The Plague - Albert Camus (1947)

The dance of death the careless and the careful.
"Usually a question like this is theoretical: What would it be like to find your town, your state, your country, shut off from the rest of the world, its citizens confined to their homes, as a contagion spreads, infecting thousands, and subjecting thousands more to quarantine? How would you cope if an epidemic disrupted daily life, closing schools, packing hospitals, and putting social gatherings, sporting events and concerts, conferences, festivals and travel plans on indefinite hold? In 1947, when he was 34, Albert Camus, the Algerian-born French writer (he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later, and die in a car crash three years after that) provided an astonishingly detailed and penetrating answer to these questions in his novel The Plague. ..."
LitHub: What We Can Learn (and Should Unlearn) From Albert Camus’s The Plague
Open Culture: Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Novel the Coronavirus Has Made a Bestseller Again
W - The Plague
amazon

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), 2019 September: Les Pieds-Noirs: Algeria’s Forgotten Footballers

This Week's Sky at a Glance, March 13 – 21

"... Betelgeuse is rebrightening. After bottoming out at about V magnitude +1.64 in early to mid-February, Orion's Betelgeuse was up to +1.3 as of March 8th, and the brightening seems to be speeding up a bit. The change from minimum is quite clear now to the eye; use Orion's other shoulder star, Bellatrix, as a comparison. During Betelgeuse's minimum brightness they appeared essentially equal. See The Fall and Rise of Betelgeuse. ... Saturday, March 14. Right after dark, five carnivore constellations stand upright in a row, from the northeast to south. They're all seen in profile with their noses pointed up and their feet (if any) to the right. They are Ursa Major the Big Bear in the northeast (with the Big Dipper as its brightest part), Leo the Lion in the east, Hydra the Sea Serpent in the southeast, Canis Minor the Little Dog higher in the south-southeast (lit by Procyon), and bright Canis Major the Big Dog lower in the south (lit by Sirius). ..."
Sky & Telescope

Trump’s False Claims About His Response to the Coronavirus

President Trump taking questions from reporters Friday at a news conference.
"The president inaccurately described travel restrictions he had announced, falsely blamed his predecessor for testing shortages and misstated the role Google was playing in mitigating the outbreak. As he declared a national emergency over the coronavirus outbreak, President Trump attempted to deflect criticisms of his administration’s response to the virus with inaccurate claims. Here’s a fact-check. ... False. The Food and Drug Administration issued a 'draft guidance' in 2014 in which it sought to extend its authority to regulate laboratory-developed tests. But it’s wrong to blame that effort for the scattered and insufficient delivery of coronavirus tests as the guidance was not particularly relevant to emergency situations and was never finalized or generally enforced. A law enacted in 2004 created the process and requirements for the use of unapproved products in public health emergencies. ..."
NY Times

Roma - Alfonso Cuarón (2018)

"Roma is a 2018 epic drama film written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who also produced, shot, and co-edited it. Set in 1970 and 1971, Roma follows the life of a live-in housekeeper of a middle-class family, as a semi-autobiographical take on Cuarón's upbringing in the Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. The film stars Yalitza Aparicio and Marina de Tavira. The film had its world premiere at the 75th Venice International Film Festival on 30 August 2018, where it won the Golden Lion. ... In 1971, Cleodegaria 'Cleo' Gutiérrez is an indigenous live-in maid in an affluent household in the Colonia Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. The family's matriarch, Sofía, her husband, Antonio, her mother Teresa, their four young children, and another maid, Adela, also live in the house. Antonio, a doctor, leaves for a conference in Quebec. It becomes clear that Sofía and Antonio's marriage is strained. ..."
WikipediaNY Times - ‘Roma’ Review: Alfonso Cuarón’s Masterpiece of Memory (Video)
Variety: Alfonso Cuarón on the Painful and Poetic Backstory Behind ‘Roma’
TIME: The Real History Behind the Movie Roma
YouTube: ROMA | Official Trailer

Luther Allison ‎– Bad News Is Coming (1973)

"The very thing that made Luther Allison noteworthy became an albatross around his neck. Years after his initial run of records in the '70s, he was known for the same thing he was at the time -- he was the only blues artist on Gordy, or any Motown affiliated label. This was true and novel, but many focused on the novelty, not the truth, ignoring Allison's status as a terrific torchbearer of raw Chicago blues. Some of material illustrates some contemporary influence -- dig that funky groove and organ on 'Raggedy and Dirty,' or the rock-oriented slow burn of Mel London's 'Cut You A-Loose' -- but as his original title track illustrates, he can also deliver a torturous, impassioned slow grind. Still, this isn't an album about originality, it's a record how tradition can remain alive in a contemporary setting. ..."
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: "Bad News is Coming" - Full Album 11 videos

