Portland Protest Tactics: Umbrellas, Pool Noodles and Fire

Federal forces and protesters clashed near the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., early Wednesday.
"PORTLAND, Ore. — Shields were made of pool noodles, umbrellas and sleds. The body armor was pieced together with bicycle helmets and football pads. The weapons included water bottles and cigarette lighters. Facing federal forces who came to Portland to subdue them, many of the city’s protesters have taken to the streets this week with items scrounged from home. Then they have assembled at the federal courthouse each night with sometimes starkly different visions of how to put their tools to use. In 55 consecutive nights of protest in Portland, no two have been alike. The protests began on May 29, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. ..."
NY Times (Video)
***NY Times: Federal Officers Hit Portland Mayor With Tear Gas (Video)
NY Times: Chaotic Scenes in Portland as Backlash to Federal Deployment Grows (Video)
NY Times: A Navy Veteran Had a Question for the Feds in Portland. They Beat Him in Response. (Video)
NY Times: From Antifa to Mothers in Helmets, Diverse Elements Fuel Portland Protests (Video)

Chaotic scenes continued to play out in Portland, Ore., early Wednesday amid the growing backlash to the presence of camouflaged federal agents.

The Great Migration - Baltimore Magazine

"Jacob Logan saw an opportunity. It was 1945, and Cherry Hill was finally being developed to alleviate housing shortages for the Black veterans and World War II defense workers that had flooded into Baltimore. After years of delays because of white backlash at other proposed sites, the Cherry Hill project—the first suburban-style planned community for African Americans, and perhaps most conspicuous example of residential segregation by design ever in the United States—went up quickly once it got the go-ahead. Families rushed into the new rowhouses and apartment buildings before basic infrastructure, such as a school, shopping center, or grocery store, were even in place. Originally from the rural South, Logan worked at the Bethlehem-Fairfield docks, having come to Baltimore during the war to build Liberty ships. Despite a fifth-grade education, he’d also managed to save and invest in a small corner grocery in a nearby Black section of South Baltimore by the time construction in Cherry Hill began. ..."
Baltimore Magazine

Map of The Great Migration

Army of Shadows - Jean-Pierre Melville (1969)

Lino Ventura plays Philippe Gerbier, immediate commander of a French Resistance group whose leader is largely unknown among the ranks.
"The most personal film by the underworld poet Jean-Pierre Melville, who had participated in the French Resistance himself, this tragic masterpiece, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel, recounts the struggles and sacrifices of those who fought in the Resistance. Lino Ventura, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and the incomparable Simone Signoret star as intrepid underground fighters who must grapple with their conception of honor in their battle against Hitler’s regime. Long underappreciated in France and unseen in the United States, the atmospheric and gripping thriller Army of Shadows is now widely recognized as the summit of Melville’s career, channeling the exquisite minimalism of his gangster films to create an unsparing tale of defiance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds."
Criterion (Video)
W - Army of Shadows
Roger Ebert: Existential Resistance
NY Times: 'Army of Shadows' Takes a Hard Look at a Horrible and Marvelous Time (April 2006)
YouTube: Army of Shadows - Trailer

2015 January: Le Cercle Rouge (1970), 2017 June: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Cinema of Resistance, 2017 November: Un Flic (1972), 2018 November: Two Men in Manhattan (1959), 2020 June: Jean-Pierre Melville: Who does that for anyone?

Bernadette Mayer - Memory

"'Look at very small things with your eyes / & stay warm,' wrote Bernadette Mayer, addressing herself in the 1968 poem 'The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica.' 'Nothing outside can cure you but everything’s outside,' she continues. For the past five decades, Mayer, the author of more than 30 volumes, has marked herself as a cataloguer par excellence of everyday life, attuned to the rhythms of the world and her position as an artist in it. Steeped in the conceptualism of the 1970s, her early work eschewed the boundaries of genre and form to capture life’s grand moments and its minute details. In 1971, then age 26, she set out to synthesize such experiences in an artistic investigation of memory by recording the world as she lived it over the course of a single month. ..."
The Nation: An Emotional Science Project - Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.
Everyday Life, Revisited—with Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
Locus Solus: The New York School of Poets - Bernadette Mayer’s “Memory” as an “Everyday-Life Project”
Brooklyn Rail - On Memory : Bernadette Mayer with Phillip Griffith
ARTFORUM - Interviews, Bernadette Mayer (Video)
amazon

