What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural

The Basque town of Guernica after its devastation by German bombs in 1937.
"What emotion did you feel the first time you saw Picasso's Guernica? Perhaps curiosity or fascination, and maybe even surprise, given how different the painting looks from everything else in a museum or an art-history textbook. There was almost certainly a dash of confusion as well, but you probably didn't feel the kind of shock you would have if you had learned what many of its early viewers did. Just what gave Guernica its early impact is the central question of the animated TED-Ed video above, written by humanities scholar Iseult Gillespie. 'How can we make sense of this overwhelming image,' asks its narrator, 'and what exactly makes it a masterpiece of anti-war art?' ..."
Open Culture (Video)
salon - Picasso's weapon against fascism: Why "Guernica" is the greatest of all war paintings
Guardian: Eighty years on, Spain may at last be able to confront the ghosts of civil war

Picasso, Guernica, 1937

2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 2011 August: Down and Out in Paris and London, 2012 March: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), 2012 June: "The Spanish Earth", Written and Narrated by Ernest Hemingway, 2013 January: The Real George Orwell, 2015 August: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 2016 September: George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia (1938), 2017 January: Guernica (2016)

Grant Phabao Afrofunk Arkestra - Grant Phabao Afrofunk Arkestra (2018)

"Access to groovy, funkin', rockin', psychedelic, revolutionary (etc.) African music as we've grown to like it at Paris DJs was not for everyone before the internet age. For Paris DJs co-founder Loik, it began in the early 80s when he met with a former Fela Kuti horn player, who introduced him to Afrobeat. When Loik arrived at Radio Nova in 1986 (he was radio programmer there between 1987 and 1997), he then discovered marvels of African Music (other than Fela), through the radio's vast record collection, which soon led to the word-famous 'La Sono Mondiale' concept. At the same time, Grant Phabao, in his late teens, discovered Congolese music through friends from Zaire. ..."
Paris DJ's (Audio)
Discogs

Les Pieds-Noirs: Algeria’s Forgotten Footballers

"They were war criminals, Nobel Prize laureates and World Cup record-setters. History often shuns them into that dark corner where it tends to stash the unspeakable atrocities too tender for recollection. They were les Pieds-Noirs. The word Pied-Noir literally translates as 'black foot', and it refers to North African settlers of French origin. The vast majority of these settlers ended up in Algeria. In fact, when the Franco-Algerian war began in 1954, 1 million of Algeria’s 9 million inhabitants were Pieds-Noirs. But in the span of a few years, the heart of their identity was arrested by a hideous infarction – decolonization. ... Stuck in a peculiar identity limbo, les pieds-noirs forged their own identity and subsequently stamped a significant impression on footballing folklore. ... The five champions of each league would then participate in an ancient version of the Champions League called the North African Cup. Part One of our series homes in on a special goalkeeper in the league in Algiers: Albert Camus. ..."
French Football Weekly
Africa is a Country - Algerian history as graphic novel: “The past flows into the future”
W - Pied-Noir

Map of French Algeria

2011 October: Albert Camus on Nihilism, 2014 November: Albert Camus: Soccer Goalie, 2015 May: LISTEN: New Cave And Ellis Soundtrack, 2016 April: Anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche, 2016 April: Algerian Chronicles (2013), 2017 November: The Stranger (1942), 2018 July: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960)

Can Instagram and Egg Creams Save the Last Punk Rock Bodega?

The (possible) birthplace of the egg cream, which became Gems Spa in the 1950s, has long been a magnet for bohemian East Villagers, as above in 1969.
"Gem Spa had been open for only 40 minutes before the first tour group of the day came by. It was early on a Saturday, and a potbellied guy with bleached blonde hair and a goatee who calls himself Bobby Pinn was lecturing to a devastatingly bored preteen and four adults who did not seem to know what he was talking about. He was explaining the concept of an egg cream — the quintessential New York fountain drink that some people say was invented at this location. 'It’s very refreshing,' he said. 'Almost like a Yoo-Hoo.' Then Mr. Pinn flipped through a laminated book to show the tourists a black-and-white photo of the New York Dolls posing in front of Gem Spa’s iconic signage before shifting gears. ..."
NY Times

The making of an egg cream.