In Which Edna St. Vincent Millay Stares Into The Abyss

"At age 48 – looks fading, youth fading, genius (she thought) also fading — the extravagant American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay found herself staring blankly into the abyss that had moved with her all her life. Once she had written ecstatically of that 'conscious void' (her first encounter: a passage of poetry from Romeo & Juliet when she was five years old), of both 'the tangible radiance in which I stood' and 'the edge of nausea' that bordered it. Once it had left her thrilled, transcendent, outside herself; the “radiance” and the 'nausea' had been intertwined. But, at 48, interred at the farmhouse she and her husband had converted near the Berkshires, worn out by her lifelong hungers, that abyss was now dark to her — and it took it took two gin rickeys, a martini, eight cigarettes and several morphine shots, all before 1 p.m., to be able to face it. ..."
This Recording

2015 May: The Spinster Hall of Fame: Yes, Cut-out dolls of five pioneering women writers

A Solar System of Fire and Ice

The Galileo spacecraft caught a volcano erupting on Jupiter's moon Io in 1997.
"Rosaly Lopes spent five years carefully inspecting a churning landscape where molten rock spilled forth like the arced jets of a water fountain. Using data from an orbiting probe, she picked out eruptions across the fiery surface, eventually spotting 71 active volcanoes that no one had ever detected before. ... None of the volcanoes were on Earth, though. They were several hundred million miles away, on a moon of Jupiter called Io. Today, Io is known as the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Other volcanic spots are scattered across our neighboring planets and moons, too, and probably countless more in other solar systems across the universe. Recently, NASA announced it would fund proposals for four new robotic missions, all headed for a close look at these kinds of worlds—Io, Venus, and Triton, a moon of Neptune. ..."
The Atlantic

The Life of a Ghost Town

Century-old houses stand empty at the former Idarado Mine, near Silverton, Colorado. The homes were moved here in 1948 from Eureka, a nearby ghost town.
"There is a ghost town, high in the Colorado Rockies, inaccessible to all but the most rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles, that I’ve visited since I was a child. I’ll call the town Inez, instead of its real name, since the folks who live in that solitary spot are there for a reason: they don’t like being around a lot of people, and they aren’t interested in attracting tourists. Many of them are my relatives, too, and I’d like to stay on speaking terms. They aren’t hermits, exactly, but they aren’t very sociable, either. 'This is my hideout,' one put it. Inez, surrounded by a fortress of peaks, has always seemed like a remote and rustic Shangri-la, far from the rest of the world and the current time period. When I was a child, my family would jeep up the narrow, rocky shelf road that leads to Inez, climbing over the final crest and into an aspen valley and a town that wasn’t much more than a handful of old log cabins in various stages of decay. ..."
Alta

Built in 1892, this wooden powerhouse helped supply compressed air for mining operations near Crystal, Colorado.

Arte del mar: Artistic Exchange in the Caribbean

"Arte del mar ('art of/from the sea') explores the artistic exchange around the rim of the Caribbean Sea before the sixteenth century between the Taíno civilizations of the Antilles archipelago and their powerful peers on the continental mainland. Recent archaeological, ethnohistorical, and art-historical research has deepened our understanding of indigenous Caribbean concepts of ritual knowledge, ceremonial performance, and political power. Artists in the region—which includes the modern Antilles archipelago and countries such as Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras—sought to express the distinct force of their deities and ancestors, known to the Taínos as zemí (or cemí), which pervaded the environment and was crucial to the foundation of communities. ..."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Video)
NY Times: The Art of Caribbean Exchange, in Gold, Stone or Hardwood

Bebopped and Rebopped: The Births of Bebop and Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison
"In the early 1940s, during after-hours jam sessions at Harlem clubs such as Minton’s Playhouse and Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, a group of young jazz musicians hailing from across the country began to develop a new sound, a new form of jazz music (Lott 598). Trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie recalls that, during jam sessions at Minton’s, 'Theloni[o]us Monk and I began to work out some complex variations on chords and the like, and we used them at night to scare away the no-talent guys. After a while, we got more and more interested in what we were doing as music, and, as we began to explore more and more, our music evolved.' In this evolution, Gillespie notes, 'we were…playing, seriously, creating a new dialogue among ourselves, blending our ideas into a new style of music…You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other…We invented our own way of getting from one place to the next.' ..."
New York City in the '40s
W - Invisible Man
“Invisible Man”: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem
NPR - Ralph Ellison: No Longer The 'Invisible Man' 100 Years After His Birth
New York City in the '40s: Ellison and Bebop

Gordon Parks. Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1952.

