jam club night, Jazzman brings you regular doses of the wildest, rawest original rhythm and blues of the '50s and early '60s on DJ-friendly collectable 45 rpm format. Linked by a sequential catalog numbering system, each release will also boast a unique label design and title. For Jukebox Jam number four, Dave Bartholomew takes center stage with two solo sides from his prolific spell with Imperial Records, both with some distinctly Latin/Caribbean seasoning, hence the naming of this label, Mambo. You'd be hard-pressed to find a record which sounds more 'N'Awlins' than 'Shrimp And Gumbo,' a raucous percussion-heavy party-starter perfect for any Creole carnival. The flip-side is an earlier recording from Dave, and again one which could only have come from NOLA. The band pull off a sound so authentic, that you'd imagine it must surely be Cuban players responsible. All-in-all, a nice package then, two bags of mambo-Mardi Gras gris-gris sure to keep you safe from all manner of Voodoo ill-will."
Forced Exposure
W - Dave Bartholomew
NY Times: Dave Bartholomew, Mainstay of New Orleans R&B, Dies at 100
Discogs
YouTube: Shrimp and Gumbo, Ah Cubanas, Who Drank My Beer While I Was In The Rear, Carnival Day, JUMP CHILDREN

2019 Tour de France

Wikipedia - "The 2019 Tour de France is the 106th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's three grand tours. The start of the 2019 Tour (known as the Grand Départ) was in Brussels in honour of the 50th anniversary of the first Tour de France win of Eddy Merckx.^[1] It was the second time the Grand Depart has taken place in Brussels and is the fifth Belgian Grand Depart. The Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) presented the Grand Depart in a special conference in January 2018.^[2] The opening stage will visit Charleroi and loop back to Brussels, to connect the regions of Flanders and Wallonia in a stage. 176 riders are on the startlist to Tour de France 2019. The 100th anniversary of the yellow jersey will be celebrated on 19 July. Throughout the race, an individual jersey design will be issued for each day's race leader. ... 2018 Tour winner Geraint Thomas (Team Ineos) is expected to return to defend his title. After celebrating his victory, he was overweight at the start of the 2019 season. First signs of improving form came with a third-place finish at the Tour de Romandie. He then started the Tour de Suisse, but a crash on stage 4 saw him abandon the race and require recovery time. This put doubt in his ability to perform at the Tour. ..."
Wikipedia
W - Mountains classification in the Tour de France
Guardian: Tour de France 2019 (Video)
Le Tour (Video)
Telegraph (Video)
steephill (Video)
Bicycling (Video)
5 Ways the 2019 Tour de France Could Surprise the Hell Out of Us
YouTube: Route in 3D - Tour de France 2019

2008 July: Tour de France 2008, 2009 July: Tour de France 2009, 2010 July: Tour de France 2010,  2011 July: Tour de France 2011, 2012 July: 2012 Tour de France, 2015 July: 2015 Tour de France, 2015 July: Tour de France 2015: Team Time Trial Win Bolsters American’s Shot at Podium, 2015 July: Tour de France: Chris Froome completes historic British win, 2016 July: 2016 Tour de France, 2017 July: 2017 Tour de France, 2018 May: 2018 Giro d'Italia, 2019 July: 2018 Tour de France

The Empire is Crumbling

"Rails, waterways, pipes, bridges, airports, electricity, even the internet – America is falling apart."
The Nib
America's Infrastructure Is Slowly Falling Apart
"America is literally falling apart around us. Roads, built decades ago, are littered with potholes from carrying ten times the number of cars they were designed to carry. Crumbling Cold War–era gas pipes are exploding. One in nine of the country's bridges is structurally deficient. And some dam or levee is always just one rainstorm away from wiping out a neighborhood. ..."
VICE
Falling apart: America's neglected infrastructure
"... There are a lot of people in the United States right now who think the country is falling apart, and at least in one respect they're correct. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, our airports are out of date and the vast majority of our seaports are in danger of becoming obsolete. All the result of decades of neglect. None of this is really in dispute. Business leaders, labor unions, governors, mayors, congressmen and presidents have complained about a lack of funding for years, but aside from a one time cash infusion from the stimulus program, nothing much has changed. ..."
CBS - Falling apart: America's neglected infrastructure (Video)

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)

