Poet in New York - Federico Garcia Lorca (1930)

On Lorca’s Poet in New York - "What a strange, vital, careening book—what a book for now. Yet also, what a fascinating document of the early 20th century. A Poet in New York, 'New York in a Poet,’ as Lorca himself glossed it: this is clearly one of the great works of transnational modernism, a cracked Andalucían mirror held up to New York’s crazed, vibrant, and disgusting face. The best poetry is 'news that stays news,’ as Pound put it. This book seems to me news I can use—registering the skyscrapered canyons of the city, its savage underbelly everywhere humming with reptilian life (all those iguanas and crocodiles running around in the poems), the titanic fraudulence of Wall Street, the vomiting crowds of a Coney Island Sunday.”
FSG Work In Progress
Lorca: Introduction
Lorca in New York: A Celebration
NY Times: Poetic Love Affair With New York; For Garcia Lorca, the City Was a Spiritual Metaphor
Back Tomorrow. Federico García Lorca in New York
amazon, Grove Atlantic

Federico García Lorca, Young man and pyramids, 1929-1930

2011 August: Federico Garcia Lorca , 2013 July: A Mural of a Spanish Poet in Bushwick, Confounding and Enchanting

John Singer Sargent and His American Contemporaries in Venice

John Singer Sargent, Venetian Interior, 1882.
"Born to American parents in Florence, Italy, in 1856, John Singer Sargent spent his youth traveling through Europe with his family. From 1874 to 1885 he lived in Paris, receiving formal training in fine art and forming friendships with artists from around the world, including American painters. On visits extending from 1880 into 1881 and again in 1882, Sargent returned to Italy for several months at a time, beginning his mature artistic exploration of the city of Venice. An American art colony had already begun to form there and these artists were joined by painters and printmakers from a number of European nations, as well as artists from various provinces of the newly united Italian Kingdom; and more significantly, a thriving and innovative company of Venetian painters. ..."
incollect

John Henry Twachtman, Venice, Campo Santa Marta, circa 1878.

2013 October: John Singer Sargent Watercolors, 2015 May: Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, 2016 November: A Street Scene in Venice (1880-81)

This Week's Sky at a Glance, May 8 – 16

"... Monday, May 11. Before and during early dawn on Tuesday the 12th, the waning gibbous Moon shines under Jupiter and Saturn as shown above. For skywatchers in North America's Central and Mountain time zones, they'll form a virtually perfect right triangle while dawn is brightening. Tuesday, May 12. Vega is well up in the east-northeast as evening advances. Look for its faint little constellation Lyra, the Lyre, hanging down from Vega with its two-star bottom canted a bit to the right. Take advantage of these moonless evenings to work through a fine clutch of galaxies in the northern reaches of the Virgo Cluster high overhead, using the Deep-Sky Wonders article and charts in the May Sky & Telescope, page 54. The five selections there range from magnitude 9.6 to 12.8. ..."
Sky and Telescope

The unused, unlit taxi signs across Manhattan

"Sometimes you come across one outside tony pre- and postwar apartment buildings (and some businesses): a small sign that says taxi, or just a lone light bulb under the awning or affixed to the facade. It’s probably unlit when you see it, but illumination is the whole point. At night, if a resident needed a taxi, a doorman could turn on the sign from inside. A cabbie looking for a fare would see the lighted sign from the street and drive over. (Below, on Sutton Place and East 57th Street) In a city whose yellow taxi fleet has been squeezed by ride hailing apps (not to mention this year’s stay-at-home orders), the idea of relying on a sign to get a cab sounds old-timey. ..."
Ephemeral New York

Baseball: Part 7: The Capital of Baseball

1953 World Series
"For those who hated the New York Yankees—and there were many who did—the 1950s were best imagined through the eyes of Joe Boyd, the middle-aged, fictional protagonist from Damn Yankees! who sold his soul to the Devil to become a superstar for the Washington Senators and help win the pennant over the Yankees. Fairy tales like this were practically the only way to comprehend the Yankees anywhere else but first place. If there ever was a need for parity in the majors, the American League of the 1950s was it; the Yankees with eight pennants during the decade, the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago White Sox always trading off second and third place—and, deep down, hopeless ballclubs such as the aforementioned Senators or the Philadelphia/Kansas City A’s—a franchise often rumored to be a subsidiary of the Yankees due to the wealth of lopsided trades in New York’s favor. ..."
This Great Game: 1950s A Monopoly of Success
PBS: Part 7: The Capital of Baseball (Video)
W - Major League Baseball relocation of 1950s–1960s
Dig the 1950s
This Great Game: 1950 Gee Whiz!
This Great Game: 1954 At Least They Stopped the Yanks