Does The Mayhem In The Champions League Race Open Up A Spot For … Burnley?

Could Burnley qualify for Champions League?
"The Premier League has felt more like a coronation than a competition this season. Liverpool opened up a gap at the top of the table as wide as the River Mersey and will almost certainly win its first Premier League title — and its first English top division title in 30 years. In lieu of a title race, Premier League fans have had to settle on a race for the top four and Champions League qualification. That race also looked to be predictable for much of the season, that is until UEFA (the governing body of European soccer) banned Manchester City from competing in next season’s competition for failing to comply with 'financial fair play' rules. Manchester City has appealed, but the ban stands for now. That means that, at least for now, the Premier League team that finishes in fifth place will qualify for next season’s edition of the Champions League. ..."
Five Thirty Eight

Aksak Maboul : Tout a une fin / Blaue Bleistift (2020)

"... In 1977, Marc Hollander formed a band in Belgium called Aksak Maboul. What kind of band, you ask? Oh, just your average avant-rock-cabaret-jazz combo. One that could evoke Bela Bartok, Duke Ellington, and Arab music in quick succession. You know, one of those bands. Their 1977 album Onze Danses pour Combattre la Migraine was a formative influence on me when I started the New Sounds program here at WNYC in 1982 and remains a signal achievement in genre-blind music. But Marc Hollander also formed a successful record label, Crammed Discs, and after releasing another album in 1980, the band essentially disappeared. So it is wonderful news to hear that Aksak Maboul is releasing a new album (a double-LP, as if that will make up for all the time passed) in May, and the announcement came with the release of this single, called 'Tout a une fin' ('Everthing Ends'). It features the band’s new vocalist Veronique Vincent (formerly of The Honeymoon Killers) and a fairly straightahead rock rhythm, at least to start. But the song acquires some strange tendrils of sound and eventually bursts into an electronic/orchestral climax."
New Sounds
Crammed - Aksak Maboul
Bandcamp (Audio)
YouTube: Tout a une fin/everything ends (official video)

2014 November: Aksak Maboul, 2017 July: Made to Measure, Vol. 1 (1984), 2018 February: Before And After Bandits: Marc Hollander Of Aksak Maboul & Crammed Discs

Atypical Girls: The Female Punks Who Fought For Equality

"It’s sad to relate, but it’s a fact that, before female punks burst on the scene in the 70s, a woman in the man’s world of rock’n’roll had little chance of even being taken seriously, let alone being viewed on equal terms. Strong, independently minded women in rock were depressingly thin on the ground up to this point. Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick, the late Janis Joplin and acclaimed singer-songwriters including Joni Mitchell and Carole King had begun to make a mark in the late 60s and early 70s, but as far as all-girl bands were concerned only a few, such as Anglo-Canadians The She Trinity and New Hampshire proto-punks The Shaggs, dared to try writing and recording their own material, and those that did struggled to gain any kind of commercial foothold. ..."
udiscover (Audio/Video)

Taking Shape Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s

Omar El-Nagdi, Untitled, 1970. Mixed media on wood, 47 x 47 inches
"Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s explores mid-20th-century abstract art from North Africa, West Asia, and the Arab diaspora—a vast geographic expanse that encompasses diverse cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. Comprising nearly 90 works by artists from countries including Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the exhibition is drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation based in Sharjah, UAE. The paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints on view here reflect the wide range of nonfigurative art practices that flourishes in the Arab world over the course of four decades. Decolonization, the rise and fall of Arab nationalisms, socialism, rapid industrialization, wars and mass migrations, and the oil boom transformed the region during this period. ..."
Grey Art Gallery
Brooklyn Rail
amazon

Menhat Helmy, Space Exploration/Universe, 1973.

