The Complete Guide to Middle-earth - Robert Foster (1971)

"The Complete Guide to Middle-earth is a reference book for the fictional universe of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, compiled and edited by Robert Foster. Originally published in 1971 as A Guide to Middle-Earth, before the publication of The Silmarillion, the first edition contained only information from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. In 1978, a new edition (The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: from The Hobbit to The Silmarillion), containing material from The Silmarillion, was published. ..."
Tolkien Gateway
W - The Complete Guide to Middle-earth
LOTR Project
amazon
W - Middle-earth
YouTube: Tolkien Maps Interview

2010 January: The Lord of the Rings, 2018 January: An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More, 2019 January: The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More, 2020 January: Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve

Gil Scott-Heron ‎– We’re New Again (A Reimagining By Makaya McCraven)

"XL Recordings celebrates the 10 year anniversary of the late great Gil Scott-Heron’s final studio recording I’m New Here, prior to his passing in May of 2011, with a re-worked version of the album by visionary Chicago-based composer, producer, and drummer Makaya McCraven, titled We’re New Again. Where the original 2010 album heavily featured Scott-Heron’s deep baritone vocals and poetry, combined with minimal electronic beats by producer Richard Russell, these new renditions have much more of an analog jazz feel, incorporating McCraven’s signature production style of blending together newly recorded instrumental backing grooves with spliced up samples, and re-working it all together in post-production. ..."
beat caffeine: Makaya McCraven brings new life to Gil Scott-Heron’s final recording (Audio)
NY Times: Gil Scott-Heron’s Legacy Is a Work in Progress
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: I'm New Here, New York is Killing Me, I'll Take Care of You, This Can't Be Real, Running

2017 January: Pieces of a Man (1971), 2017 April: Winter in America - Gil Scott-Heron / Brian Jackson (1974), 2018 February: I'm New Here (2010), 2019 May: "The Bottle" - Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson (1974)

How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters

For Virginia Woolf, correspondence became a way to transcend a climate of illness—to envision a future she couldn’t see.
"Hours after watching her twenty-six-year-old brother die, Virginia Stephen wrote a letter to one of her dearest friends. In that letter, written on November 20, 1906, she did not utter a word about her brother’s death; she did not so much as mention his name. Virginia was twenty-four—six years from marrying and becoming Virginia Woolf, nine years from publishing her first novel. She and her three siblings had just returned from a trip to Greece and Turkey, which had ended in disaster. Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s eldest brother, had been infected with typhoid. ..."
New Yorker

2019 April: Bloomsbury Group, 2019 April: Feminize Your Canon: Violet Trefusis

Unwanted Truths: Inside Trump’s Battles With U.S. Intelligence Agencies

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, via Getty Images
"In early July of last year, the first draft of a classified document known as a National Intelligence Estimate circulated among key members of the agencies making up the U.S. intelligence community. N.I.E.s are intended to be that community’s most authoritative class of top-secret document, reflecting its consensus judgment on national-security matters ranging from Iran’s nuclear capabilities to global terrorism. The draft of the July 2019 N.I.E. ran to about 15 pages, with another 10 pages of appendices and source notes.According to multiple officials who saw it, the document discussed Russia’s ongoing efforts to influence U.S. elections: the 2020 presidential contest and 2024’s as well. ..."
NY Times

The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr, c1507, by Giovanni Bellini

"St Peter Martyr was a medieval inquisitor who, it is said, was murdered by the heretics he was so good at catching. Bellini’s painting makes the story both real and fairytale-like with its eerie setting in a shady woodland. In this dark and obscure wood, Saint Peter and a companion are set upon by the medieval equivalent of 'terrorists', whose opposition to the Catholic religious order is equated with brutality and evil. The assassins are members of the Cathar sect, which believed the material world was utterly evil; it was popular in parts of south-western France between the 12th and 14th centuries. Bellini’s juxtaposition of pastoral landscape and extreme violence makes this propaganda story utterly compelling. ..."
The National Gallery (Video)
W - The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr

Gregory Isaacs - Slum In Dub (1978)