Willie Mays
10 Best 1950s Baseball Rookie Cards
W - Shot Heard 'Round the World, W - Willie Mays, W - Mickey Mantle, W - Duke Snider, W - Gil Hodges, W - Hank Aaron
YouTube: Willie Mays, The Lost Ball Parks: Ebbets Field, Farewell Polo Grounds & Ebbets Field (1958), New York Yankee Highlights From Early 1950's Featuring Joe DiMaggio & Mickey Mantle, 1950s Baseball Radio Broadcasts - 44 videos
World Series: 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959

1955 World Series

The Origins of Scandinavian Noir

Martin Lewis, The Great Shadow, 1925
"Sometime in the early eighties, I began reading a series of mysteries that featured a Swedish homicide detective named Martin Beck. I was living in Berkeley at the time, studying for a Ph.D. in English literature as I worked a variety of part-time jobs, and I knew a lot of people both inside and outside the academy. Being a talkative sort, I started telling everyone around me about this incredible Scandinavian cop series. Soon we were all reading it. What I knew at the time was that it was written by a couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, who had from the very beginning envisioned it as a sequence of ten books that would portray Swedish society from a distinctly Marxist perspective. ..."
The Paris Review
W - Martin Beck
CIS: A guide to the Martin Beck series
amazon: Martin Beck (10 book series)

Original Outlaws: 10 Country Heroes Who Paved The Way For Americana

Johnny Cash
"Americana, a music deeply rooted in the musical culture of the United States, has arguably been around in one form or another for a more than a century: country heroes such as Jimmie Rodgers and his travelling tent shows of the late 20s were one of the earliest incarnations. And while “Americana” has been a category recognised at the Grammy awards since 2009, the term has been in widespread use for three decades. ... Here we present 10 groundbreaking country heroes who paved the way for the modern Americana explosion. ..."
udiscover (Video)

V. - Thomas Pynchon (1963)

"Nothing more intricately conceived than Thomas Pynchon’s first novel has appeared in American fiction since the work in the thirties by Faulkner, Nathaniel West and Djuna Barnes, the last two being among the writers who have given him the courage of his artifices and of the assumptions that go with them. V. is full of self-mystified people consistently avoiding direct relations with one another through disguise or evasion, people living the disrupted existences either of the Cook’s Tour, in one plot or in the other, of a kind of contemporary tourism called 'yo-yoing,' the pointless repetitive passage and return on any convenient ferry or subway. Neither of the two interwoven plots is presented in sequence. ..."
The New York Review of Books (June 1, 1963)
W - V.
Guardian: 'Reader beware ...'
amazon

This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal - II

This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal
"Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) occupies a lofty place in American cultural history. He spent two years in a cabin by Walden Pond and a single night in jail, and out of those experiences grew two of this country’s most influential works: his book Walden and the essay known as 'Civil Disobedience.' But his lifelong journal—more voluminous by far than his published writings—reveals a fuller, more intimate picture of a man of wide-ranging interests and a profound commitment to living responsibly and passionately. ..."
The Morgan Library & Museum
The Morgan Library & Museum: The Protester: April 1851, Etc. (Audio)
The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau
amazon: The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861
Gutenberg: The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau


A Map of Radical Bewilderment - Daegan Miller
"Although he is now remembered mostly as a romantic nature writer, in his own time and place Henry David Thoreau was a highly trained, well regarded, disciplined though eccentric land surveyor. In the summer of 1859, he stood under a willow beside the Concord River contemplating a gash he had cut low in the tree’s trunk, to gauge the water level. In 22 miles the Concord fell only 32 inches — it was very nearly a pond — and any additional water heaved the river up and over its banks, before gravity’s current slowly siphoned it out to sea. Yet flooding wasn’t necessarily a problem. Indeed, the annual springtime deluge was the town’s lifeblood, because the waters always rolled back, leaving behind a thick, black, nutrient-rich muck spread all across the bottomlands, whose field grasses grew fat and sleek on nature’s bounty, perfect fodder for the farming town’s livestock. ..."
Places Journal