Dollar Bin Mix #4 - Astral Jazz

"It's been a heady week, so I've dived deep into the Dollar Bin for a mix of far out jazz to cleanse the soul and feed the spirit. Join me on a trip to out there and back where you'll end in a lighter place. - Mr Chips. Note: All songs were taken from albums exclusively found in the Dollar Bins of my travels. Pops and clicks are all part of the experience. Track List: Stanley Turrentine - Gibraltar, Rashaan Roland Kirk - Black Root 10:19, Ramsey Lewis - Jungle Strut 13:26, Les McCann - The Harlem Buck Dance Strut 18:04, Charles Earland - Betty's Dilemma 24:02, Eddie Harris - Shorty Rides Again 32:14, Cannonball Adderley - Leo 40:42, Herbie Hancock - Fat Mama 43:33, Lonnie Liston Smith - Devika (Goddess) 47:17, Les McCann - The Dunbar High School Marching Band 52:23, Flora Purim - Uri (The Wind) 58:28, Deodato - Adam's Hotel 1:04:30, Leon Thomas - Echos 1:08:01, Rufus Harley - Scotch & Soul 1:13:36, Qunicy Jones - Oh Happy Day 1:18:38.
mixcloud (Audio)

The secret backhouse behind East 38th Street

"While walking through Murray Hill recently, I cut through the driveway of an apartment building to get from 38th to 37th Street without going all the way to Third Avenue. What I saw when I peered over the apartment building’s brick fence and into a yard next door surrounded by tidy brownstones made me stop in my tracks and ask myself: is that a backhouse? Backhouses aren’t uncommon in New York; these are small dwellings built behind a main house. Property owners in the late 18th and early 19th century put up backhouses for various reasons. Sometimes they served as a stable, but others were cheap houses landlords constructed on a lot to squeeze more tenants into the property and get more rent. I’d seen backhouses before, mostly downtown in the Village or Chelsea—like this backhouse, now hidden behind tenements in the East Village. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Cape Breton Island - Protest Song (2012), Songs of Steel, Coal and Protest (2012)

"On Cape Breton Island, where coal mining and steel making were once an essential part of the region’s culture and economy, protest song and verse are found in abundance. The Protest Song Project is an initiative of The Centre for Cape Breton Studies at Cape Breton University. The program’s goal is to preserve and promote the protest songs and verse that represent the region’s rich industrial heritage. ... These songs played an important role in the labour struggles of the 1920s and are an unexplored aspect of Cape Breton’s labour heritage. ... Songs of Steel, Coal and Protest. This is part two of a program to preserve, promote and make available the steel, mining and protest songs of the region. It tells stories about the struggles to survive strikes and hard times, the courage of workers wives, the fight by trade unionists and the oppression of international company owners. ..."
Protest Songs, Protest Songs – Volume 1 (Audio), Songs of Steel, Coal and Protest – Volume 2 (Audio)
Industrial heritage remembered
iTunes:: Cape Breton Island Protest Songs (Audio), Songs of Steel, Coal and Protest (Audio)
W - Cape Breton Island
YouTube: Albert Lionais - He Walked Right In

2015 October: History of the Acadians, 2012 February: Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, 2012 December: Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler, 2011 June: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood - Alistair MacLeod, 2016 February: Island (2001), 2016 October: Alistair MacLeod - No Great Mischief (1999), October: Nova Scotia Lighthouse, 2017 April: Cape Breton fiddling

Burlington Progressives — lots of them — eye mayor’s office after council wins

The list of possible candidates is already long: Clockwise from top left: Carina Driscoll, Max Tracy, Gene Bergman, John Franco, Brian Pine and Ali Dieng.
"Burlington, VT — After the election of two new Progressives to the City Council Tuesday, another race was quickly on the minds of Burlington Progressives — the 2021 mayoral election. Party executive director Josh Wronski was less than a minute into his speech at a victory celebration Tuesday night when he crystal balled the party’s success boded well for its chances of taking back the mayor’s office next year. 'Miro Weinberger, we’re coming for you,' Wronski said. Already, Progressives are starting to float names of potential candidates to take on Weinberger, a Democrat who’s served since 2012. In an interview Friday, the mayor said he was months away from deciding, but allowed there was a 'good chance' he will run again for another three-year term. ..."
VTDigger (Audio)

Voters inside the Fletcher Free Library, the polling place for Burlington’s Ward 8, on March 3.