2008 December: Bernadette Mayer, 2016 June: Thirteen poems by Bernadette Mayer, 2019 June: The Poetry Project’s Half-Century of Dissent

Best Reggae Producers: 10 Pioneers Of Jamaica’s Musical Legacy

King Tubby
"The best reggae producers pioneered new sounds and recording techniques. They also ensured that Jamaica was recognized as a country capable of creating worldwide stars. From helping to sow the seeds of hip-hop to ushering in the 'version,' or creating utterly unique music that couldn’t have been made by anyone else, in any other place, the best reggae producers deserve to be held up alongside any other sonic innovators in musical history. Here are the best reggae producers of all time. Think we’ve left someone off the list? Let us know in the comments section." Duke Reid, Coxsone Dodd, Dandy Livingstone, Lee “Scratch” Perry, King Tubby, King Jammy, Harry Mudie, Leslie Kong, Keith Hudson, Rupie Edwards.
udiscover (Video)

Lee “Scratch” Perry

Rereading Mrs. Dalloway at the Same Age as Mrs. Dalloway

"Recently, I began rereading Mrs. Dalloway for what was easily the eighth or tenth time. It might just be my favorite novel, the one on that changing list of Books-I-Proselytize-About which stays there, not that it needs my proselytizing. I had not read it in several years, so I opened it with a deep pleasure, an anticipation of how lost I would become in it, how enveloped by the sensations and the emotions and the sentences themselves. But when I reached the passage above, early in the book, I saw that something had changed. I was now Clarissa’s age exactly. ..."
LitHub
LA Review - Me and Mrs Dalloway: On Losing My Mother to COVID-19
The Criterion, Vol.4, No.1: About the Issue
[PDF] The Criterion, On Being Ill

Mrs Dalloway. Flower detail.

I Want You - Marvin Gaye (1976)

"Marvin Gaye’s I Want You was originally released 40 years ago this month, and the timing feels somewhat fitting given today’s essential dialogue about the existential value of black life. You can’t make a convincing argument that black lives matter if you’re not also willing to acknowledge that black sexuality, romance, and love—aspects that have been historically threatened, circumscribed, and limited by the horrors of slavery and legally enforced systems of segregation and brutality—matter too. ... Like no other record before or since, I Want You captures the distilled feeling and aesthetics of black sensuality, sex, and simmering erotic desire—right down to the seductive bump ‘n’ grind cover art by the late great Ernie Barnes. ..."
I Want You Still: Celebrating 40 Years of Marvin Gaye’s Sensual Classic (Video)
W - I Want You (Marvin Gaye album)
Guardian - Ernie Barnes: the overlooked legacy of the athlete turned celebrity artist, W - Ernie Barnes
Discogs (Video), amazon
YouTube: I want you 1976 (Virus Mix), I Want You 1976 Soul Purrfection Version, I want you extended remix 62889, I Want You (Remix) (Mike Maurro Mix)

Ernie Barnes

2016 July: "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" (1971), 2011 October: What's Going On

Debatable: Is open debate under threat?

Noam Chomsky, left, and J.K. Rowling
"Last week, 153 writers, artists and academics — including J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky and Nell Irvin Painter — signed an open letter in Harper’s Magazine warning of a threat to intellectual life in the United States. 'The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,' the letter reads, condemning 'a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.' ..."
NY Times (Video)

French TEE carriages and posters around 1970

Un nouveau Mistral
"In the late 1960s domestic long-distance trains were added to the Trans Europ Express (TEE) network of first-class trains. Paul Arzens designed colorful TEE carriages and sharp-cut locomotives for the French national railways. Matching posters for these SNCF carriages were created by graphic designer Philippe Foré. He played with lines and colors to express speed and strength. The posters promoted legendary trains such as the Mistral and Capitole. ..."
RETOURS
RETOURS: The tracks of two Alpinists
RETOURS: The New Travel Land

Mac McRaw: 60 Raw Ones – Straight Out The SP!

