What Happens When a President and Congress Go to War?

"In early October, President Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, sent a defiant letter to four leaders of the House of Representatives. No one in the Trump administration, Cipollone declared, would participate in the impeachment inquiry that Speaker Nancy Pelosi opened in September after Trump’s phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine came to light. 'Because participating in this inquiry under the current unconstitutional posture would inflict lasting institutional harm on the executive branch and lasting damage to the separation of powers, you have left the president no choice,' Cipollone concluded. Cipollone’s warning came at a pivotal moment for the balance of power between Congress and the presidency. Some political scientists have called Trump a weak president for failing to push through a legislative agenda. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Inside Adam Schiff’s Impeachment Game Plan
W - War Powers Resolution

Senator Joseph McCarthy and the counsel Roy Cohn, right, at a subcommittee hearing in 1953.

Venetian glass

A section from a larger view of Venice with the island of Murano in the distance (circa 1600 attributed to Danckerts in the style of the famous woodcut print by Jacopo de’Barbari circa 1500).
"Venetian glass is thought to have been made for over 1,500 years, and production has been concentrated on the Venetian island of Murano since the 13th century. Today Murano is known for its art glass, but it has a long history of innovations in glassmaking in addition to its artistic fame—and was Europe's first major glassmaking center. During the 15th century, Murano glassmakers created cristallo—which was almost transparent and considered the finest glass in the world. Murano glassmakers also developed a white-colored glass (milk glass called lattimo) that looked like porcelain. They later became Europe's finest makers of mirrors. Originally, Venice was controlled by the Byzantine Empire, but it eventually became an independent city state. ... Although Venetian glassmaking in factories existed as far back as the 8th Century, it became concentrated in Murano by law, beginning in 1291. ..."
Wikipedia
The History of Glassmaking in Murano
Discovering the Secrets of Venetian Glass (Video)
YouTube: Blowing Glass on Murano Island in Venice, Italy, Venice Murano glass blower makes a Horse figurine in a matter of seconds, Murano Glass Blowing of a Flower Vase with 2 handles, Vetreria Badioli Murano Venezia

Philip Glass Is Too Busy to Care About Legacy

Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role of “Akhnaten” at the Met.
"A Joan Mitchell painting looms at the top of the grand staircase at the Anderson Collection, Stanford University’s modern art museum here. It’s a sweaty, emotive work, bright colors moodily smeared across a huge canvas. On a recent Monday evening, Philip Glass sat at a piano placed between the painting and a few dozen potential donors to the Days and Nights Festival, his annual works-in-progress showcase south of Palo Alto. Mr. Glass, the master of musical Minimalism, is known for the precision of his endlessly undulating arpeggios. When he plays his own pieces, though, they tend to blur and smear, like Mitchell’s brush strokes. Rhythms that in other hands are almost clinical in their regularity begin to smudge, the music newly volatile and feeling. ..."
NY Times

Mr. Glass, right, rehearsing with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1974.

2009 November: Philip Glass, 2010 April: Satyagraha, 2010 May: Koyaanisqatsi, 2010 July: The CIVIL warS, 2010 November: Akhenaten, 2011 January: Landscape with Philip Glass (1975), 2011 May: Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (1985), 2011 August: Philip Glass Ensemble - "Train/Spaceship", 2011 December: The Satyagraha protest, 2011 December: Glassworks, 2015 June: THE EARTH MOVES. A documentary about Einstein on the Beach., 2015 December: Composing Myself: Philip Glass (2015)