In England (Eugene Manet on the Isle of Wight)
"A leading Impressionist figure, Berthe Morisot remains to this day less well-known than her friends Monet, Degas and Renoir. Yet she was immediately recognised as one of the group’s most innovative artists. The exhibition traces the exceptional career of a painter who, at odds with the practices on her time and her circle, became a key figure of the Parisian avant-garde movement in the late 1860s up until her untimely death in 1895. Painting from a model allowed Berthe Morisot to explore several themes of modern life, such as the private life of the bourgeoisie, the popularity of holiday resorts and gardens, and the importance of fashion and women’s domestic work, while blurring the borders between the interior and exterior, the private and the public, the finished and the unfinished. It was her belief that painting should endeavour to 'capture something that passes'. ..."
Musée d'Orsay (Video)
W - Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot Brought a Radically Feminine Perspective to Impressionism
Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist
YouTube: Berthe Morisot: Inventing Impressionism

La Chasse aux Papillons. 1874.

Putumayo Presents: Brasileiro (1999)

"... A collection of Brazilian pop that spans 1974-1999, Brasileiro isn't as much of a musical roller coaster as some might expect from Putumayo -- you would have expected the collection to aim for maximum diversity and jump from forro, lambada and tropicalismo to bossa nova and serteneja before spotlighting a rap group from Bahia. But while Brasileiro isn't as far-reaching as it could have been, it's enjoyable and satisfying. Anyone who's seriously into Brazilian pop should be familiar with Beth Carvalho, João Bosco, Jorge Ben, Chico Buarque, and the late Clara Nunes, but Putumayo also turns its attention to some artists who weren't huge names in Brazil when the compilation came out, including Zeca Baleiro, Chico César (whose 'Mama Africa' combines Afro-Brazilian music with reggae) and Rosa Passos, who embraces the Portuguese lyrics to the Antonio Carlos Jobim standard, 'Waters of March.'"
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs
YouTube: Brasileiro 45:05

Bookchin’s Revolutionary Program

"The lifelong project of Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was to try to perpetuate the centuries-old revolutionary socialist tradition by renovating it for the current era. Confronted with the failure of Marxism after World War II, many, perhaps most radical socialists of his generation abandoned the left. But Bookchin refused to give up on the aim of replacing capitalism and the nation state with a rational, ecological libertarian communist society, based on humane and cooperative social relations. Rather than abandon those ideas, he sought to rethink revolution. During the 1950s he concluded that the new revolutionary arena would be not the factory but the city; that the new revolutionary agent would be not the industrial worker but the citizen; that the basic institution of the new society must be, not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the citizens’ assembly in a face-to-face democracy; and that the limits of capitalism were ecological. ..."
ROAR

2014 September: Anarchism in America (1983), 2015 August: The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders, 2016 October: Why Bernie Was Right, 2015 October: The Ecology of Freedom (1982), 2016 July: Murray Bookchin’s New Life, 2017 January: Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model - Eleanor Finley, 2017 February: Socialism’s Return, 2017 April: The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 (1977).
2016 February: The Feminist, Democratic Leftists Our Military Is Obliterating - Debbie Bookchin, 2016 May: Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn, 2016 July: How Turkey Came to This, 2017 March: As repression deepens, Turkish artists and intellectuals fear the worst, 2017 July: mRadical Municipalism: The Future We Deserve, 2018 May: Bookchin: living legacy of an American revolutionary, 2018 July: How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy - Debbie Bookchin

Counter Intelligence: Atlanta

Wax N Facts
"... Ella Guru - If a record shop named after a classic Captain Beefheart track isn’t indicative of a music first mindset, what is? Don Radcliffe readily concedes that the Trout Mask Replica-inspired Ella Guru may not be the most practical name for a record store. But conventional marketing means little for this intimate 400-square foot vinyl destination in northern DeKalb County. Ella Guru is the only record store in the greater Atlanta area devoted 100% exclusively to used wax. And that in itself is enough to make EG a haven not only for record shoppers but a convenient face-to-face meeting spot for friends wanting to share music tips and recommendations. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily

Criminal Records

Redux: Sulfurous Coils of Red and Green

"This week at The Paris Review, we’re celebrating the Fourth of July early. Read Harry Mathews’s Art of Fiction interview, as well as Rachel Kushner’s short story 'Blanks' and George Bradley’s poem 'The 4th of July, and.' If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. ..."
The Paris Review

Harry Mathews

Bertrand Bonello - Nocturama (2016)