"Mac McRaw is back once again with a new project for all the B-Boys, B-Girls, DJs, Producers, Breakers, and all those who love the classic sounds coming straight out of the SP1200. Crafting beats that snap necks and wreck shop, Mac gives us 60 raw beats from 1993 to 2020. These beats are all on one disk, are ten seconds only and run like a mix tape. The cool thing is that they run from slowest to fastest beat, 84 BPM to 120 BPM. Inter-dispersed with SP1200 lyric samples and drops from legendary DJs and producers like Audessey, Breakbeat Lou, Boogie Blind, Chucky Smash, Danny Dan The Beatman, DJ Nu-Mark, Dooley-O, Forrest Getem Gump, Gensu Dean, Johnny Juice, J-Zone, Lewis Parker, Mr Supreme, Mr Walt, Oxygen, Phill Most Chill, Skeme Richards, and UGeorge, this is one mix tape we can definitely get behind here in 2020. ..."
flea market funk (Audio)
bandcamp (Audio)
AE Productions (Audio)
Discogs

On Lessons From August Wilson’s Jitney

"Jitney ran for a limited revival at the Mark Taper Forum prior to the quarantines that recently swept through L.A. County. ... A part of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Century Cycle' of plays, meant to cover 100 years of Black life in Pittsburgh, Jitney, written in 1979 and first performed in 1982, remains eerily prescient for the times we find ourselves in now. Set in 1977, the play follows a cab station in Pittsburgh, where several Black American drivers operate ‘jitneys’ – or unlicensed taxis – as vehicle services for the poor Black community where ‘official’ cabs will not go. Each driver has his own personal burdens to bear: the youngest, Youngblood, is a hot-tempered Vietnam veteran attempting to save money to buy a house for himself, his girlfriend, and their young child. ..."
Riot Material
KPBSAugust Wilson’s ‘Jitney’ Depicts The Mundane And Finds Something Profound (Audio)
W - Jitney (play)
[PDF] Jitney

L-R: Ray Anthony Thomas (as Turnbo), Steven Anthony Jones (as Becker), Anthony Chisholm (Fielding), Keith Randolph Smith (Doub) and Amari Cheatom (Youngblood) in August Wilson’s Jitney, directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

2017 July: Fences (2016), 2017 August: The Ground on Which I Stand, a Speech on Black Theatre and Performance (1992), 2018 July: Pittsburgh Cycle, 2018 August: August Wilson in St. Paul: A MN Original Special, 2020 May: August Wilson's Blues Poetry

Black Atlantic lives

Conakry, Guinea.
"Last month, the brother of George Floyd appealed to the UN Human Rights Council to stop racist violence and the killing of black people in the US. While the current US administration continues to ignore and amplify systemic racism, Philonise Floyd looked well beyond his national borders for help. As he declared, 'Black lives do not matter in the United States of America.' Floyd’s statement comes alongside weeks of anti-racist protests in cities across the world, with activists and ordinary citizens mobilized and enraged by events in the US. However, this 'global conversation' on American racial injustice is not a new one. ... The example of a small country like Guinea shows how intimately black Atlantic lives are connected through shared pain, protest, and hope. ..."
Africa is a Country
W - Guinea

Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History

The Chronological Star of the World, An Entertaining Game, published by John Marshall of London, 1818
"Players moving pieces along a track to be first to reach a goal was the archetypal board game format of the 18th and 19th centuries. Alex Andriesse looks at one popular incarnation in which these pieces progress chronologically through history itself, usually with some not-so-subtle ideological, moral, or national ideal as the object of the game. ..."
The Public Domain Review

Healthy Living, created by the doctors and textbook authors K. W. Lapin and A. S. Berljand, and published by the Soviet Commission on Public Health, Rostov-on-Don or Moscow, 1926