The Vehicule Poets

Endre Farkas, Claudia Lapp, Artie Gold, John McAuley, Ken Norris, Tom Konyves, Stephen Morrissey
"The Vehicule Poets was a collective formed in Montreal in the 1970s by poets Endre Farkas, Artie Gold, Tom Konyves, Claudia Lapp, John McAuley, Stephen Morrissey and Ken Norris, who shared an interest in experimental American poetry and European avant-garde literature and art. While they were each distinct in their own writing, and published books as individuals, they were collectively involved in organizing readings, art events, and in controlling their own means of literary production through the development of a variety of periodicals and collective publishing ventures. In 1979, John McAuley’s Maker Press published a collective anthology, The Vehicule Poets. Six of the original Vehicule poets are still active as poets, artists and teachers. ..."
Wikipedia
The Vehicule Poets (Audio)
Cross Posted From Vimeo See Also The Vehicule… - Tom Konyves
Vehicule Days: An Unorthodox History of Montréal’s Vehicule Poets - Ken Norris
Ken Norris, Véhicule Poet; Endre Farkas, Montrealer and Véhicule Poet, Artie Gold
amazon: The Vehicule Poets Now

Larry Young - Lawrence Of Newark (1973)

"First ever reissue of 1973 album for jazz artist called 'the John Coltrane of the organ'. Because of it's freeform, avant garde, experimental nature, Young used a loose aggregate of floating musicians, including guitarist James (Blood) Ulmer & a 'Mystery Guest' (maybe Pharaoh Sanders?). plus numerous percussionists. A welcome reissue of this pure underground jazz classic from Newark, NJ's own Larry Young. He's in 'out' mode here, putting aside his more well-known styles (as heard on his classic Blue Note LP Unity) and laying down some Arkestra-style jamming alongside the shredding of James Blood Ulmer and some other underground cats. A killer melting of funky, cosmic, Eastern, Afro and free music vibes. ..."
Holland Tunnel Dive
W - Lawrence Of Newark
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Lawrence Of Newark 38:20

Guy Fawkes Night

Festivities in Windsor Castle by Paul Sandby, c. 1776
"Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night and Firework Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in the United Kingdom. Its history begins with the events of 5 November 1605 O.S., when Guy Fawkes, a member of the Gunpowder Plot, was arrested while guarding explosives the plotters had placed beneath the House of Lords. Celebrating the fact that King James I had survived the attempt on his life, people lit bonfires around London; and months later, the introduction of the Observance of 5th November Act enforced an annual public day of thanksgiving for the plot's failure. Within a few decades Gunpowder Treason Day, as it was known, became the predominant English state commemoration, but as it carried strong Protestant religious overtones it also became a focus for anti-Catholic sentiment. Puritans delivered sermons regarding the perceived dangers of popery, while during increasingly raucous celebrations common folk burnt effigies of popular hate-figures, such as the pope. ..."
Wikipedia
YouTube: The Story of Guy Fawkes

Guy Fawkes was one of 13 conspirators involved in the gunpowder plot to blow up King James I, the protestant King at the time.

Henry David Thoreau, Tree-Hugger - Richard Higgins

"In the fall of 1860, trees were at the center of Thoreau’s life. His long interest in how they live, grow, and propagate intensified after his lecture on succession on September 20, the acclaim for which gave him a rare bit of outside encouragement. He threw himself into forest history, measuring trunks, counting rings, and digging up the roots and shoots of trees with almost the same youthful zeal with which he had fathomed the bottom of Walden Pond years earlier. His enthusiasm for this left little room for anything else. As he rushed around to record findings and test insights about trees from October 1 to November 30, he poured out a torrent of words in his journal, nearly 900 a day on average—but said not one about the election of the gangly but promising senator from Illinois as president on November 6. Thoreau classified local forests by age. ..."
LitHub
Thoreau on Nature as Prayer
amazon

Thoreau’s Cove in Concord, Massachusetts.

2009 April: Henry David Thoreau, 2012 September: Walden, 2015 March: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), 2017 March: Civil Disobedience (1849), 2017 April: The Maine Woods (1864), 2017 June: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal, 2017 July: Pond Scum - Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia. By Kathryn Schulz, 2017 July: Walden, a Game, 2017 October: Walden Wasn’t Thoreau’s Masterpiece, 2017 December: Walden on the Rocks - Ariel Dorfman, 2018 March: A Map of Radical Bewilderment, 2018 April: On Tax Day, Reread Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’, 2018 October: Against Everything: Thoreau Trailer Park, 2018 November: Walking (1862), 2019 August: Huckleberries on hot summer days