Lessons in Constructive Solitude From Thoreau
"During most of his life Henry David Thoreau was, by conventional standards of success, a failure. He rarely left the farm town of Concord, Mass., where he was born in 1817. There he was viewed by at least some of his neighbors as a marginal figure, standoffish, politically radical, a loner, a crank. As a member of the New England literary world he cut a graceless figure and had an inauspicious professional start. His first book, 'A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack River,' self-published in 1849, was a bust. He sold a mere fraction of its 1,000-copy press run. When the printer dumped the remainders on him, Thoreau stacked them up in his bedroom and wrote in his journal: 'I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.' ..."
NY Times


Against Everything: Thoreau Trailer Park
"... This excerpt is taken from his concluding essay 'Thoreau Trailer Park - The Meaning of Life, Part IV', in which Greif reflects on Thoreau, public parks, and the Occupy Movement. It is hard to remember what Thoreau said because it is all so disturbing. It is easier on us to think of a thin man who erected a cabin with his own hands on the shores of a lovely pond. Thoreau deliberately didn’t build his cabin from scratch. He hacked a free timber frame from someone else’s trees, got friends to help him raise it, and recycled the rest from a laborer’s bivouac, buying cheap, for boards and roof, 'the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad.' This was philosophical, with all its shortcuts and offenses. ..."
Verso


Thoreau: American Resister (and Kitten Rescuer)
"When my father was in high school he worked summers as a lifeguard at Walden Pond. As a kid, I used to hang out there, bird-watching, reading from a slender volume of Henry David Thoreau’s journal and soaking up Transcendentalist vibes from the big glacial bowl of clear water ringed with firs and footpaths. Even off-season I wasn’t alone. Pilgrims kept turning up in search of Thoreau. The little cabin — he called it a house — that he’d built there in 1845, furnished with a green-painted pine desk, and lived in for two years, was long gone. But a cairn of loose stones marked the site, and each visitor would, by tradition, toss a fresh stone on the pile. Doing so gained you a little hit of Thoreau; a moral lesson (give, don’t take); and a sense that you’d added something to history. ..."
NY Times


Thoreau and the Language of Trees
"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. ..."
LitHub: VIA University of California Press Henry David Thoreau, Tree-Hugger
Thoreau on Nature as Prayer
amazon


J.M.W. Turner: Wreckers—Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore, 1834
Walden on the Rocks - Ariel Dorfman
"The bodies are strewn everywhere along the beach. Burials are complicated because nobody knows the names of the dead—mostly women and children fleeing famine and poverty, trying to reach the land of plenty that has been promised to them but finding, instead, an early end in turbulent waters. Spectators gape at the debris from the recent shipwreck 'cracked up like an eggshell on the rocks,' while others go about their business. ... This scene of devastation and indifference seems torn from the latest headlines or photos from around the world, just one more group of refugees appearing fleetingly on our screens and in our consideration. ... The eyewitness referred to above, without whom we might not remember the incident at all, was none other than Henry David Thoreau. ..."
NYBooks


Everybody Hates Henry
"In a prominent national magazine, there appeared an indictment of the late Henry D. Thoreau whose literary stock the indictment’s author judged to be grossly overvalued. It wasn’t just Thoreau’s writing that deserved a take-down; so did the man himself, if in Thoreau’s case one could even distinguish between the two. Thoreau was conceited, indolent, egotistical. Also: a failure, selfish, self-involved, useless, unimaginative, provincial. The indictment compared Thoreau to Montaigne—unfavorably; called him a sophist, a hypocrite, a humorless boor. ..."
New Republic