"Bertrand Bonello’s 'Nocturama' is another August heist movie, to place alongside Josh and Benny Safdie’s 'Good Time' and Steven Soderbergh’s 'Logan Lucky.' (It came out in France last year and was released here on August 11th.) Of the three films, 'Nocturama' is both the most and the least political. The criminal scheme on which it’s centered is not about loot but about terrorism: nine young people in the Paris region plot a coördinated series of terrorist attacks, which include a point-blank murder and a quartet of nearly simultaneous bombings, including at busy sites, one of which—the Ministry of the Interior—is an expressly political venue. Yet despite the drama about attacks of a political nature on political targets, Bonello filters politics out of the film: the plotters have no explicit program, no stated demands, no debated or declared ideology, not even any particular expressed complaints about the way of the world or the situation in France. ..."
New Yorker: The Ideological Mad Libs of “Nocturama” By Richard Brody
Grasshopper Film
NY Times: In ‘Nocturama,’ Bored, Beautiful Terrorists With a Taste for Luxury Brands by A.O. Scott
W - Nocturama
YouTube: NOCTURAMA Trailer | Festival 2016

The West Coast Jazz Revival - Ted Gioia

Trumpeter Shorty Rogers and drummer Shelly Manne joined many other jazz musicians in relocating to the West Coast in the 1950s.
"Every 50 years or so, California makes a claim for jazz preeminence—and then loses its way. Will it work out better this time? Don’t believe anyone who tells you that jazz originated on the West Coast. It’s just the word for jazz that started out in California. But it could have been so much more. The term first appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1912, when a baseball pitcher bragged about his 'jazz ball'—so wobbly that no one could hit it. ... Before long, 'jazz' was linked to anything different, exciting, or dynamic. ... But California might have taken over the music, too, and set itself up as a home base for the first generation of jazz performers. The musicians were willing, and, for a while, it looked as though it would happen. That was the first wave of West Coast jazz. By my measure, there have been two subsequent waves—extraordinary moments when California stepped to the forefront of the genre and seemed ready to assert itself as the creative center and trendsetter in the music. The first two waves crested and ended in failure. The third wave is happening now. ..."
City Journal
W - West Coast jazz
NPR - West Coast Cool: The Jazz Sound Of '50s California (Audio)

Emmylou Harris and The Band - Evangeline (1976)

"... So begins the tale of Evangeline. This was Robbie Robertson’s swan song as writer for The Band. He was still finishing it during Thanksgiving of 1976 as his old bandmates, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and Richard Manuel gathered together one final time in San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. Standing in front of the Opera set of La Traviata ~ The Fallen Woman the men took their places in front of 5,000 turkey fed folks and, with a few friends, played their hearts out. They left them where they lay. Evangeline didn’t find it’s home that night amongst the rock n rollers who filled the stage. It would be later in the following year as Robertson was mixing the live recording of The Last Waltz when someone remembered they had invited a young country singer to perform with them that past Thanksgiving, but she hadn’t been able to make it*. The song Emmylou Harris was suppose to sing was Evangeline and when she finally did sing it, standing next to Rick Danko, it finally found its way home. ..."
The Real Mr. Heartache (Audio)
How Emmylou Harris and The Band transformed “Evangeline”, Robbie Robertson’s Last Waltz gem, into an instant southern classic
Genius (Audio)
YouTube: Evangeline-The Last Waltz


2009 July: The Band, 2011 June: Music from Big Pink, 2011 September: The Last Waltz, 2012 December: King Harvest 2012 January: Rare Concert Footage of The Band, 1970, 2015 January: Stage Fright (1970), 2015 October: The Band (1969), 2015 December: The Band With The Hawks - The Silver Dome 1989, 2016 April: Don’t Do It (1976), 2016 August: Rock of Ages (1972)

What Trump Did in Osaka Was Worse Than Lying

A papier-mâché float made for a parade in Germany in February
"President Donald Trump’s penchant for out-and-out deception—lies, in common parlance, and as more and more observers are willing to label them—has meant that another of his tendencies has been eclipsed: the tendency to bluff blithely and obviously falsely. During his trip to Asia over the past few days, however, Trump has made that tendency unavoidable, offering blusteringly confident answers to questions on topics he clearly knows nothing about. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt offers an earthy, useful description of this mode of Trump speech in his essay On Bullshit: 'He is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.' ..."
The Atlantic

Be Known Ancient/Future/Music - Ethnic Heritage Ensemble (2019)