The Ad Men

"For the past decade, Colossal Media has been enlivening the walls of New York City with their hand-painted advertisements — not to mention helping clients from Smirnoff and Heineken to Adidas and Converse hawk their wares. Their pieces, products of painstaking and meticulous days of work, are destined to be urban ephemera, lasting from just one week to one month before they’re painted over. Built in 2004 by founders Paul Lindahl, Adrian Moeller, and Patrick Elasik (who died in 2005), the Brooklyn‐based advertising and mural company is reviving and modernizing a sign-painting tradition that hails from an earlier era. The team currently has sixteen members, including both apprentice and lead painters. Completing an apprenticeship takes a year or two; becoming a lead painter takes five to seven. ..."
BKLYNR

Why the Clash Matter

"'The only band that matters.' There is charismatic hubris in this phrase, a declaration of radical faith. Fuck the past, the future is here and everything in music will be ruthlessly revamped in its wake. And when the description was applied to the Clash, it was easy to believe. Today, though, it’s easy to scoff at. Since the death of front-man Joe Strummer in 2002, the Clash have ascended into rock-and-roll mythos. No fewer than thirty books have been released on the band or on Strummer. Some of them are wonderful. Others are shallow and sloppy hagiographies. Their music has been used to hawk everything from boots to smartphones. Centrists in progressive clothing like Beto O’Rourke receive high praise for quoting 'The Clampdown' to Ted Cruz. Separating what’s commodity and spectacle from the band’s actual contribution is getting harder. ..."
Jacobin
Voice: We Have to Deal With It: Punk England Report by Robert Christgau (January 9, 1978)
Music you need: The Clash. This is punk rock. This is the only band that matters. (Video)

The Moth Poem - Robin Blaser (1963)

"The Moth Poem is Robin Blaser’s first book publication, which was preceded by a broadside printed by Auerhahn Press in 1963. I love this chapbook format which is perfect for the serial poem. Spicer’s work of the period published by Auerhahn and White Rabbit provide the model, along with Robert Duncan’s groundbreaking Medieval Scenes. ... The Moth Poem with the gray wrappers and the endpapers is a moth itself when opened to be read. The gray covers suggest the wings of the common gray moth and the front and back endpapers have illustrated moth wings on them. ... The work of Dante and the image of the moth are just two of the threads that hold this serial poem together. The Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso tie into the image of the moth at various points. ..."
MIMEO MIMEO
Visitation by Divination: A Ghost Story
W - Robin Blaser
Robin Blaser at SGWU, 1969 (Audio)
amazon

November 2007: EPC, November 2009: Robin Blaser (1925 - 2009), March 2010: Les Chimeres, 2011 February: The Holy Forest, 2011 July: "Image-Nation 21 (territory", 2010 April: Manroot and Acts,  2015 January: 'Absolutely temporary': Spicer, Burgess, and the ephemerality of coterie, 2015 March: San Francisco Renaissance, 2016 March: The Astonishment Tapes: Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends, 2017 May: The Pacific Nation, 2016 March: The Astonishment Tapes: Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends

Elodie Lauten - Piano Works Revisited (2010)

"Back in the days when there were a plethora of record stores in lower Manhattan that trafficked in independent releases of new music, by total serendipity I picked up an LP featuring music by Elodie Lauten. I was attracted by its provocative title, Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Memory, and its somewhat mysterious cover. The cover consisted of nine photographs—presumably from someone’s apartment—including the top of a kitchen stove and a cat on a bed, but also an upright piano and a synthesizer. There wasn’t much information about the piece, whose eight movements filled both sides, but I took a chance anyway; I was really glad I did. As the vagaries of independent releases go, it was not widely distributed and soon went out of print, and yet, as is so often the case, the music it contained was extraordinary. It’s a bizarre amalgam of minimalism, musique concrète, free jazz, and psychedelic freakout that inexplicably all fits together seamlessly. ..."
Sounds Heard: Elodie Lauten—Piano Works Revisited
1983-2010: Elodie Lauten - Piano Works Revisited
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Tempo Di Habanera, Imaginary husband, Revelation
YouTube: Sonate Modale part 1 of 3 - Live at Music Gallery, 1985, 2 of 3, 3 of 3.