Thoreau Farm
"... The picture they draw of life on Virginia Road provides a glimpse into early 19^th-century Concord farm life as well as into the mind of Thoreau, who valued the simplicity of Concord’s farmers in an age increasingly dominated by progress and machine.After the Thoreaus left, the farm went through several hands before it eventually became a tenant-farm in the latter half of the 19th century worked primarily by African-Americans and immigrants from Ireland, Nova Scotia, and Scandinavia. In 1878, the house was moved 300 yards down the road and a new house was built on the original site. ..."
About Thoreau Farm

Video
POLITICAL THEORY 5:47
CANOEING IN THE WILDERNESS - FULL AudioBook 2:39:39, Walking Full Audiobook 1:28:52, Life Without Principle 42:49

April 2020: Henry David Thoreau - I

We Are in This Together

Stay-at-home orders have some people feeling trapped, but a home is what you make of it, and a fire escape can be a yard.
"Good morning, if it is morning where you are, good afternoon and evening, too. Welcome to At Home, a newsletter and section of The Times devoted to the belief that we can live rich lives at home even while we are quarantined during the coronavirus pandemic, even while we are maintaining social distance from one another, even as we contemplate the slow, unsteady steps toward re-opening our cities and states, our world. Because you are at home, I think? I am, as so many of us are these days, at least those of us who aren’t laboring in dangerous conditions for the betterment of all: in hospitals and on buses, in processing plants and logistics hubs, police and fire stations, newspaper printing plants, on farms. We’re on lockdown, many of us. We’re hunkered down in an invisible storm, at home. ..."
NY Times

We’re on the Brink of Cyberpunk

Ridley Scott - Blade Runner (1982)
"Where is the president in Blade Runner? Beneath the 1982 neo-noir’s trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life, alienation in the face of wealthy indifference to the plight of workers. Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon and reframe the replicants as 'essential services,' and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence—moving straight from fiction to reality. ..."
Slate

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

2010 September: Cyberpunk, 2010 October: Bruce Sterling, 2011 July: William Gibson, 2015 May: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology - edited by Bruce Sterling (1986), 2015 July: A Global Neuromancer, 2016 May: The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (1990), 2017 August: Sprawl trilogy, 2019 February: Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science - Edited by Larry McCaffery (1992), 2019 December: How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real

Columbia Noir #1: Dead Reckoning (1947)

"In his book The American Cinema, critic Andrew Sarris listed John Cromwell in the Lightly Likable category. Sarris meant this as a mild put-down of the 'formal deficiencies' in Cromwell's films, so don't get the idea that there's anything light about pictures such as Of Human Bondage [1934] and The Goddess [1958]. There's plenty of darkness in Dead Reckoning, too, which is natural for a 1947 mystery thriller from film noir's golden age. Sarris also wrote that the motto of Cromwell's cinema is cherchez la femme, but while it's true that he worked well with female stars, the most memorable face in Dead Reckoning belongs to Humphrey Bogart, not Lizabeth Scott although the riddle that keeps the movie clicking is whether Scott's character is a femme fatale, or just a femme caught up in events none of the characters can control. ..."
TCM
W - Dead Reckoning
Obscure Train Movies
Criterion: Dead Reckoning (Video)
YouTube: Theme of the Month - COLUMBIA NOIR, Film Noir - COLUMBIA NOIR

Fairfield Porter: Raw—The Creative Process of an American Master

"Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) was an artist and critic whose works were grounded in the real world during years when abstraction largely dominated American art. Described as a reticent realist, he painted the world immediately surrounding him: his family, his friends, his studio, and his homes in Spruce Head Island, Maine, and Southampton, New York. This exhibit of thirty-nine works, many of them unfinished, reflects on his working method and creative process. In 1949 Fairfield Porter established his home and studio on South Main Street in Southampton, where he lived until his death in 1975. Four years later some 250 works were given to the Parrish by his widow Anne. The bequest included, in addition to major paintings and important works on paper, a large number of works in various states of completion, including a sketchbook, unstretched paintings on canvas that had been stored by the artist rolled-up, and many paintings on various kinds of boards. ..."
Middlebury College Museum of Art (Audio)
Parrish Art
amazon

Calverton, 1954

2008 May: Fairfield Porter, 2010 June: Fairfield Porter - 1, 2011 August: "Respect For Things As They Are" - by John Ashbery, 2013 March: "The Great Spruce" by Alex Carnelevale, 2013 July: In Fairfield Porter / James Schuyler country: Penobscot Bay, Maine