"Percussionist and composer Kahil El’Zabar may not be as well known as his AACM forebears Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but his contribution to the continuum of black music has been huge. His two main groups, the Ritual Trio and the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, create a bridge between jazz, the blues, and African rhythms and musical practices. He’s also collaborated extensively with David Murray, and worked with Pharoah Sanders and the late violinist Billy Bang. The EHE included trombonist Joseph Bowie (brother of the Art Ensemble’s trumpeter, Lester Bowie, and founder of Defunkt) for many years, alongside saxophonist Ernest Dawkins; about ten years ago, trumpeter Corey Wilkes—who also plays with the Art Ensemble of Chicago—replaced Bowie. On this album, Dawkins is gone, and baritone saxophonist Alex Harding is in his place, and cellist Ian Maksin has joined the group, expanding it to a quartet. ..."
bandcamp (Audio)
mixcloud (Audio)
amazon
YouTube: ETHNIC HERITAGE ENSEMBLE: BE KNOWN ANCIENT / FUTURE / MUSIC (Live)
YouTube: Be Known Ancient / Future / Music (Full Alb)

A Bronx Tale - Chazz Palminteri (1993)

"A Bronx Tale is a 1993 American crime drama film adapted from Chazz Palminteri's 1989 play of the same name. It tells the coming of age story of an Italian-American boy, Calogero Anello, who, after encountering a local Mafia boss, is torn between the temptations of organized crime, racism in his community, and the values of his honest, hardworking father. The Broadway production was converted to film with limited changes, and starred Palminteri and Robert De Niro. ... In 1960, Lorenzo Anello lives in Belmont, an Italian-American neighborhood in The Bronx, with his wife Rosina and his 9-year-old son Calogero, who is fascinated by the local mobsters led by Sonny LoSpecchio. One day, Calogero witnesses a murder committed by Sonny in defense of an assaulted friend in his neighborhood. When Calogero chooses to keep quiet when questioned by NYPD detectives, Sonny takes a liking to him and gives him the nickname 'C'. Sonny's men offer Lorenzo a better paying job, but Lorenzo, preferring a law-abiding life as an MTA bus driver, politely declines. ..."
Wikipedia
11 Surprising Facts About A Bronx Tale (Video)
Roger Ebert
amazon
YouTube: A Bronx Tale - Trailer, One of the best scenes ever made?

Jazz On Film: French New Wave 1957-62

"The French New Wave burst onto world movie screens during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was launched by a new, restless post-WWII generation in their teens and twenties who wanted to see a renewal in all the arts and culture. Their startling production tactics quickly caught on beyond France’s boundaries. These youthful movies were not just about young people, they were also told with fresh new techniques, some of which seemed too radical and untested to entrenched critics. The core of young writer-directors, including François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard in Paris, began as brash young film critics in Cahiers du Cinéma, but they quickly inspired a new generation of actors, writers, and directors throughout Europe and the world. The New Wave was a youthful reaction against mainstream culture and its traditional approaches to storytelling. These new filmmakers wanted their movies to speak to young audiences the world over, and they themselves were likewise influenced by international trends, including jazz. ..."
moochin about
Jazz On Film Records
amazon
bandcamp: JAZZ ON FILM...THE NEW WAVE (Audio)

Manet and Modern Beauty

"With her flowery spring ensemble, her pert profile, and bright, leafy backdrop, Jeanne—also known as Spring—is a popular favorite at the Getty. This year we’re celebrating Jeanne and her maker, the great painter of modern Paris Édouard Manet, with the first exhibition ever devoted to the last years of his short life. Manet and Modern Beauty, co-organized by the Getty and the Art Institute of Chicago, opens on May 26 in Chicago and comes to Los Angeles on October 8. When she made her debut at the Paris Salon in 1882, Jeanne marked a high point in Manet’s career. Best remembered for ambitious, provocative pictures painted in the early 1860s (think Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia), he had evolved in a very different direction some twenty years later. ..."
Getty: Exhibition Manet and Modern Beauty Explores the Artist’s Last Years
Getty: Manet and Modern Beauty: The Artist’s Last Years