2015 December: Gem Spa

Babylon - Franco Rosso (1980)

"'Babylon' is a 39-year-old nugget of a movie about young British Jamaicans and their itinerant reggae scene built around sound systems, freestyling and parties with rich, low lighting. The film is making its American debut on Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and it’s got an episodic vividness and blanket-load of warmth, but also a harsh view of day-to-day life for black people in South London — on its streets, in its public housing, at its video arcades. If the police aren’t trying to shake down and beat up these guys, some fed-up white lady has come to their chill spot to complain (not unreasonably) that their music is too loud by telling them (unreasonably) to go back to their country and calling them 'jungle bunnies.' The movie is more interested in what feels real than what seems right. What was real, when the movie opened in Britain in November 1980, was the poverty and racism its characters dealt with. Apparently, it was too real. ..."
NY Times - ‘Babylon’ Review: A Clear View of Black Londoners When Few Films Saw Them (Video)
Rolling Stone - ‘Babylon’ Rising: The Resurrection of a Controversial U.K. Reggae Movie (Video)
W - Babylon (film)
YouTube: BABYLON • Official Trailer, Babylon - Franco Rosso - Trailer

Make your own Joe Brainard collage (out of fragments he chose but never used)

"Have you ever looked at a collage by an artist like Picasso or Joseph Cornell, Kurt Schwitters or Joe Brainard, and felt a powerful urge to immediately go make a collage yourself?  Perhaps there’s something about the tactile, playful, anyone-can-do-it premise of collage (unlike, say, oil painting) that invites us to try it ourselves. Fortunately now you can, thanks to a delightful new interactive website called 'Make Your Own Brainard,' created by the scholar Rona Cran (an expert on, among other things, collage in twentieth-century literature and art). Not only does the site enable you to design your own collage, but rather miraculously, you can create one using actual materials that Brainard himself selected, cut out, but never used. ..."
Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets
Joe Brainard and the New York School: Material Texts and Digital Cultures

2008 February: Joe Brainard, 2010 November: I Remember, 2011 October: A State of the Flowers Report, 2011 November: Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, 2012 March: Bolinas Journal, 2012 September: I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard by Matt Wolf (2012), 2014 November: Tibor de Nagy Gallery

Fearless and Well-Fed, New York City's Red-Tailed Hawks Are Flourishing

The number of known Red-tailed Hawk nests in Manhattan has more than doubled in the past six years. The birds usually stick to trees, but will sometimes lay claim to A/C units, fire escapes, and balconies.
"On a mellow evening this past June, a very unexpected guest was entertaining Mateo Suarez while he grilled chicken on his balcony in Flatbush, Brooklyn. His visitor didn’t say anything—it just stared at Suarez with unblinking, yellow eyes and gripped the rail with its sharp talons. The stranger was a Red-tailed Hawk, and it hung out with Suarez as he cooked for the better part of an hour. ... A Brooklyn balcony is an unexpected place for a hawk to turn up—but it's far from the weirdest encounter New Yorkers have had with the birds. In the past few years, the number of close encounters with the birds of prey in New York City seems to have spiked. There was the hawk that got stuck in the window on the Upper East Side, and then the dazed individual sitting on a Midtown street during rush hour. ..."
Audubon
Audubon: Pale Male Is a Legend—But Is He Still Alive?
W - Pale Male

Pale Male in Central Park circa 2011. Or was it?

Lee Fields & The Expressions

"Soul music pours out of Lee Fields, as free and unstinting as God’s love. It has ever since the 1960s, when he was a teenager in North Carolina sweating it out on juke joint stages, crumpled dollars hailing at his feet. It continues now that the living legend is in his late sixties, ushering in the most successful and fruitful period of his career. Like any living legend worth their salt, Fields has suffered despair, obscurity, defeat. Although he now tours stages around the world, and although he helped fellow soul legends like Sharon Jones (who was once Fields’ backup singer) and Charles Bradley (whom Fields took on his first tour) get their first break, he did not always have this position. There were years—they were known as 'the 1980s'—when Fields nearly gave up. His success these days, then has a bittersweet tinge: His dear friends Bradley and Jones have both passed, leaving Fields to outlive them and carry their legacy forth. ..."
Big Crown
W - Lee Fields
YouTube: Wish You Were Here, Faithful Man (Yours Truly Session), You're The Kind Of Girl, Don't Leave me this way | A Take Away Show
YouTube: Full Performance (Live on KEXP) 34:26, "Special Night" (Full Album Stream) 39:14, Full Performance (Live at The Dolhuis - 36 minutes) 36:36

Dissent

"Dissent is a quarterly magazine of politics and ideas. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A. Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin, Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and many others. ..."
Dissent