2010 July: Elodie Lauten, 2016 July: Orchestre Modern (EP - 1981), 2017 October: Transform EP (2014)

Giant Skeletons Emerge from the Streets of Mexico for Día de los Muertos

Jaén Cartonería
"Mexico City is gearing up for its annual Day of the Dead celebrations and in one neighborhood, something strange is emerging from the city streets. In the Tláhuac municipality, two giant skeletons have burst through the asphalt, resting their weary limbs on the pavement. Measuring over 11 feet wide and 7 feet tall, the sculptures are welcome forebearers of the annual celebrations that take place on November 1 and November 2. The appropriately ghoulish sculptures were created by Jaén Cartonería, a family-run collective of artisans who have been carrying out this tradition for the past eight years. The design was dreamed up by Raymundo Medina Jaen as a way to show children in the Santa Cecilia neighborhood about cultural heritage. Made from cardboard, the sculptures took about one year to create and two days to assemble. ...."
My Modern Met

Metro Tacubaya

Patience Is a Virtue in the Premier League. Isn’t It?

Three years after parting ways with Manager Quique Sánchez Flores, Watford brought him back.
"The Premier League season was only a few weeks old when, in the middle of a quiet Saturday evening, Watford revealed that it had fired its manager, Javi Gracia. He would be replaced, the club said, by his countryman Quique Sánchez Flores, who had himself been fired by Watford three years earlier. This was, in the eyes of most observers, the madness of modern soccer boiled down to its very essence. Gracia had, only a few months earlier, led Watford to the F.A. Cup final. He had, it was broadly agreed, done a reasonable job at one of England’s top-flight makeweights. Watford — owned by Italy’s Pozzo family, and operated according to a model in which the manager is just an employee, not some sort of all-powerful medieval potentate — stood accused of short-termism, shortsightedness, and doing things in a conspicuously foreign way. ..."
NY Times

This Week’s Sky at a Glance, November 1 – 9

"... Saturday, Nov. 2. Saturn shines right of the Moon in early evening, as shown here. Look much higher above them for Altair, a little brighter than Saturn. Capella sparkles low in the northeast these evenings. Look for the Pleiades cluster, fingertip-size, about three fists at arm's length to Capella's right. These harbingers of the cold months rise higher as evening grows late. Upper right of Capella, and upper left of the Pleiades, the stars of Perseus lie astride the Milky Way. Standard time resumes at 2 a.m. Sunday morning for most of North America. Clocks fall back an hour. And for astronomers, darkness henceforth arrives an hour earlier! Sunday, Nov. 3. First-quarter Moon (exactly so at 5:23 a.m. Monday morning EST). On Sunday evening the Moon shines inside the huge triangle of Saturn to its lower right, Altair much higher to its upper right, and Fomalhaut way off to the Moon's left. Sometime around 10 p.m., depending on where you live, zero-magnitude Capella will have risen exactly as high in the northeast as zero-magnitude Vega has sunk in the west-northwest. How accurately can you time this event? Astrolabe not required. . . but it would help. ..."
Sky & Telescope

How To Beat Trump in 2020: Four opinion writers show the way

"2020 Meme Team, Assemble By Charlie Warzel. A long time ago, on a different internet — where Photoshopped images of 'God Emperor' Donald Trump riding atop a velociraptor were just a faint glimmer in a young meme lord’s eye — the Republicans were in trouble. Barack Obama’s 2008 win over John McCain was heralded as a digital over an analog. In 2012, Mitt Romney’s technological secret weapon to track voters in real time crashed on Election Day. A 2012 profile of Obama’s digital team in The Atlantic exclaimed that the 'nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure.' By 2014, the conventional wisdom was that progressives had lapped the Republican Party in the tech space. I heard rumors swirling that some of the Republican National Committee staff were scouring Silicon Valley churches for tech-company hoodies, looking for programmers to hire. ..."
NY Times: Win the Internet
NY Times: Electrify the Base
NY Times: Focus on His Corruption
NY Times: Seize the Center