"1978 Slum In Dub album re-issued on CD and 180 gram vinyl in its original cover. Gregory Isaacs, the Cool Ruler, or Lonely Lover, the man with the laconic voice and equally laconic delivery who sings as easily of matters of the heart or earthly horrors is well known to all Jamaican enthusiasts, but few realise that he also sat the other side of the studio glass and was a very proficient producer too. Gregory Isaacs wrote much of his own work and also produced it, so it shouldn’t be any surprise to find that this dub album consisting of mainly Mr Isaacs’s work was produced by him too. Although the mixing, which is of course the major enjoyment factor of any dub album, was done by a talented protégée of King Tubby; Lloyd ‘Jammy’ James who started out as ‘Prince’ but was promoted to ‘King’ a few years later. ..."
Secret Records
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Party In The Slum + Dub 1978, Slum (In Dub) 14 videos

Cornerstone

A cornerstone with bronze relief images
"The cornerstone (or foundation stone or setting stone) is the first stone set in the construction of a masonry foundation. All other stones will be set in reference to this stone, thus determining the position of the entire structure. Over time a cornerstone became a ceremonial masonry stone, or replica, set in a prominent location on the outside of a building, with an inscription on the stone indicating the construction dates of the building and the names of architect, builder, and other significant individuals. The rite of laying a cornerstone is an important cultural component of eastern architecture and metaphorically in sacred architecture generally. Some cornerstones include time capsules from, or engravings commemorating, the time a particular building was built. ..."
Wikipedia

Ceremonial masonry stone of the Los Angeles Central Library building, laid in 1925

Hans-Joachim Roedelius ‎– Tape Archive 1973-1978

"In 2014, Hans-Joachim Roedelius' 80th birthday was celebrated with the release of an expansive triple-LP box set of unreleased material recorded throughout the 1970s, while he was active as a member of Cluster and Harmonia. By 2020, the box set was long out of print and unavailable on streaming services, so this single-disc version was released for anyone who missed out on the larger set. Roedelius constantly recorded in his own private studio whenever he wasn't working with his collaborators on their group projects, and he always kept the tape reels running, documenting his constant stream of ideas. These ten tracks play as a cohesive album rather than a selection of outtakes, and it's easily as good as any of Roedelius' solo records from the 1970s or '80s. ..."
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Tape Archive Essence 1973-1978 10 videos

New York’s Sidewalk Prophets Are Heirs of the Artisans of France’s Lascaux Caves

Green aliens with signs of empathy and solidarity for Black Lives Matter on Canal Street.
"About 17,000 years ago, in the caves of Lascaux, France, ancestors drew on grotto walls, depicting equines, stags, bison, aurochs and felines. They wanted to convey to other humans a political reality crucial to their survival: They shared their environment with other beings that looked and behaved differently from them. ... These portraits and discrete stories are not very different from our contemporary forums: the street art adorning boarded-up storefronts in New York City. They tell us about our shared political realities, the people we coexist with in social space and the ways in which our stories and fates are tied together. If you walk the streets of SoHo, the alleys of the Lower East Side, and heavily trafficked avenues in Brooklyn, as I did over the last few weeks, you will see these symbols and signs and might wonder at their meanings. ..."
NY Times
33 powerful Black Lives Matter murals

A prehistoric cave painting of stags, bison and horses in Lascaux, France.

Banjo Great Gordon Stone Celebrated With Posthumous Album

"... [Gordon] Stone, the celebrated but troubled Vermont banjo player, was discussing with Seven Days the perceived danger that his substance abuse had posed over the years to his friends, family, fellow musicians and anyone else who might rely on him. That included people like Biondo, a talented, ambitious fellow banjo player who in recent years had become 70-year-old Stone's friend and protégé — among other roles. ... Stone has long been regarded one of the finest banjo players of the late 20th century, frequently cited in the same breath as modern banjo icons Béla Fleck and Tony Trischka. Banjo fans know him as a stylistic trailblazer who was as comfortable in a traditional bluegrass or country setting as he was exploring funk, jazz, rock and world music. ..."
Seven Days (Video)

Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Céline Sciamma (2019)

"Céline Sciamma wants you to see that equality is sexy. In her drama 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire,' we watch as two women in 18th-century France fall in love. ... The story begins with an artist named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) being thrown around a tiny boat on her way to an island off the Brittany coast, where she’s been hired to paint an aristocrat, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). Héloïse’s suitor, who is from Milan, wants to see her portrait before he marries her, but she is decidedly not interested and has refused to pose. So Marianne is asked to deceive Héloïse, accompanying her on walks to the beach and then painting her from memory in secret. ..."
NY Times: How ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ Sees Power in Two Women in Love
W - Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Guardian: Portrait of a Lady on Fire review – mesmerised by the female gaze (Video)
New Yorker: “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” Is More Than a “Manifesto on the Female Gaze”
amazon
YouTube: Portrait of a Lady on Fire [Official Trailer]