The Sopranos - Season 1

"The first season of The Sopranos aired on HBO from January 10 to April 4, 1999.  ... The season introduces DiMeo Crime Family Capo Tony Soprano and his family, as well as his troubled relationship with his mother Livia. Also troubled is his relationship with his Uncle Junior, who becomes locked in a power struggle with Tony after the death of the Crime Family Boss, Jackie Aprile. Tony also begins therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi after his panic attacks become more frequent. Meanwhile, Tony's daughter Meadow becomes aware of her father's true profession while preparing to get into college, and Tony's nephew Christopher attempts to write a screenplay about his crime life and anxiously awaits becoming a made man. Due to Junior's plotting of an assassination, Tony also gets embroiled in a plot against childhood friend Artie Bucco, a charming but obsequious restaurateur. ..."
W - The Sopranos (season 1)
W - Tony Soprano, W - Carmela Soprano, W - Jennifer Melfi
RecapGuide: The Sopranos - Season 1
The Sopranos: 10 Best Episodes Of Season 1, According To IMDb
Top 5 Episodes: The Sopranos – Season 1 (Video)
Season 1 - Music (Video)
YouTube: The Sopranos Dictionary | HBO, Episode 1 Ducks Depart The Pool & Tony Has a Panic Attack

Orbital Patterns Goes Deep

"'A Vessel in the Fog,' uploaded to the YouTube channel of the musician who goes by Orbital Patterns just this Monday, is a live ambient piece. Textures twist and turn like clouds of smoke, turning in the air before vaporizing and being replaced by something else, something similar and yet apart. There’s numerous such elements at any given time, packed like sediment in a vibrant terrarium: surface noise, and muffled chords, and crunchy percussives like fall leaves under foot, and what sounds like psychedelic guitar riffs going round and round. It’s a beautiful piece, gaining depth as it goes, a deep bass tone slowly making itself heard and lending a slow, thoughtful pace to what might otherwise be an understated roil. It is clearly, so to speak, the title vessel. Video originally posted at youtube.com. More at instagram.com/0rbitalpatterns and twitter.com/orbitalpatterns."
disquiet (Video)
YouTube: A Vessel In The Fog/eurorack modular lofi ambient, Ellipsis/eurorack modular lofi ambient, Full Of Unspoken Words/eurorack modular lofi ambient, Cant Push The Sun/eurorack modular lofi ambient, Torn From The Morning/eurorack modular lofi ambient

Baadasssss Songs: A History Of Blaxploitation Soundtracks

"Its title might read more like a Blaxploitation spoof rather than the real deal, but, when it was released in April 1971, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss song ushered in a whole new era of filmmaking. Despite a rudimentary plot – even by the standards of the time – the fact that writer, director, actor and musician Mario Van Peebles masterminded, starred in and financed the whole thing himself proved that a new genre of film could attract a black audience to the cinemas – and that that same audience could, finally, see characters they related to up on the big screen. Released during funk music’s heyday, the film also boasted a soundtrack written by Peebles and performed by nascent funk group Earth, Wind And Fire. This marriage of sound and vision would help to define Blaxploitation films, as a host of artists clamoured to assert their street cred and soundtrack these cinematic tales of ghetto life. ..."
udiscover (Audio/Video)

C/2020 (NEOWISE)

Finding Charts
"C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) or Comet NEOWISE is a retrograde comet with a near-parabolic orbit discovered on March 27, 2020, by astronomers using the NEOWISE space telescope. At that time, it was a 10th-magnitude comet, located 2 AU (300 million km; 190 million mi) away from the Sun and 1.7 AU (250 million km; 160 million mi) away from Earth. By July 2020, it was bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. It is one of the brightest comets in the northern hemisphere since Comet Hale–Bopp in 1997. Under dark skies, it can be clearly seen with the naked eye and might remain visible to the naked eye throughout most of July 2020. ... For observers in the northern hemisphere, in the morning, the comet appears low above the north-eastern horizon, below Capella. In the evening, the comet can be seen low in the north-western sky. ..."
W - C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), W - NEOWISE (pre-hibernation)
How to see Comet NEOWISE
Stellarium Astronomy Software
NASA: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Spies Newly-Discovered Comet NEOWISE
YouTube: I filmed Comet Neowise with my 12 inch Telescope !!!!, How to view comet NEOWISE at night, and in the morning

Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE from Slovakia, Europe.