Merrrrdrrrre!: Alfred Jarry and Père Ubu

Detail from front cover of Ubu Roi, 1896
"Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) is best known for creating Père Ubu, the monstrous anti-hero of his plays Ubu Roi, Ubu Cocu and Ubu Enchaîné, but, as Alastair Brotchie reveals in this immensely enjoyable journey through Jarry’s life and work, the origins of Ubu are far from straightforward. It all began with the “classroom martyrdom” of one Félix-Frédéric Hébert (1832–1917), a physics teacher at the lycée in Rennes. Possessed of a large stomach, short legs and an air of bluff pomposity, Hébert was ragged mercilessly by his pupils. ... Two brothers, Charles and Henri Morin, began writing and illustrating a series of satirical sketches recounting the exploits of the ridiculous Père Hébert, and these stories were added to by other boys. The 'Hébert cycle' consists of long poems, plays, mock newspapers and fantasy adventures, many exhibiting a protosurreal wit. ..."
The Times Literary Supplement
How a 19th-Century Absurdist Playwright Accidentally Predicted Trump

Poster for Ubu Roi in France, 1896.

2011 April: The Insolent Eye: Jarry in Art, 2013 August: The Banquet Years of Apollinaire, Alfred Jarry, Henri Rousseau, and Erik Satie - Roger Shattuck, 2015 September: An Inglorious Slop-pail of a Play

Wailing Souls - Very Well (1978)

"An undeniable classic straight from 29 Maxfield Avenue. The Wailing Souls' 'Very Well', all-time epic roots reggae, and as impassioned a song about repatriation as ever sung. This 12-inch reissue replaces the B-side 'Fire Coal Man' from the original release with a full extended dub of 'Very Well'!"
DKR
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Very Well

2018 August: Wailing Souls / Soul & Power

‘To Particularize Is the Alone Distinction of Merit’: Blake’s Visionary Imagination

Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, 1824–1827
"The Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, the first major exhibition in nearly twenty years, shows 300 of his prints and paintings, with manuscripts and printed books, gathered from galleries and libraries across the world. There have been other, smaller Blake shows with particular emphases, but this one sets out bravely to guide us through the whole range of his ideas, his art and his working life. A lot to see, a lot to take in. To corral this, the curators have imposed a chronological arrangement, setting Blake’s work in the context of the French Revolution, the spread of industry and the growing British empire, and devoting rooms to his patrons and his career as an engraver to show how he scraped a living until the relative freedom of his final years. ..."
NYBooks

2009 April: William Blake, 2010 December: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 2011 June: The Ghost of a Flea, 2012 August: Isaac Newton (1795), 2015 November: America a Prophecy (1793), @019 May: The Notebook of William Blake

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker: Work/Travail/Arbeid

"The starting point for Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid is a simple question: Can choreography be performed in the form of an exhibition? To answer that question, one of today's most important dancer/choreographers reimagined her stage performance Vortex Temporum (2013)—choreographed to the eponymous work by the late French composer Gérard Grisey—for a museum space, away from a conventional theater setting. Work/Travail/Arbeid is not De Keersmaeker’s first project to be performed in the museum space; in 2011 she performed the solo Violin Phase, part of her very first piece, Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (1982), in MoMA's Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. But with Work/Travail/Arbeid the artist imagines the choreography as an exhibition. ..."
MoMA (Video)

2009 July: Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, 2012 December: Rosas Danst Rosas (1983), 2013 September: Re : Rosas!, 2014 March: Maison Martin Margiela with H&M (2012), 2016 October: Vortex Temporum, 2017 March: Counter Phrases (2000)

Revolutions of 1848

Barricade on the rue Soufflot, an 1848 painting by Horace Vernet. The Panthéon is shown in the background.
"The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, People's Spring, Springtime of the Peoples, or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history. The revolutions were essentially bourgeois revolutions and democratic and liberal in nature, with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures and creating independent nation-states. The revolutions spread across Europe after an initial revolution began in France in February. Over 50 countries were affected, but with no significant coordination or cooperation among their respective revolutionaries. Some of the major contributing factors were widespread dissatisfaction with political leadership, demands for more participation in government and democracy, demands for freedom of the press, other demands made by the working class, the upsurge of nationalism, and the regrouping of established government forces. The uprisings were led by ad hoc coalitions of reformers, the middle classes and workers, which did not hold together for long. ..."
Wikipedia
Guardian - 1848: Europe's year of revolution – from the archive
YouTube: What Were the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848?