2017 December: Vermont Progressive Party, 2018 February: Carina Driscoll - Mayor: Burlington, Vermont - Progressives Party, 2018 February: Burlington officials grapple with controversial mural, 2017 May: 05401PLUS, 2019 May: Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington

Women Directors: 150 Filmographies (1972)

"When the total number of films made by women is considered, it becomes useless to determine universally common themes and styles. Such gestures of interpretation and analysis would constitute a disservice to the individuality of each. Would we presume to find common threads among men directors? In spite of the attitudes of male critics and historians, Reiniger, Dulac, Riefenstahl, Deren, Varda, and Chytilova have received the recognition and historical placement they deserve; most other women filmmakers have not. The image of women in film—in front of and behind the cameras—is a subject of keen interest currently being studied elsewhere. The comments and filmographies which follow are not meant as political statements with relation to the women’s movement, although much overlapping of interest is self-evident. Rather, the existence of the women’s movement has generated an interest in and search for more information on the place of women in the arts. It is to this end, temporary as its usefulness may be, that the historical tone of this introduction is directed. ..."
FILM COMMENT

Elaine May

From Doo-Wop to Hip-Hop: Paul Winley and the Invention of the Breakbeat Compilation

"Paul Winley’s life neatly joins the dots between 1950s doo-wop and old-school hip-hop. In fact, he views both artforms as part of an unbroken oral tradition that binds every facet of black American music. Winley was impeccably placed to make such an observation. As a young man, he worked in Manhattan’s fabled Brill Building, penning songs for the likes of Big Joe Turner and Ruth Brown. In 1956, he set up his own label, which became home to groups such as the Paragons and the Jesters. By the late 1970s, however, Paul Winley Records had shifted its focus to New York’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. The imprint was at the vanguard of the movement. ..."
Red Bull Music Academy (Video)
W - Paul Winley

Emma Goldman Is Alive and Well and Making Trouble on the Lower East Side

"A certain kind of career is well known among American intellectuals. An eager young person joins the Socialist Something-­or-other movement and spends several fer­vent years in its ranks. He develops literary and analytic skills. And after a while the Socialist Something-or-others begin to dis­appoint him. They aren’t prospering the way he expected. They need to shape up. He tells them how. But they won’t hear of it. The young comrade therefore undergoes a crisis. Why, he asks himself, can’t the Something-or-other movement do better? Why is the Party a failure and why is social­ism not proving popular in America? Different answers come to mind. Maybe socialism doesn’t deserve to be popular. In that case the young militant becomes a con­servative. Maybe socialism is all right but the Party’s version is extreme, rigid, or mis­guided. The militant becomes some sort of liberal or social democrat. Maybe what the Party believed as literal truth should be reinterpreted figuratively. The militant be­comes a sophisticated radical. ..."
Voice - by Paul Berman (October 1, 1985)
W - Emma Goldman

2015 November: The Masses,1911 - 1917

Afro football fever

Ugandan soldiers serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) play football with young Somali boys in the central Somali town of Buur-Hakba.
"It can be hard to see how the real energies and possibilities of African football survive in the niches left by globalization. Sometimes one needs a sharper eye. Both visitors and the leading lights amongst a new generation of African photographers have that. Taking football as their subject matter, they have helped capture the game’s deep historical meanings and living everyday presence. The Senegalese, Omar Victor Diop, dressed as little-known but important figures from the African diaspora, took a series of self-portraits based on paintings from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Styled and posed like the African studio photography of the twentieth century, Diop made the twenty-first century connection to these images by adding an object. Pedro Camejo, the only black officer in the army of Simon Bolívar, wearing goalkeeping gloves. Badin, first a slave, then butler and diarist to Princess Sophia of Sweden, holding a red card. ..."
Africa Is a Country

Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race

"Senator Elizabeth Warren entered the 2020 race with expansive plans to use the federal government to remake American society, pressing to strip power and wealth from a moneyed class that she saw as fundamentally corrupting the country’s economic and political order. She exited on Thursday after her avalanche of progressive policy proposals, which briefly elevated her to front-runner status last fall, failed to attract a broader political coalition in a Democratic Party increasingly, if not singularly, focused on defeating President Trump. Her departure means that a Democratic field that began as the most diverse in American history — and included six women — is now essentially down to two white men: former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders. Ms. Warren said that from the start, she had been told there were only two true lanes in the 2020 contest: a liberal one dominated by Mr. Sanders, 78, and a moderate one led by Mr. Biden, 77. ... Though her vision energized many liberals — the unlikely chant of 'big, structural change' rang out at her rallies — it did not find a wide enough audience among the party’s working-class and diverse base. ..."
NY Times (Video)
NY Times: Elizabeth Warren Was the Wrong Kind of Radical
NY Times: The Case for Elizabeth Warren
NY Times: Will Elizabeth Warren Endorse a Candidate? She Has a Few Options
***NY Times: I Am Burning With Fury and Grief Over Elizabeth Warren. And I Am Not Alone.