‘We Have One Last Chance to Save America’: This Powerful New Anti-Trump Ad Will Bring Tears to Your Eyes

"Eleven Films released a powerful new anti-Trump ad on Thursday, featuring footage from recent protests calling for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. 'In November, we have one last chance to save America. #VoteForOurLives,' Eleven Films wrote above the ad on Twitter, where it quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Titled 'The Dangerous Ones', the two-minute, 29-second ad is set to the song of the same name, performed by Kasey Anderson. It was funded by the Resistance. 'We’re almost there,' a title screen reads near the end of the ad. 'We’ve been through hell. We must vote.' Watch it below."
TOWLEROAD (Video)
YouTube: Eleven Films
YouTube: BREAKING The Dangerous Ones

Psychedelic Blues: When The Blues Turned On And Tuned Out

"After psychedelia came to a boil in the late 60s, the blues and rock heroes of the 50s took a brief but thrilling walk on the wild side, with fuzz guitars, wah-wah effects, and epic jams to the fore. It was the Age of Aquarius, and the blues was busy being psychedelicized. The psychedelic blues period for Chicago titans like Muddy and Wolf and first-generation rock’n’rollers like Bo, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard wasn’t a long one but it blasted a hole in preconceptions on either side of the stylistic fence. And the impact was as unforeseen as it was long-lasting. Baby boomer rockers and Chicago blues originators spent a good portion of the 60s doing a dizzying do-si-do together. ... But by the late 60s, the countercultural explosion had pulled rock fans further from away the genre’s musical roots, so a few savvy souls decided to do something about it. ..."
udiscover (Video/Audio)

Exploring Wes Anderson’s wonderful cinematic commercials

"American filmmaker Wes Anderson is easily one of the most unique artistic voices in contemporary cinema. Now famous for his beautiful films such as Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel and more, his work stands out in cinematic tradition because of their eccentric visual and narrative styles. Some critics even cite him as the 'modern-day example of an auteur'. The critically acclaimed director is not just responsible for making cinematic masterpieces. Over the course of his career, Anderson has also directed some of the best commercials of the 21st century for top companies like American Express, Prada, Hyundai and AT&T. The clips also feature a few of his biggest collaborators such as actors Jason Schwartzman and Adrian Brody, cinematographer Robert Yoeman and co-writer Roman Coppola. Here are some of the brilliant commercials that Wes Anderson directed. ..."
FAR OUT (Video)

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...., 2018 September: Isle of Dogs (2018), 2020 May: Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie

How Cannonball Adderley Shared the Joy of Jazz

"Jazz has always had big personalities. In the mid-20th century, an explosion of major players became as well known for their personal quirks as for their revolutionary techniques and compositions. Monk’s endearing oddness, Miles Davis’ brooding bad temper, Charles Mingus’ exuberant shouts and rages, Ornette Coleman’s cryptic philosophizing, Coltrane’s gentle mysticism…. These were not only the jazz world’s greatest players; they were also some of the century’s most interesting people. The same can be said for Julian Edwin 'Cannonball' Adderley, saxophonist and bandleader who was heralded as a new Charlie Parker on arrival in the New York scene from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where he had worked as a popular high school band director and local musician before deciding to pursue graduate studies. Music had other plans for him. ..."
Open Culture (Video)

2018 March: Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago (1959)

Bicycle gearing

"Bicycle gearing is the aspect of a bicycle drivetrain that determines the relation between the cadence, the rate at which the rider pedals, and the rate at which the drive wheel turns. On some bicycles there is only one gear and, therefore, the gear ratio is fixed, but most modern bicycles have multiple gears and thus multiple gear ratios. A shifting mechanism allows selection of the appropriate gear ratio for efficiency or comfort under the prevailing circumstances: for example, it may be comfortable to use a high gear when cycling downhill, a medium gear when cycling on a flat road, and a low gear when cycling uphill. Different gear ratios and gear ranges are appropriate for different people and styles of cycling. ..."
W - Bicycle gearing
W - Bicycle
YouTube: Bicycle Documentary, How Do Bicycle Gears Actually WORK?