Doin' Allright - Dexter Gordon (1961)

"From the first track of this record—in Blue Note's 45rpm double-disc reissue series—tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon certainly seems to be doing just fine. That opener, 'I Was Doing All Right,' lilts along with a nice 'n' easy, early 1960s treatment of an insistently positive George Gershwin melody. Gordon doesn't rush his solo, but allows it to intensify naturally from the surrounding breeze. He explores the entire range of his instrument, allowing his pace to ebb and flow while never jettisoning himself from the track of comfortable swing. Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard enters on—and retains—a brasher course, slashing through a stream of jagged, harmonic lines. Pianist Horace Parlan goes farther afield, injecting the tune with some passing abstract figures. ..."
All About Jazz
W - Doin' Allright
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Doin' Allright 40:57

2014 April: Night in Tunisia, Whats new, Blues Walk (Holland, 1964), 2015 May: Our Man in Paris (1963), 2015 August: Ballads, 2016 June: One Flight Up (1964)

The painter who captured the soul of New York

Eighth Street Macdougal Alley
"New York right now feels like it’s at a crossroads. People are fearful of walking the streets with the threat of a virus literally in the air. Subway problems, homelessness…the city doesn’t always seem to be working. To restore your faith in Gotham, take a look at these paintings by Alfred S. Mira, whose vivid street scenes of the 1930s and 1940s city capture the life, passion, and activity inherent in New York’s soul. Mira wasn’t a native New Yorker. Born in Italy in 1900, he came to New York as a boy with an 'insatiable desire to draw,' as he put it. ..."
Ephemeral New York
Ephemeral New York: A Village painter’s dynamic 1930s street scene
artnet

St. Bartholomew's New York City, 1943

60-Minute Gourmet - Pierre Franey

"ALMOST all the recipes that have run in the 60-Minute Gourmet over the years have been innovations of one sort or another. Some were pure creations, dishes that were not based on anything I had read about or dined on before; they were stimulated instead by a particular occasion or an item of food that was on hand. Others have been improvisations, coming from dishes that I have either heard about or recall from my travels here and abroad. Still others are reproductions of dishes that I first cooked as a professional chef or have known about since childhood. ..."
NY Times: By Pierre Franey (Sept. 29, 1982)
NY Times: Parmesan! Crusted! Chicken! (May 1, 2020)
amazon

Crispy frico chicken with mushrooms and thyme.

Coronavirus Live Updates: Daily Death Toll Will Nearly Double by June, Trump Administration Models Predict

"The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June. As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750. The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now. The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, significant risks remain. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse. ..."
NY Times (Video)

Tonspur: Artists in Isolation Live

"A live improvised performance, direct from the studio, at the invitation of Tonspur Kunstverein Wien. Tonspur set up a series of live performances by different artists to present their work in these challenging times. I performed a live set, then answered questions from the audience online, and finished with an encore. This film features only the musical aspects of this event. Please tune into http://www.tonspur.at to enjoy the full work if you want to listen to my rambling on and to admire my now long hair. Many thanks to Georg Weckwerth and Hannah Schwegler who enabled this to happen, and everyone out there who tuned in. ..."
YouTube: Tonspur: Artists in Isolation Live 03 May 2020

2012 October: Scanner, 2015 December: Robin Rimbaud (Scanner), 2017 September: The Great Crater (2017), 2018 January: Podcast 523: Scanner, 2019 September: scanner - Unearthly Powers (2019)

Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail

"The Admiralty has just declassified a recent report on Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail, the document in question reveals details about the Campaign. This is the campaign map, an illustrated replica of a real historical region. Here players maneuver their fleets to engage the enemy or otherwise explore. In Ultimate Admiral, the campaign is divided into regionally distinct chapters. Each chapter traverses a region of European or American waters and consists of multiple battles, events, and other points of interest. Every chapter has multiple stages, or turns measured one month at a time. The game world is updated after every stage, repopulating the map with new challenges and opportunities for the player to tackle. ..."
game play - Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail - Campaign Guide
Take command in a realistic simulator with hardcore gameplay (Video)
STEAM $ (Video)
YouTube: AMERICAN CAMPAIGN - Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail - FIRST LOOK!, ULTIMATE ADMIRAL: AGE OF SAIL - First Extended Gameplay Footage and Website Live!!!. Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail Early Access - Let's Play Part 1: Horatio Nelson's Antiles War