Cooking with Cesare Pavese

Characters in Pavese’s work follow the unchanging traditions of the countryside, including eating much polenta, easily made from medium-grind cornmeal, like this.
"Film buffs will know the Italian modernist writer Cesare Pavese (1908–50) because his novel Among Women (Tra donne sole) was the source for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Le Amiche. But I came across his work in the unlikely location of a cookbook, English food writer Diana Henry’s How to Eat a Peach. Pavese, Henry writes in a chapter entitled, 'The Moon and the Bonfires (and the Hazelnuts),' was born in Piedmont in Northern Italy, and his native landscape was 'almost a character' in his work. She quotes him as saying that, if you live there, you 'have the place in your bones like the wine and polenta.' How to Eat a Peach is formatted as menus drawn from Henry’s travels and interests, and her Pavese-Piedmont menu, inspired by the 1949 novel The Moon and the Bonfires, offers an ox cheek stew, white truffle pasta, and a hazelnut-strewn chocolate cake. She suggests an accompaniment of the local Barolo or Dolcetto wine. ..."
The Paris Review

The wines of Piedmont are elegant and challenging, like the work of Cesare Pavese.

2015 August: Cesare Pavese, 2017 March: NYRB: The Moon and the Bonfires, The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese

When Tenants Take On Landlords Over Bad Conditions: A Rent-Strike Explainer

Organized rent strikes can give tenants greater leverage in negotiations with their landlords.
"D.C. appears to be in the midst of a rent-strike resurgence. From an ongoing strike in Columbia Heights to a recently resolved strike in Brightwood Park, the practice has emerged at several buildings in the city as a means to provoke landlord compliance with housing code. Rent strikes — in which tenants aim to withhold rent until their grievances are addressed — have grown more common in several cities contending with the impact of gentrification on affordable housing. And the strategy isn’t new to D.C., where an ultimately unsuccessful 1964 strike nonetheless inspired a spate of similar efforts, with mixed results, through the 1960s and 1970s. So how does a rent strike work? Here are the basics. ..."
WAMU
“Organizing 4 power”, from workers to tenants
YouTube: Jane Mcalevey | A Collective Bargain

The Piano - Jane Campion (1993)

"The Piano is a 1993 New Zealand-Australian period drama film about a psychologically mute young woman and her pre-adolescent daughter, set during the mid-19th century in a rainy, muddy frontier backwater town on the west coast of New Zealand. It also involves the woman's failing arranged marriage to a frontiersman. The Piano was written and directed by Jane Campion and stars Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, and Anna Paquin in her first acting role. The film's score by Michael Nyman became a best-selling soundtrack album, and Hunter played her own piano pieces for the film. She also served as sign language teacher for Paquin, earning three screen credits. ..."
Wikipedia
Guardian - How we made: Michael Nyman and Jane Campion on The Piano
amazon
YouTube: The heart asks pleasure first Michael Nyman The Piano

2008 April: Michael Nyman, 2010 August: Decay Music, 2010 December: After Extra Time, 2011 August: Michael Nyman Band, 2011 December: The Draughtsman's Contract - Peter Greenaway, 2012 March: Time Lapse, 2013 July: Composer in Progress, In Concert (2010), 2015 September: An Eye for Optical Theory (Live at Studio Halle, 2010), 2016 January: Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds, 2017 April: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (1972), 2019 May: The Heart Asks Pleasure First
2015 August: Jane Campion: Top of the Lake (2013)

Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble - Where Future Unfolds (2019)