The Blue Coxsone Box Set (2020)

"Clement ‘sir Coxsone’ Dodd has made his mark as one of the major players in the reggae scene. With the help of his label, Studio One, he has crossed all the styles close to reggae, such as rocksteady, ragga and dub. Coxsone has launched the careers of many artists like Bob Marley & The Wailers, Ken Boothe, Toots And The Maytals and The Skatalites among others. Studio One will be releasing a brand new 6×7″ box set in July containing singles released under the sub-label Coxsone Records, entitled 'The Blue Coxsone Box Set'. ... This limited edition box set features six rare singles all reproduced on the original Blue Coxsone label featuring essential tunes from Joe Higgs, Winston Jarrett, The Sound Dimension, The Melodians and other Studio One icons. ..."
Studio One releases a box set of rare Coxsone Records singles (Audio)
Various – The Blue Coxsone Box Set (Audio)
bandcamp (Audio)

The Last Tocquevillian

A Deck of Cards Dating Back to the French Revolution Where Kings Have Been Replaced With Wise Men (Solo, Plato, Cato, & Brutus), and Queens With Virtues (Justice, Union, Prudence, & Force). Leo S. Olschki,La Bibliofilia, Firenze : Giuseppe Boffito, 1906
"François Furet, who passed away twenty years ago this year, was a central figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life. Historian of the French Revolution, he challenged the social interpretation that presented the uprising as an expression of class struggle, a symptom of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Instead, Furet’s political interpretation portrayed the revolution as the triumph of a Manichaean ideology that almost inevitably led to the violence that followed. Furet first advanced this perspective in Interpreting the French Revolution (1978), which mobilized the then-ascendant French critique of totalitarianism to paint the event as proto-totalitarian and thereby discredit the revolutionary tradition. ..."
Jacobin
W - François Furet
W - Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America

Richard Thompson - Bloody Noses (EP 2020)

"... It is a six track EP by Richard Thompson called 'Bloody Noses' that is available – due to coronavirus – on download and streaming only. Hopefully a physical copy will appear at some stage. It is brand new and I have just bought the download from Bandcamp. It cost me $7.20 – you can pay more if you want. Now I regard Richard Thompson as not only one of the great singer song writers but also the finest guitarist..ever. Acoustic or electric, he is simply brilliant. And 'Bloody Noses' is an acoustic EP - sounds like Richard has multi - tracked rhythm & lead – at least on the first song 'As Soon As You Hear The Bell' which is a terrific opener- the second track 'If I Could Live My Live Again' – which rocks along nicely and is of course beautifully played, is to my ears, just Richard. ..."
rateyourmusic
bandcamp (Audio)
Discogs
YouTube: Facebook Live Concert #4

2011 July: Shoot Out the Lights - Richard and Linda Thompson, 2012 February: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, 2014 March: Videowest 81, 2015 October: Richard & Linda Thompson - Rafferty's Folly (1980), 2015 December: Rumor and Sigh (1991), 2016 March: Hand of Kindness (1983), 2018 December: You? Me? Us? (1996), 2019 July: Across a Crowded Room—Live at Barrymore’s 1985

David Brazil - A Holy Forest: 2008

"... I spent a few hours that afternoon rooting around in those bags, which is where I discovered a copy of the Coach House edition of Robin Blaser’s The Holy Forest with its lovely mysterious cover of leafy shadows. Brenda Iijima had advised me when I departed for California that I should anticipate 'lemon trees, succulents, and the ghost of Jack Spicer,' and I knew Blaser’s name from reading Spicer — specifically, his afterword essay in the Black Sparrow Collected Poems, which I’d had to borrow back in Ithaca, New York, from the poet Joshua Corey in whose library I had spotted it, because it, too, was fabulously expensive, and remained so until Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi’s new edition, My Vocabulary Did This To Me, arrived years later. ..."
Jacket2
 
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, 2019 November: The Moth Poem (1963)

Tommy "Madman" Jones

"... The Mad label came out of the rich "honkers and barwalkers" tradition in Chicago. Tenor saxophonists, in emulation of the great Illinois Jacquet's 'Flying Home,' would jump up on the bars and squall and blast on their horns. If any one tenor sax blower epitomized this tradition it would have to be Tommy 'Madman' Jones, who for nearly three decades decades entertained Chicago nightclub audiences with wild exuberant performances on his instrument. In the 1940s and 1950s, Jones was generally considered a jazz player, and his bebop heritage is frequently audible on his records. But he had a strong orientation toward the blues (he was sometimes billed as 'Madman Jones and his Blue Saxophone'), and his style exhibited such hard blowing and energy that it could just as easily be considered rhythm and blues. Jones was credited for inventing a unique amplifier for the saxophone, which he later gave aspiring honkers and barwalkers lessons on. He made a few records in the 1940s and 1950s, but he built his reputation mainly as a nightclub performer. ..."
The Mad and M&M Labels
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Hi Fi Apartment, Snake Charmer (Jungle Exotica), "Jess" one mo' time, Four Shades Of Rhythm - Come Here, Bow Legs