Paris c’est l’Afrique: The Pioneers (episode 1)

"The documentary series Paris c’est l’Afrique by Philippe Conrath has resurfaced from oblivion. As of today, PAM will share a weekly dose of the cult film via our YouTube channel. Episode 1: 'The Pioneers'. It is truly a remarkable documentation. Sending you back to a time, when the French capital Paris was both the bridge for African music in the West, and the crossroads at which most of the continent’s artists would pass through (Mainly French-speaking, but not limited to). ... Almost all of the greats feature here on screen, thirty years younger, at a time when their careers were flourishing. The passage of time has made these images even more moving, and all the more interesting given that we now know how much the music and its authors have evolved since. ..."
Pan African Music (Video) 25:33

Baseball: Part 6: The National Pastime

Joe DiMaggio
"1940s Of Rations and Spoils. Feast and famine was never more defined within baseball than in the 1940s. After a few glorious years to start the decade, the major leagues had to play it lean, leaner and leanest through 1945 as America diverted all of its resources to winning World War II. ... World War II stripped many of the game’s greats of up to four years of their prime in baseball. If not for armed conflict, Ted Williams—arguably the best pure hitter the game has ever seen—might have finished his career with 3,200 hits and 650 home runs. ..."
This Great Game
PBS: Part 6: The National Pastime (Video)
This Great Game: 1941 56, .406 and Dem Bums
W - Baseball color line
This Great Game: 1948 The Greatest Show in Cleveland
“Reese & Robbie”

Jackie Robinson
W - Branch Rickey, W - Ted Williams, W - Joe DiMaggio, W - Jackie Robinson, W - Bob Feller, W - Pee Wee Reese, W - Enos Slaughter, W - Minnie Miñoso
W - All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, League of Women Ballplayers
W - All Star Baseball, Ethan Allen, Cadaco-Ellis, and All-Star Baseball, Baseball's Ethan Allen: The Original Spin Doctor, All Star Baseball DISCS
YouTube: Jackie Robinson Breaks the Color Barrier, Joltin Joe DiMaggio!, Will We Ever See Another .400 Hitter?, Batting with Ted Williams from 16mm film, JOE DiMAGGIO TALKS ABOUT HIS 56-GAME HITTING STREAK AND HOW IT ENDED, Red Barber on Jackie Robinson, Jackie Robinson Steals Home, The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) - Full Length Biography 1:16:49
World Series: 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949

Ted Williams

Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie

"Every Wes Anderson Movie is the 237th episode of Screen Junkies comedy series Honest Trailers. It was written by Spencer Gilbert, Joe Starr and Dan Murrell. It parodies the 8 films directed by Wes Anderson from the 1996 American crime-comedy film Bottle Rocket to 2014 American comedy film The Grand Budapest Hotel. In addition to regular narrator Jon Bailey, it features the voice debut of Ted Evans, impersonating Alec Baldwin. It was the first ever career retrospective episode of Honest Trailers. It was published on March 20, 2018, to coincide with the theatrical release of Wes Anderson's film Isle of Dogs. It is 6 minutes 59 seconds long. It has been viewed over 2.2 million times. ..."
Honest Trailer
YouTube: Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie

2013 November: Wes Anderson Honors Fellini in a Delightful New Short Film, 2013 November: Rushmore (1998), 2013 Decemher: Hotel Chevalier (2007), 2014 March: Wes Anderson Collection, 2014 April: The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies, 2014 July: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), 2014 August: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), 2014 December: Welcome to Union Glacier (2013), 2015 January: Inhabiting Wes Anderson’s Universe, 2015 July: Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A Supercut for Bibliophiles, 2015 November: Moonrise Kingdom (2012), 2015 December: Chapter 8: "The Grand Budapest Hotel", 2016 June: Here's pretty much every song used in a Wes Anderson film, 2016 November: Watch Come Together, Wes Anderson’s New Short Film...., 2016 December: All of Wes Anderson’s Cinematic Commercials: Watch His Spots for Prada, American Express, H&M & More, 2018 September: Isle of Dogs (2018)