The House at Rueil, 1882

2011 May: Manet, the Man who Invented Modernity, 2013 April: Manet: Portraying Life

Chinese home run

1954: Dusty Rhodes, three-run home run at the Polo Grounds, New York Giants
"In baseball, a Chinese home run, also a Chinese homer, Harlem home run, or Pekinese poke, is a derogatory and archaic term for a hit that just barely clears the outfield fence at its closest distance to home plate. It is essentially the shortest home run possible in the ballpark in question, particularly if the park has an atypically short fence to begin with. The term was most commonly used in reference to home runs hit along the right field foul line at the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants, where that distance was short even by contemporary standards. ... Why these home runs were called 'Chinese' is not definitely known, but it is believed to have reflected an early 20th-century perception that Chinese immigrants to the United States did the menial labor they were consigned to with a bare minimum of adequacy, and were content with minimal reward for it. ..."
Wikipedia
Kansas City Royals Announcers Should Re-Think Using This Derogatory Phrase
NY Times - 'CHINESE HOMER': HOW IT ALL BEGAN; Cartoonist Tad Credited as Coiner of Term -- Oriental Food Offered to Rhodes (Oct. 1, 1954)
SABR - September 29, 1954: Willie Mays makes The Catch; Dusty Rhodes homer wins Game One

Mel Ott, on a 1933 baseball card

How Low Can You Go? Journey to the Bottom of the Sky

Star clusters M7 and M6 in Scorpius never get far above my local horizon — 8° and 11° respectively — but they're wonderful sights all the same.
"When it comes to deep sky, I'll do almost anything. Stand on a teetering ladder, travel 100 miles to dark skies, set up the scope at the edge of a mosquito-infested bog, or sit in the dirt to glimpse an impossibly low planetary nebula. One time I tried to (and succeeded in) observing NGC 3132, the bright 'Eight-Burst' planetary nebula in Vela. At declination –40° 26′, it stood just 2.5° above my southern horizon. Atmospheric extinction at that altitude dimmed it nearly four magnitudes, from 10 to 14. Sure, it was faint, but I could clearly make out its shape in my 11-inch scope. Are you a bottom-feeder, too? Some of the best deep-sky objects lurk in the bellies of constellations that scud across the southern sky. Naturally, we want to observe any object when it's high in the sky and least obscured, but for objects with southerly declinations, that luxury requires travel. Under the right conditions — haze-free skies and good seeing — you can see almost anything your latitude allows. ..."
Sky & Telescope

This map highlights 11 delightful objects with southerly declinations visible from the northern U.S., southern Canada, central Europe, and points south. Declinations are labeled at left and stars are shown to magnitude 8. The NGC prefixes are omitted to avoid clutter. The map is drawn for 11 p.m. local time in late June, facing south. Objects on the map that I couldn't see but may be visible to you are lettered in gray. Click to enlarge.

Don’t Stop: The Sopranos ends

"A bell hangs above the door of Holsten’s ice cream parlour in New Jersey, and every time the door opens, the bell rings. But we’ll get to that. First, we have to go back to 1963, and an episode of The Twilight Zone called 'The Bard.' The show’s creator, Rod Serling, one of the greatest talents television has ever known, wrote it himself, probably as a joke, but, equally, probably not. It’s about a hack writer struggling to come up with a script for a TV pilot. ... Except that, when Tony Soprano, face filling the screen like a dead moon in the sleeping close-up that has become the programme’s signature shot, snorts himself awake at the start of the final episode of The Sopranos to remember that his terminal little war with Phil Leotardo is still going on, and that he’s stilled holed up with what’s left of his crew in an anonymous safe house, rifle by his bedside, he discovers that episode flickering on the TV as he wanders downstairs. ..."
Damien Love
This Magic Moment
Vanity Fair - The Sopranos: Everything David Chase Has Said About That Notorious Ending
YouTube: The Sopranos Ending HD, The Sopranos: Ending Explained

2011 June: The Sopranos, 2012 March: The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos, 2013 June: James Gandolfini, 2015 April: David Chase Reveals the Philosophical Meaning of The Soprano’s Final Scene, 2018 September: Spaccanapoli - Vesuvio (As featured in The Sopranos), 2019 January: Television Learned the Wrong Lessons From The Sopranos

Where Have All the Diners Gone?

"On a downtown street corner saturated with the shadowy azures of vacant storefronts, a late-night diner hosts three nocturnal customers. Theirs is a peculiar and disjointed congregation without narrative or context, but the iconic tableau, titled Nighthawks (1942) and painted by American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967), has endured as a classic image of World War II-era New York City. In a way, Hopper’s portrayal is timeless: three-quarters of a century later, diners are still hosting night owls. But these venues are vanishing – a 2015 Crain’s article informed by the New York City department of health reported that diners had seen a 60 percent decline in the previous 25 years – due to rising rents and discerning millennial palates vetoing greasy-spoon fare. ..."
The Culture Trip