2013 October: French Revolution of 1848

John Ashbery’s Reading Voice

John Ashbery at 92Y in 1970
"The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y has a seventy-year archive of recordings—it began hosting readings in 1939 and recording them in 1949—and it offers a unique opportunity to study poets’ voices and reading styles. Between 1952 and 2014, John Ashbery made seventeen appearances on the stage of the Poetry Center. He read with other poets—Barbara Guest, Mark Ford, Jack Gilbert, John Hollander, J. D. McClatchy, W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, and James Schuyler. He read with painters—Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. And he joined in readings honoring other poets—tributes to Frank O’Hara (1970), Elizabeth Bishop (1979) and Marianne Moore (1987). ... As a scholar and poet who uses software to analyze performance style in poetry recordings, I was thrilled when Bernard Schwartz, the Poetry Center’s director, invited me to study the archive. The Ashbery readings seemed, to me, like a perfect corpus to begin with. ..."
The Paris Review (Audio)
NYPL: Finding Ashbery

The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1950s

A Collection of Vintage Fruit Crate Labels Offers a Voluptuous Vision of the Sunshine State

"Ah, Florida… The Sunshine State. Tourists began flocking to it in earnest once the railroads expanded in the late 19th century, drawn by visions of sunset beaches, graceful palms, and plump citrus fruit in a warm weather setting. The fantasy gathered steam in the 1920s when citrus growers began affixing colorful labels to the fruit crates that shipped out over those same railroad lines, seeking to distinguish themselves from the competition with memorable visuals. These labels offered lovers of grapefruit and oranges who were stuck in colder climes tantalizing glimpses of a dreamy land filled with Spanish Moss and graceful long-legged birds. Words like 'golden' and 'sunshine' sealed the deal. (The reality of citrus picking, then and now, is one of hard labor, usually performed by underpaid, unskilled migrants.) ..."
Open Culture

State Under Siege

"It is an article of faith among many strategists and activists within the Democratic Party that shifting demographics will be its salvation. The Republican electorate gets older and whiter with every election. Greatest Generation and boomer Fox News addicts can’t live forever, and Big Data shows that it’s merely a matter of time until the modal Republican voter is firmly in the minority.
 When I come across this talismanic bit of folk wisdom, I counter with an example that has little relevance to anyone under 40: apartheid-era South Africa. ... The South Africa case may seem extreme, akin to Trump-Hitler analogies. Yet both in spirit and in practice, the modern GOP is embracing a similar strategy of maintaining power in a nation where it has managed to win the popular vote in a presidential election exactly one time since 1992. ..."
New Republic (Audio)
Harvard Politics: The Future of Federalism
W - States' rights
W - John C. Calhoun
W - Steve Bannon

John C. Calhoun, circa 1801.

Sun Ra Arkestra Live In Kalisz, 1986

"Sun Ra Arkestra’s debut concert in Poland is getting its first vinyl offering, this October via Lanquidity Records. Taking place on the 7th of December in 1986 as part of the 13th instalment of the International Jazz Piano festival, the 10-track performance included ‘Prelude To A Kiss’, ‘Children Of The Sun’ and ‘Mack The Knife’. Alongside Sun Ra on piano and synthesizer, it featured an 11-member Arkestra, with Danny Ray Thompson on bassoon and sax, Laurdine Kenneth “Pat” Patrick on baritone saxophone, alto saxophone, and Fender bass, Marshall Belford Allen on alto sax, Tyler Mitchell on bass, Ronald Wilson on tenor sax, John Gilmore on tenor sax and clarinet, James Jacson on Bassoon and ancient Egyptian infinity drums, Leroy Taylor on alto sax, alto & bass clarinet, Tyrone Hill on trombone, Earl 'Buster' Smith on drums and Carl LeBlanc on guitar. ..."
Sun Ra’s 1986 Poland concert recording released for the first time (Audio)
bandcamp (Audio)
Sounds of the Universe (Audio)