Synchro Sound System & Power - Nigeria Fuji Machine

"‘Synchro Sound System & Power’ features the music of Nigeria Fuji Machine, which includes some of Nigeria's finest ‘Fuji’ master drummers and singers, and is newly recorded by Soul Jazz Records in Lagos. Fuji is the heavily percussive and improvisational style of Nigerian popular music, at once modern and yet deeply rooted in the traditional Islamic Yoruba culture of Nigeria. Here on this album Nigeria Fuji Machine’s striking and powerful lead vocalist Taofik Yemi Fagbenro soars above a wild and energetic backdrop of polyrhythms played on traditional talking drums, trap drums, electronic and street percussion to create a powerful wall of intense sound. ..."
Soul Jazz Records (Audio)
Nigerian Fuji drum music showcased in new Soul Jazz album (Audio)
YouTube: Orin Gidi, Ilu

Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South

Blocks and Strips Quilt (detail), 2003, by Irene Williams
"Discover an extraordinary collection of textile art, sculpture, and painting acquired from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. With remarkable inventiveness and skill, generations of quilters from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, have created arresting compositions of color and form, made from worn-out clothes and other repurposed fabrics. Exhibited with them are provocative mixed-media paintings and found-object sculptures by Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, and others whose subjects and materials echo with the painful history of the American South and the conditions of life for many who live there. ..."
Philadelphia Museum of Art
On View: ‘Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South’ at Philadelphia Museum of Art
6abc Loves the Arts: 'Souls Grown Deep' puts African American art on display (Video)

Installation view of “Souls Grown Deep: Artists of the African American South” at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Amid Growing Soccer Wealth Gap, Is 92 Teams Too Many?

Bury F.C. faced a Friday deadline to show it could meet its financial obligations.
"Bury is one of those places that is easily lost. It is — or it was, anyway — a small English town just a little north of Manchester, famous for its market and its mills. The bigger city’s relentless crawl has long since swallowed up Bury, though, claiming first its borders and increasingly its identity in a slow-motion land grab. There is no discernible line anymore where Bury begins and Manchester finishes. It is on the city’s tram system. It does not have a separate ZIP code — it comes under Bolton’s — and, like Bolton, it is no longer a town in Lancashire, but a part of Greater Manchester. Officially, at least; that is not how the people who live there, the people who have always lived there, see it. Soccer matters in the places like these, the places that can feel forgotten. ..."
NY Times - Rory Smith

Rosanne Cash - Everyone But Me

"... But it is on the haunting piano-bedecked hymn Everyone But Me that Cash resonates most acutely, her lyricism as sharp and poignant as her notes are gentle. The partnership between Cash and Lenventhal is equally harmonious. ..."
Guardian: Rosanne Cash review – haunting hymns and sharp lyricism
YouTube: Everyone But Me (Acoustic)

2010 March: Rosanne Cash, 2012 January: Black Cadillac, 2012 April: "I Was Watching You", 2012 July: The Wheel, 2012 February: Live From Zone C, 2014 February: The River & the Thread (2014), 2014 August: Rules of Travel (2003), 2015 June: King's Record Shop (1987), 2016 June: 10 Song Demo (1996), 2017 January: Rodney Crowell - "It Ain't Over Yet (feat. Rosanne Cash & John Paul White)"

‘The Congregation’: How Johnny Griffin Preached A Hard Bop Sermon

"On 23 October 1957, a 29-year-old Chicago tenor saxophonist walked into Van Gelder studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, to record his third album, The Congregation, for Blue Note, the influential New York jazz label run by producer Alfred Lion. Johnny Griffin had just spent seven months working with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, but was now focusing on forging a successful solo career. At five foot five inches tall, Griffin was deemed short in stature but, musically, he was an absolute colossus. For a small man, he had a commanding sound. ..."
Udiscovermusic (Audio)
W - The Congregation (Johnny Griffin album)
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: The Congregation 6 videos

Homicide - David Mamet (1991)

"Homicide is an American neo-noir crime film written and directed by David Mamet, and released in 1991. The film's cast includes Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, and Ving Rhames. It was entered in the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Bobby Gold is a homicide detective on the trail of Robert Randolph, a drug-dealer and cop-killer on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. En route to nab an accomplice of Randolph, Gold and his partner Tim Sullivan happen upon a murder scene: the elderly Jewish owner of a candy store in a ghetto has been gunned down, reportedly for a fortune hidden in her basement. The deceased woman's son, a doctor, uses his clout to have Gold assigned to the case in the belief that Gold, himself Jewish, might be empathetic to his plight. ..."
Wikipedia
‘Homicide’: David Mamet’s Soul-Searching Thriller as a Modern-Day Classic (Video)
NY Times: 'Homicide': The Victims Abound
amazon
YouTube: Homicide - Trailer