Redemption Songs

"Chinese Jamaican music producers helped turn reggae into a global sensation—one that would eventually reach all the way to the country their ancestors had left behind.
Words and illustrations by Krish Raghav
topic
W - Redemption Songs
Genius (Audio)
YouTube: Bob Marley - Redemption Song Live In Dortmund, Germany

Dub Daze: Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida

"'A FACT OF ANY SUCCESSFUL POP RECORD,' Brian Eno argued in Artforum’s summer issue in 1986, 'is that its sound is more of a characteristic than its melody or chord structure or anything else.' The advent of recording technology and synthesizers had by that time already exponentially broadened composers’ sonic palettes, and musical interest was no longer merely in melody, serialization, or polyphony, but in 'constantly dealing with new textures.' Over the last three decades, composer, visual artist, and turntablist extraordinaire Marina Rosenfeld has built up a library of dubplates—those rare, prized aluminum rounds coated in laquer and incised with a lathe used as test pressings off of which vinyl for mass-distribution is copied—that store the component parts of her distinct sonic landscapes: tinkling pianos, female voices, sine waves, snaps, crackles, and pops. ... This past May, Rosenfeld’s turntables met experimental musician Ben Vida’s modular synthesizer for a bout of improvisation at Fridman Gallery to celebrate the release of their collaborative record Feel Anything (2019). ..."
ARTFORUM
After 9 Evenings: Marina Rosenfeld & Ben Vida (Video)
Marina Rosenfeld & Ben Vida - Feel Anything (Audio)
Marina Rosenfeld , Ben Vida
YouTube: Marina ROSENFELD & Ben VIDA_PRESENCES électronique 2018

The Wonderful World of the White Horse

"West Village I: The Wonderful World of the White Horse - June 22, 1961. The young man fresh out of Dartmouth College left the $8-a-week room he’d just moved into on Greenwich Street and ventured into the oppressively muggy late afternoon. Although a newcomer to the West Village in that summer of 1951, he made tracks to the White Horse Tavern like an old-timer. People at Dartmouth had told him about the 'The Horse.' Traditional watering-place for writers, longshoremen, Bohemians, pub crawlers, socialists, and just-plain-drunks, it was the kind of scene he’d dreamed of. 'Dartmouth' looked around at the West Village as he marched along, taking in the grimy streets, the weary brownstones, and tenements, the massive brick warehouses. There was something backwaterish about the neighborhood, tired. ..."
Voice
Good-bye to the White Horse Tavern, a Flawlessly Imperfect Pub

2014 December: White Horse Tavern

An Introduction to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Radical Nigerian Bandleader, Political Hero, and Creator of Afrobeat

"I cannot write about Nigerian bandleader, saxophonist, and founder of the Afrobeat sound, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, with any degree of objectivity, whatever that might mean. Because hearing him counts as one of the greatest musical eye-openers of my life: a feeling of pure elation that still has not gone away. It was not an original discovery by any means. Millions of people could say the same, and far more of those people are African fans with a much better sense of Fela’s mission. In the U.S., the playfully-delivered but fervent urgency of his activist lyricism requires footnotes. Afrobeat fandom in many countries does not have to personally reckon with the history from which Fela and his band emerged—a Nigeria wracked in the 60s by a military coup, civil war, and rule by a succession of military juntas. Fela (for whom the first name never seems too familiar, so enveloping was his presence on stage and record) created the conditions for a new style of African music to emerge, an earth-shattering fusion of jazz, funk, psych rock, high life from Ghana, salsa, and black power, anti-colonial, and anti-corruption politics. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
W - Afrobeat

This Is His Music

"The jazz world came out last week to mourn the loss of Ornette Coleman, the  saxophonist, band leader, and composer, who died on Thursday at the age of 85. Coleman was lauded as a rule-breaker and visionary who, despite initially hostile reactions from many of his peers, moved jazz past bebop conventions and into the 'free' explorations of the 1960s and beyond. Without Coleman, John Coltrane’s final years might have sounded very different, as would Miles Davis’ electric period, and the entire free-improvisation world down to today. ... What helped make Coleman more broadly significant is that his revolution radiated beyond the boundaries of jazz to young seekers through the decades in every musical form. Musicians are widely aware of this, as reflected in the list of performers at a tribute concert in Brooklyn in 2014 that would turn out to be his last performance, who included Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Nels Cline of Wilco, members of Morocco’s Master Musicians of Jajouka, and even Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But non­–jazz listeners tend to be less cognizant of it. ..."
Slate (Video)

The Minutemen