Socialism and cha-cha-cha: Agnès Varda's photos of Cuba forgotten for 50 years

"Agnès Varda’s pictures of Cuba had been sitting untouched in boxes since the mid-1960s. The images – of female bodies in form-fitting silhouettes, and men harvesting in cane fields – 'were never meant to be shown,' says the grande dame of French cinema. The compendium of thousands of photographs had been taken in service of her film, Salut les Cubains; after it was completed, Varda cast the images aside. That was until curator Clément Chéroux looked through her archives and discovered them. ..."
Guardian
Beyond the Photo Album: Relocating Varda’s Salut les Cubains
YouTube: AGNES VARDA in Cuba

May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000), 2013 September: Cinévardaphoto (2004), 2014 July: Black Panthers (1968 doc.), 2014 October: Art on Screen: A Conversation with Agnès Varda, 2015 September: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), 2017 April: Agnès Varda’s Art of Being There, 2017 April: AGNÈS VARDA with Alexandra Juhasz, 2017 August: Agnès Varda on her life and work - Artforum, 2017 October: Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience, 2018 March: Faces Places - Agnès Varda and JR (2017), 2018 July: Vagabond (1985), 2019 March: Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90, 2019 April: Mur Murs (1980)

Sonny Stitt ‎– The Last Stitt Sessions Vol. 1 & 2 (1984)

"It is difficult to believe after listening to this two-CD set, that Sonny Stitt only had six weeks left in his life; he already had cancer but did not know it. Switching between tenor and alto, Stitt on the first disc is heard in top form with pianist Junior Mance, bassist George Duvivier, and drummer Jimmy Cobb while the second CD (recorded the following day) adds trumpeter Bill Hardman and has Walter Davis in Mance's place. As was typical of Stitt's career, the music throughout is high-quality bebop with the saxophonist stretching out creatively over common chord changes. This double CD (a straight reissue of two single LPs) shows that Sonny Stitt went out on top."
allmusuc (Audio)
Discogs
amazon
YouTube: The Last Sessions, Vols 1&2 1:11:55

2018 March: Stitt Meets Brother Jack (1962), 2019 February: Sonny Stitt Plays Jimmy Giuffre Arrangements (1959), 2019 June: Personal Appearance (1957)

The Stay At Home Museum: Your Private, Guided Tours of Rubens, Bruegel & Other Flemish Masters

Bruegel walk
"Of the many world class museums treating a stuck-at-home public to virtual tours of their collections, none inspire the resolve for future travel as the Stay At Home Museum, an initiative of the Flanders tourism board. Before the COVID-19 epidemic response demanded the temporary shuttering of all such attractions, the region was entering the final year of a 3-year festival celebrating such Flemish masters as Jan Van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, and Peter Paul Rubens. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

The Islamic History of Coffee

"It is Ramadan, the holy month of Islam, which means that observant Muslims will be fasting from dawn till dusk. Fasting is one of the pillars of Islam, and is practiced to understand the lived realities of the poor and underfed, while also disciplining the spirit and the mind. Muslims rise in the early hours of the morning for a ritual meal, followed by a day of abstinence—not just from food and water, but also from swearing, fighting, lying, and all stimulants. That includes coffee, at least until sunset. Despite the spiritual inducements to forgive during this holy month, there is an especially vicious bone I have to pick with how the subject of coffee is written about. ..."
Omer Aziz

2010 September: Espresso, April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso

Diplomacy (game)

"Diplomacy is an American strategic board game created by Allan B. Calhamer in 1954 and released commercially in the United States in 1959. Its main distinctions from most board wargames are its negotiation phases (players spend much of their time forming and betraying alliances with other players and forming beneficial strategies) and the absence of dice and other game elements that produce random effects. Set in Europe in the years leading to the Great War, Diplomacy is played by two to seven players, each controlling the armed forces of a major European power (or, with fewer players, multiple powers). ..."
Wikipedia
Diplomacy: The Map That Ruined a Thousand Friendships
The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds
The Game of Diplomacy
YouTube: "Diplowar" Diplomacy Commentary January 2017 (Full)