Sounds and Pressure: The Enduring Power of Jamaican Street Art

Mural by Ricky Soul, in Cockburn Pen, Kingston
"... Five more minutes and a lanky character, nonchalantly sporting the mandatory and distinctive fresh white towel on his right shoulder, appears on the street corner. 44-year-old 'Bones' Williams is one of Kingston’s best mural artists. He’s known to sign his pieces with a stylized tibia bone scratching its head, in honor of the nickname that his lengthy figure earned him at a young age. What Bones does is important to the community. What they all do is. Often self-taught (Bones being one of the exceptions), a whole scene of mural artists share similar techniques – brushes and paint over expensive spray cans– and a love for realistic and figurative portraiture. Among the flock, some, like Bones, have gained respect and prominence, including Danny Coxson, Lyndon 'Balla' Johnson, Ricky Culture, Captain Irie, Trenchtown’s own Michael Robinson, Errol 'Gideon' Reid and a few more abstract artists such as Deon 'Sand' Palmer and Matthew McCarthy. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy Daily

Deejay Reggie Stepper in front of the Small World studio, downtown Kingston. Murals by Errol Reid AKA Errol Alphanso.

Stream Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a BBC Production Featuring Derek Jacobi

"A nice tip from Metafilter: 'BBC Radio 4 is airing Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 10 episodes running to about nine hours in total. With a starry cast headed by Derek Jacobi as the Narrator, the adaptation is written by U.S.-born, UK-based playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker.' The entire audio collection will remain streamable for the next 28 days. Here are the individual episodes: Episodes 1 and 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Episode 10."
Open Culture (Audio)
Got a Spare 153 Hours? Listen to Proust’s Masterpiece, Unabridged

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 August: Paintings in Proust - Eric Karpeles, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: "Paintings in Proust" - View of the Piazza del Popolo, Giovanni Battista Piranes, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online, 2017 December: The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925), 2018 May: Time Regained (1927), 2018 September: Céleste Albaret, 2018 November: In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust, 2019 February: On the Anxiety and Vanity of Marcel Proust, Debut Novelist

067° .TEMPERO BRASILEIRO "A Hora e a Vez do Samba" - selected by Edson Carvalho.

"If you’re following us, you can only remember of São Paulo’s master digger Edson Carvalho and the portrait we made of him! That portrait came along with a selection of 7 inches named 'Tempero Brasileiro'. Well, good news, Edson is back with another 'Tempero Brasileiro' extensive selection of 30 rare tracks, this time focusing on the different Samba’s style and once more made out of 'Compactos' only! 90% of them are coming out from that – now legendary – basement in downtown São Paulo that has been Edson’s second home for a while! Samba Jazz, Sambalanço, Bossa Nova, Samba Soul and Afro Sambas bliss on menu for this 80 minutes delight to please your ears and make your day! ..."
les mains noires (Audio)
mixcloud (Audio)

Painters of the East End - Mary Ann Caws

Jane Wilson, Four Paper Palettes, 1973
"Many of the European avant-garde artists who arrived in New York during World War II found themselves reaching out for a less expensive kind of living, and discovered larger studios in a rural landscape and waterscape on Long Island’s South Fork. In the mid-twentieth century, a group of women painters developed there a collaborative community sharing a culture mingling bohemian instincts and creative inspiration. This kind of art colony thrived on their interwoven affinities, gossip, affection, envies, and dislikes. Gathered there were Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, whose painting on board of 1949 has the side-sway of Lyonel Feininger’s oddly European buildings, and also Jane Freilicher with her gorgeous landscapes, as well as Joan Mitchell, whose paintings instantly stand out anywhere, as happens with the most striking figures of various groups and periods, reminding me of how, for instance, Charles Olson’s being and writing stood out in Black Mountain College times. ..."
Brooklyn Rail

Helen Frankenthaler, White Flight, 1979

2019 April: 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), 2019 June: The Irrepressible Emotion of Lee Krasner, 2014 February: Jane Freilicher, 2015 June:Jane Freilicher (1924-2014), 2014 February: Jane Freilicher