Istanbul Captured in Beautiful Color Images from 1890: The Hagia Sophia, Topkaki Palace’s Imperial Gate & More

"Even those who know nothing else about Istanbul know that it used to be called Constantinople. The official renaming happened in 1930, meaning that the photographs you see here, all of which date from around 1890, were taken, strictly speaking, not in Istanbul but Constantinople. But under any name, and despite all the other changes that have occurred over the past 130 years, the Turkish metropolis on the Bosphorus remains recognizable as the gateway between East and West it has been throughout recorded history. This is thanks in part to its oldest landmarks, above all the cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum known as Hagia Sophia, pictured above. ..."
Open Culture

2016 May: Turkey’s Authoritarian Turn, 2016 July: How Turkey Came to This, 2017 March: As repression deepens, Turkish artists and intellectuals fear the worst, 2017 July: A Long March for Justice in Turkey, 2017 July: Radical Municipalism: The Future We Deserve, 2017 September: Istanbul: Memories and the City - Orhan Pamuk, 2018 January: Turkey’s State of Emergency, 2018 April: The Unlikely New Hero of Turkeys, 2018 June: How My Father’s Ideas Helped the Kurds Create a New Democracy, 2018 June: How Nietzsche Explains Turkey, 2018 August: The West Hoped for Democracy in Turkey. Erdogan Had Other Ideas., 2018 October: Turkish Officials Say Khashoggi Was Killed on Order of Saudi Leadership, 2019 October: Call for cultural and academic boycott of Turkey, 2020 July: An Introduction to Hagia Sophia: After 85 Years as a Museum, It’s Set to Become a Mosque Again

The Penguin Jazz Guide: The 1001 Best Albums

"Perhaps the music's slightly arcane nomenclature has something to do with it: modal jazz, free jazz, fusion, bebop. Where to start? Well, with the publication this week of the 10th edition of the Penguin Jazz Guide – subtitled 'The History of the Music in the 1001 Best Albums' - we now have an answer. In terms of navigating through the stylistic byways of jazz, you will not find a wiser, more considered or better-written companion. Published in 2008, the previous edition of the guide (then called The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings) clocked in at a whopping 1,600-plus pages. With something in the region of 14,000 CDs reviewed, this was clearly not a tome that was going to make it onto anyone's holiday reading list. ..."
theartsdesk (Audio)
allaboutjazz
amazon

Surviving a Weekend with the Wizard of Prog Rock

"... And yet, when I saw that the legendary progressive rock band King Crimson, in its eighth incarnation, was on tour again, I was reminded that there was one night, nearly thirty years ago, when I did play an instrument, in a band, before an audience, capably. And we were great. As much as anyone, the man responsible was Robert Fripp, King Crimson’s cerebral, brilliant, exacting, intimidating lead guitarist. In the summer of 1985, a full decade after King Crimson’s original proggy heyday had ended, I was a struggling freelance writer. One day, I got a call from Glenn O’Brien, an editor at the music magazine Spin. I could not have been more surprised, since in those pre-voicemail days I must have left Glenn dozens of messages that were seldom returned. ..."
New Yorker
W - Frippertronics, W - Guitar Craft
YouTube: Robert Fripp's Guitar Craft - Careful With That Axe - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

2010 April: Robert Fripp, 2011 September: Frippertronics, 2014 April: The New World 1986 (Frippertronics), 2017 September: The Essential Fripp & Eno (1994), 2020 June: Music for Quiet Moments (2009) 2012 January: Loop, 2012 May: Tape loops, 2017 September: Terry Riley On Tape Loops

Ishmael Reed - Blues City: A Walk in Oakland (2003)

"Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its twinkling sister city across the Bay, Oakland is itself an American wonder. The city is surrounded by and filled with natural beauty — mountains and hills and lakes and a bay — and architecture that mirrors its history as a Spanish mission, Gold Rush outpost, and home of the West’s most devious robber barons. Oakland is also a city of artists and blue-collar workers, the birthplace of the Black Panthers, neighbor to Berkeley, and home to a vibrant and volatile stew of immigrants and refugees. In Blues City: A Walk in Oakland, world renowned author Ishmael Reed provides a fascinating tour of an untamed, unruly western outpost set against the backdrop of political intrigues, ethnic rivalries, and a gentrification-obsessed mayor. ..."
Ishmael Reed, author of Blues City: A Walk in Oakland
My Neighborhood by Ishmael Reed, My Neighborhood, Part 2
amazon