"... 'Where Future Unfolds by Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble is a mighty jazz & gospel album made up of a stunning live recording of a band that challenges the hard-hitting subject matter with powerful eloquence. Psychedelic bells greet the listener when starting Where Future Unfolds by Damon Locks Black Monument Ensemble before distorted vocals are brought into play. The powerful metaphors rattled off by Damon Locks in the first track 'Statement of Intent / Black Monument Theme' compliment the intense bells and draw you into this exciting music. The bells remind me of Pharoah Sanders, and most recently, Maisha, who both employ them to imbue their jazz with a lysergic acid feel. The freeform drums which start to build behind the voice escalate, and the message being delivered gets clearer and more aggressive. The message drives home why the former and current US governments are failing the people, and why institutional racism means that things won’t change. ..."
Holland Tunnel
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Where Future Unfolds [FULL ALBUM 2019], Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble (Live)

The Urban Lens: Documenting Gentrification’s Toll on the Mom-and-Pops of Greenwich Village

"Bleecker Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenue South was once a huge Italian enclave with many traditional 'mom and pop' stores catering to the large Italian families who resided in the neighborhood. By the late 1930s, it also had a significant bohemian population with many artists, writers, poets and musicians living in the area who set up galleries, coffee houses and music shops. Due to widespread gentrification and escalating real-estate values, the neighborhood has changed drastically and its unique appearance and character is suffering. We are here to take you on visual tour to experience how many of the truly authentic shops remain on this venerable Greenwich Village street, and to show you what has replaced the ones that have vanished. Many of the shops you’ll encounter ahead have been featured with full-color photographs and insightful interviews with the store owners in three of our widely acclaimed books on the subject, but we’ve also rounded up several more ahead. ..."
6sqft

Ireland’s Voices

"Throughout its history, The New Yorker magazine has published extraordinary writing by and about Irish authors and poets, from Maeve Brennan’s first Talk of the Town, in 1937, to Ian Parker’s Profile of the renowned novelist Edna O’Brien, published this past October. Such a commitment to Irish writing is far from surprising, as the island’s natural wonders and historic cities have inspired some of the most influential writers of the age—people so dear to the Western canon that it’s almost redundant to name them. (But still we will: Swift, Wilde, Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett are just a few.) The New Yorker has published poetry and fiction from Brennan and O’Brien, as well as Elizabeth Bowen, Seamus Heaney, Mary Lavin, Colm Tóibín, and Sally Rooney, among others. ..."
New Yorker

2011 March: Passages from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1965-67), 2010 March: Ulysses Seen, 2013 February: ULYSSES “SEEN” is moving to Dublin!, 2013: Dubliners, 2014 May: The Dead (1987 film), 2014 May: “Have I Ever Left It?” by Mark O'Connell, 2014 July: Digital Dubliners, 2014 September: Read "Ulysses Seen", A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Classic, 2015 January: The Mapping Dubliners Project, 2015 February: Davy Byrne’s, 2016 January: Port and Docks, 2016 February: Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Unabridged & Set to Music By 17 Different Artists, 2016 April: Nassau Street, 2016 May: Stephen’s Green, 2016 October: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 2016 November: Skerries, 2017 January: Walking Ulysses | Joyce's Dublin Today, 2018 October: Bloomsday Explained

The American restaurant is on life support

Joe Dietsch
"In a week, The New York Times would run a rave review of FieldTrip, a rice-centric little place in Harlem, New York City. Crowds of eager diners would suddenly descend, and the Sweetgreen chain, as well as the folks at Rockefeller Center and developers around the country, would get in touch about possible alliances. But at 5:30 on a weekday before the review, owner and chef JJ Johnson did what he’d done since the restaurant opened three months earlier: He greeted the two tables of two who were having an early dinner, tasted everything the kitchen had going, dropped some supplies on a shelf, and fretted. The 35-year-old Johnson had cooked at two high-end restaurants until they went out of business—The Cecil, a fine-dining establishment nearby, and Henry, a short-lived place in a restaurant-laden neighborhood called the Flatiron, where he was a partner. ..."
The Counter (Video)

Front of house at Gadi Peleg’s flagship Breads Bakery.

The Best Protest Songs In History: 10 Timeless Political Anthems

"From unflinching portrayals of racial hatred to hard-hitting invective against injustice, demands for equality and even stadium anthems with a subversive message, the best protest songs speak not only to the issues of their times, but transcend their eras to become timeless political expressions. Hip-Hop arguably remains the most politically engaged music of our current era, but, throughout the decades, jazz, folk, funk and rock music have all made contributions to the best protest songs of all time. Many more can lay claim to a place in this list. Think we’ve missed your best protest songs? Let us know in the comments section, below. ..."
udiscover (Video)