Readings on Racism, White Supremacy, and Police Violence in America

"The events of the last week—nationwide protests catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer and the subsequent wave of police violence released upon the streets of America—have revealed yet again this country’s deeply rooted racism and its predisposition to state violence. It is hard to know what the next week will bring—let alone the next five months—but as we imagine a way forward it is important to have a grounding in the past. Below you’ll find selected essays we’ve published over the last five years—historical, personal, political—that explore what it means to be Black in a country founded in white supremacy and racial injustice. ..."
LitHub

On Eric Garner, Jean-Michel Basquiat and police brutality as an American tradition.

An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

"No tour of Istanbul can fail to include Hagia Sophia. The same is true enough of the British Museum in London or the Louvre in Paris, but Hagia Sophia is more than a museum: it's also spent different stretches of its near-millennium-and-a-half of existence as an Eastern Orthodox cathedral, a Roman Catholic cathedral, and a mosque. Stripped of its religious function in the mid-1930s by the administration of President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, remembered for his creation of a secular Turkish republic, the majestic building has spent the past 85 years as not just a museum but the country's top tourist attraction. Now, according to a decree issued last week by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hagia Sophia will become a mosque again. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
W - Hagia Sophia
Hagia Sophia Architecture and Dome Features
123rf

Defending One Brooklyn Brownstone Is Just the Beginning

Demonstrators outside of 1214 Dean Street.
"'This is very lovely,' Imani Henry said, stepping out of the gate at 1214 Dean Street in Brooklyn. Though it was past midnight, a crowd of over 30 remained of those who had gathered that night to defend the tenants of the building, in the Crown Heights neighborhood, against an illegal eviction. 'A typical part of our lives is illegal lockouts,' said Henry, the founder of Equality for Flatbush (E4F), the anti-gentrification and anti-police-brutality organization that initially sent out a call to action. For most New York City tenants, the most they can do in that situation is make a call to 311, the city’s government services line, and hope to be connected with a housing lawyer. But that night was unusual. Within three hours, almost 100 people assembled outside the house, demanding that the tenants be allowed to stay in their homes. Even after a season under the threat of the coronavirus and a month of racial justice uprisings, this felt new—and, as one person at the blockade put it, like 'the start of a long summer.' ..."
The Nation
Editorial: Checking My Black Privilege While Apartment Hunting in Brooklyn (Aug. 30, 2017)
NY Times: Gentrification in a Brooklyn Neighborhood Forces Residents to Move On (Nov. 27, 2015)
NY Times: As Brooklyn Gentrifies, Some Neighborhoods Are Being Left Behind (July 8, 2012)

2014 April: Brownstone, 2014 July: Brooklyn Heights, 2015 November: The old-school soda sign of a Brooklyn grocery, 2015 May: Park Slope and the Story of Brownstone Brooklyn, 2016 March: Spring comes to brownstone Brooklyn in 1949, 2018 January: The loveliness of New York’s skinny brownstones, 2020 July: A Guide to Brooklyn’s Coolest Neighborhoods

Beyond the Milky Way, a Galactic Wall

The starry core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy, in an infrared image from NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. Obscured behind it is the South Pole Wall, a curtain of thousands of galaxies across at least 700 million light-years.
"Astronomers have discovered that there is a vast wall across the southern border of the local cosmos. The South Pole Wall, as it is known, consists of thousands of galaxies — beehives of trillions of stars and dark worlds, as well as dust and gas — aligned in a curtain arcing across at least 700 million light-years of space. It winds behind the dust, gas and stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, from the constellation Perseus in the Northern Hemisphere to the constellation Apus in the far south. It is so massive that it perturbs the local expansion of the universe. But don’t bother trying to see it. The entire conglomeration is behind the Milky Way, in what astronomers quaintly call the zone of avoidance. ..."
NY Times
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A projection of the South Pole Wall in celestial coordinates. The plane of the Milky Way is shown by a dust map in shades of grey; what lies behind it is obscured from direct observation.