Good Morning Brooklyn

"If you’re wondering what kind of grocery store develops a cult following, residents of Bushwick and Bedford–Stuyvesant would be the best people to ask. Culture Trip takes a peek into the beloved and mysterious Mr. Kiwi’s 24-hour grocery store at the intersection of Myrtle Broadway in Brooklyn. Myrtle Broadway marks the border between Bushwick and Bed-Stuy, two of Brooklyn’s most culturally diverse neighborhoods on either side of the above-ground JMZ subway route that connects Manhattan and Brooklyn. The area is known for being the birthplace of The Notorious B.I.G. (on the Bed-Stuy side) and Jay-Z. While the latter’s stage name is derived from the childhood nickname 'Jazzy,' an urban myth claims that the moniker was gleaned from the JZ trains which are so central to local residents. ..."
culture trip (Video)

Nu Yorica 2! Further Adventures in Latin Music: Chango in the New World

"The second installment of Soul Jazz Records' investigation into Afro-Cuban funk and tribal consists of recordings perhaps a bit too close to the present to compare to the previous installment. Consisting of recordings from the late '70s to the mid-'80s, Nu Yorica 2! certainly doesn't skimp as to the uniform brilliance of its included artists. Included are thick, funky, drum-heavy stews of salsa, Latin jazz, and funk by the heaviest of heavy-hitters: Mongo Santamaria, Eddie Palmieri, Patato, Irakere, Cachao, Candido, Fania All Stars. Stranded halfway between fusion, salsa, and disco, however, quite a few of these tracks lack the rawness and brassy flavor of classic Latin music recorded during the '60s and early '70s. ..."
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Nu Yorica 2! Further Adventures in Latin Music: Chango in the New World

The Chelsea Affect - Arthur Miller

"I decided to move to the Chelsea in 1960 for the privacy I was promised. It seemed a wonderfully out-of-the-way place, nearly a slum, where nobody would be likely to be looking for me. It was soon after Marilyn and I parted, and some of the press were still occasionally tracking me, looking for the dirt in a half-hearted way. A friend who I would later marry had done photos for a book on Venice by Mary McCarthy and Mary had recommended the Chelsea as a cheap but decent hotel. (Mary of course hated my work, but that’s neither here nor there.) My friend, Inge Morath, who normally lived in Paris, had stayed there for short periods of work in America, and found it shabby but, to say the least, informal. ‘Nobody will bother you there,’ she assured me. The owner, Mr Bard, showed me a newly redecorated sixth-floor apartment overlooking the parking lot (since covered by an apartment house) behind the hotel. The parking lot is important. ..."
Granta
Guardian: The 10 best Chelsea hotel moments

2010 October: Hotel Chelsea, 2014 January: Arena Hotel Chelsea
2011 April: The Misfits (1961), 2012 June: Before Air-Conditioning (1998), 2014 December: The Crucible (1953), 2015 December: A View from the Bridge (1955), 2016 January: Arthur Miller’s Brooklyn, 2017 October: Death of a Salesman (1949)

Miles Davis Iconic 1959 Album Kind of Blue Turns 60: Revisit the Album That Changed American Music

"No amount of continuous repeats in coffeeshops around the world can dull the crystalline brilliance of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue one bit. The album turned 60 three days ago, and it still stands as one of the most influential albums, jazz or otherwise, of all time… indeed, as 'one of the single greatest achievements in American music.' So says one of several critics praising the album in the introduction to an interview with Ashley Kahn, author of Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. Kind of Blue is a 'cornerstone record, not only for jazz. It's a cornerstone record for music,' another voice comments. It 'captures the essence of jazz.' It’s 'sort of like the Bible, in a way. You know, you just have one in your house.' This would make Davis not only the composer of a new jazz Bible, but also a Bible salesman. He had no doubt his product would sell. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
Open Culture: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue at 60: A New Video Essay Celebrates the 60th Anniversary of the Iconic Album (Video)
W - Kind of Blue
Slate
Guardian - 50 great moments in jazz: Miles Davis and Kind of Blue (Video)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Kind of Blue 50th Anniversary
YouTube: Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue (Full Album) 55:25