Lenox Lounge

"Lenox Lounge was a long-standing bar in Harlem, New York City. It was located in 288 Lenox Avenue, between 124th and 125th. The bar was founded in 1939 by Ralph Greco and served as a venue for performances by many great jazz artists, including Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Harlem Renaissance writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes were both patrons, as was Malcolm X. The bar deteriorated through the middle of the 20th century. Alvin Reid, Sr. purchased it in 1988 and restored the original Art Deco interior from September 1999 to March 2000, during the only closure in the bar's history. ..."
Wikipedia
Dissent: Harlem Is Everywhere
LAST CALL: WHO’S TO BLAME FOR DESTRUCTION OF THE LENOX LOUNGE?
Voice: Remembering the Lenox Lounge
YouTube: Lenox Lounge Legacy

Circa 1956: Sarah Vaughan and friends at the piano in Lenox Lounge Zebra room.

2009 February: Harlem Renaissance, 2010 August: A Nightclub Map of Harlem, 2010 October: Apollo Theater, 2014 May: History of Harlem, 2014 November: A Harlem Throwback to the Era of Billie Holiday, 2015 February: A Nightclub Map of Harlem, 2017 June: During Prohibition, Harlem Night Clubs Kept the Party Going, 2018 March: Rent party, 2019 January: Apollo Theater Is Celebrated in a New Graphic Novel

Betye Saar The Legends of Black Girl’s Window

Black Girl's Window. 1969
"After nearly a decade of focused work in printmaking, artist Betye Saar created her autobiographical assemblage Black Girl’s Window in 1969. This exhibition explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days. Celebrating the recent acquisition of 42 rare, early works on paper, this is the first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as printmaker."
MoMA (Video)
MoMA: 9 audios (Audio)
NY Times - Betye Saar at MoMA: Prelude to a Revolutionary Breakthrough

The Syria Withdrawal’s Other Victims

"In Deir Ezzor, the largest city in eastern Syria, on the banks of the Euphrates River, protesters last week chanted and raised signs calling for the downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorial regime. But they also raised U.S. and French flags, hoping the anti-ISIS coalition might keep its forces in the region. 'I remember when we were taught at a young age about the French colonialist occupier, when the [Syrian] regime pretended to be a champion of national sovereignty,' one of the protesters, a USAID-funded project manager, Abdul Rahman,* told me. 'And now we got to an unprecedented point, in which we ask an occupier to protect us, and we fail to obtain this [protection]. And protect us from whom? From the criminals of our own country.' ..."
New Republic

Junior Byles - Fade Away (1976)

"Kerrie Byles (born 17 July 1948 in Kingston, Jamaica), also known as 'Junior Byles', 'Chubby', or 'King Chubby', is a Jamaican reggae singer. ... Lee 'Scratch' Perry, then working as chief engineer at Joe Gibbs' studio, was scouting for talent for Gibbs' new Amalgamated label, and spotted the group while they were auditioning for the 1967 Festival Song Contest with 'The Time Has Come'. ... Perry signed the group to the label, but left Gibbs soon after. The Versatiles stayed with Gibbs for two years, before moving to work with Perry, and then to Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label, also recording for other producers such as Laurel Aitken.Regarded by some as his greatest work, 'Fade Away' was recorded in 1975 for producer Joseph Hoo Kim; It was a massive hit in Jamaica and was also a big success in the UK, and was covered five years later by Adrian Sherwood's New Age Steppers group. ..."
Wikipedia
Junior Byles - Fade Away
YouTube: Junior Byles & I Roy - Fade Away & Rootsman 12", Fade Away

2013 May: 129 Beat Street: Ja-Man Special 1975-1978