In Stereo: Tobias Freund & Max Loderbauer

"The release notes for their recent collaborative album, A.R.T, perhaps unfairly characterises Tobias Freund and Max Loderbauer's foray into dark ambient as "genre tourism." The heady experimentalism of concept-driven recorded work from the duo's inception in the early 2000s has seen them tackle reductionist technoid minimalism for Cadenza, craft an album of pieces composed solely with drum machines, and produce the longplayer NSI. Plays Non Standards which featured minimalist drones at the intersection of modern acoustic piano (played by Loderbauer) and electronic abstraction (as manipulated by Freund). Their acclaimed, yet infrequent, live sets have regularly skewed towards the organic and tonal qualities of the ambient aesthetic, functioning as a counterweight to the defined parameters of their celebrated output for Sähkö Recordings and Freund's own Non Standard Productions. The relative rarity of their live performances can be attributed to the sheer amount of analog gear required to realise the specificity of their sound design, as witnessed in this live capture: a fascinating mind trip through layers of deep submersion, simmering otherworldly eeriness and industrial pulses."
Boiler Room (Video)
YouTube: Tobias Freund & Max Loderbauer - Boiler Room 1:18:00

The Subtle Politics of Graphic Design

"In 2008, Barack Obama’s Chicago headquarters housed engineers from Facebook and coders from Google. Everything was optimized for the web, from the talking points to the logo—the simple, minimal, now iconic Obama 'O.' The candidate’s graphic designers even made use of a new typeface, Gotham, which was so well suited to social media that the Discovery Networks and SNL later folded it into their own branding. A decade later, the minimalist, startup-y aesthetic Obama pioneered during his first campaign is omnipresent, both in politics and in Silicon Valley, where apps from Tinder to Facebook have taken to using the style in their marketing materials. Partly because of its simplicity and adaptability across platforms, half of the 2020 Democratic field has embraced good, responsible, rather vacuous 2010s design, as well. ..."
New Republic

Habibi Funk: Tales from digging in North Africa

"'I don’t have a blueprint, really,' says Jannis Stürtz when asked how he discovers records to release on Habibi Funk, his reissue label for ’60s – ’80s funk and soul music from the Arab world. Alonsgide running his other label, Jakarta Records (with releases from artists like Mura Masa and Kaytranada), and DJing around the world, Stürtz still finds the time to dig for records in 'most [Arab] countries that you can currently go to' outside of the Arabic Peninsula. Sturtz also snuck in some much needed time researching a forthcoming Habibi Funk issue, during a trip to Lebanon for the country’s first Boiler Room. ..."
VF (Audio)
Phonica (Audio)
Pitchfork
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Habibi Funk: An Eclectic Selection of Music from the Arab World (Habibi Funk 007) 16 videos

‘The public has a right to art’: the radical joy of Keith Haring

Keith Haring at work on his mural Tuttomondo on the wall of the Church of Sant’Antonio, Pisa, in 1989.
"Though he died in 1990, in many ways Keith Haring is still alive. His art is everywhere. There are Haring T-shirts, Haring shoes, Haring chairs. You can buy Haring baseball hats and badges and baby-carriers and playing cards and stickers and keyrings. Keith Haring’s work pops up all over the place – his radiant baby, the barking dog, the dancer, the three-eyed smiling face. Simple, cheerful, upbeat, instantly recognisable. They make you smile and they work like graffiti tags, small signifiers that say 'Keith woz here'. But Haring did much more than provide cute cartoons. He was publicly minded. His art faced outwards. He wanted to inform, to start a conversation, to question authority and convention, to represent the oppressed. Those cute figures are political. ..."
Guardian
Keith Haring exhibition at Tate Liverpool (Video)

Ignorance = Fear, 1989.

2009 April: Keith Haring

I Fidanzati - Ermanno Olmi (1962)

"First the glimmering white and black images of Ermanno Olmi’s I Fidanzati light up the screen and warm your heart. Then they abruptly flicker out—like imagined fleeting glances of a love affair you can’t forget but couldn’t hold onto. In seventy-some minutes, I Fidanzati teaches – no, simply lets you learn – about distance, time and the uncontrollable, bittersweet ways in which romances wax and wane. Olmi introduces the fiancés’ plight in images of the pair sitting still across an empty table. They are in a dance hall suffused with the nervous longings of wallflowers stuck in anticipation. From the first to last, the scenes and sequences of I Fidanzati are as affecting as the quiet looks on the fiancés’ faces at this moment: she, hands in lap, looking away from him with the gentlest irritation; he, staring past her, slightly bemused and frustrated. ..."
NotComing
Pop Matters
W - I Fidanzati
amazon
YouTube: I Fidanzati Trailer, Under the Influence: Mike Mills on Ermanno Olmi, I Fidanzati opening scene