2016 February: West Oakland - 1940s and ’50s, 2017 September: Mumbo Jumbo (1972)

New Order - The Perfect Kiss (1985), Bizarre Love Triangle (1986), Blue Monday (1983), Confusion (1983)

"'The Perfect Kiss' is a song by the English alternative dance and rock band New Order. It was recorded at Britannia Row Studios in London and released on 13 May 1985. It is the first New Order song to be included on a studio album, Low-Life, at the same time as its release as a single. The vinyl version has Factory catalogue number FAC 123 and the video has the opposite number, FAC 321. ... The song's themes include love 'We believe in a land of love' and death 'the perfect kiss is the kiss of death'. The overall meaning of the song is unclear to its writer today. In an interview with GQ magazine Bernard Sumner said 'I haven't a clue what this is about.' ..."
W - The Perfect Kiss, W - Bizarre Love Triangle, W - Blue Monday, W - Confusion
YouTube: The Perfect Kiss, Bizarre Love Triangle (Extended), Bizarre Love Triangle, Blue Monday [Extended Official], Confusion (Official Music Video), Confusion

2009 February: New Order, 2011 May: Movement, 2011 October: Low-Life, 2011 December: Brotherhood, 2012 May: Unknown Pleasures - Joy Division, 2012 September: Power, Corruption & Lies (1983), 2015 June: Believe In A Land Of Love: New Order's Low-Life 30 Years On, 2015 November: True Faith (1987), 2016 March: New Order, olden style: A unique take on Blue Monday

Camp Like Kerouac in a Fire Lookout Station

"In 1956, Jack Kerouac spent 63 days as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington State. His time at a tiny cabin perched at an elevation of 6,102 feet in the Cascade Range helped inspire his novels Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums. While the cabin isn’t open to the public, you can still follow in Kerouac’s footsteps and sleep close to the stars by renting one of dozens of U.S. Forest Service fire lookout stations across the West. For instance, there’s the Werner Peak Lookout cabin, at 6,960 feet in Montana’s Whitefish Mountains, or the Green Ridge Lookout tower, a 20-foot-tall structure located 2,000 feet above the Metolius River in Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest. ..."
Alta Online

2009 November: Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut, 2010 July: Kerouac's Copies of Floating Bear, 2011 March: Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show, 2013 September: On the Road - Jack Kerouac, 2014 May: “Walker Evans and Robert Frank – An Essay on Influence by Tod Papageorge” (1981), 2015 March: Pull My Daisy (1959), 2015 December: Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken, 2016 July: Mexico City Blues (1959), 2017 February: The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990), 2017 May: The Subterraneans (1958), 2017 June: The Town and the City (1950), 2018 January: Big Sur (1962), 2018 March: A Slightly Embarrassing Love for Jack Kerouac, 2019 March: Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Paintings:”..., 2020 April: Book of Dreams (1960)

P'town

"Provincetown /ˈprɒvɪnsˌtaʊn/ is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, in the United States. A small coastal resort town with a year-round population of just under 3,000, Provincetown has a summer population of as high as 60,000. Often called 'P-town' or 'P'town', the town is known for its beaches, harbor, artists, tourist industry, and its status as a vacation destination for the LGBT+ community. ... For nearly all of Provincetown's recorded history, life has revolved around the waterfront − especially the waterfront on its southern shore − which offers a naturally deep harbor with easy and safe boat access, plus natural protection from the wind and waves. An additional element of Provincetown's geography tremendously influenced the manner in which the town evolved: the town was physically isolated, being at the hard-to-reach tip of a long, narrow peninsula. ..."
Wikipedia
Provincetown: Cape Cod’s Most Popular Destination (Video)
Things to do in a day in Provincetown (Video)
YouTube: Provincetown: An eccentric's sanctuary

2018 January: Fine Arts Work Center

Spiritual Jazz Volume 11: SteepleChase (2020)

"Jazzman is releasing the eleventh instalment in its Spiritual Jazz compilation series, focusing on music from Copenhagen-based imprint SteepleChase. SteepleChase founder Nils Winther began by recording recording visiting Americans when they performed at jazz club Café Montmartre, later establishing the imprint in 1972 after encouragement from Jackie McLean, who would be the first artist to release on the label. With a particular focus on American artists who relocated to Europe, SteepleChase put out releases from the likes of Horace Parlan, Chet Baker, Dexter Gordon, Jackie McLean and Stan Getz. ..."
Jazzman announces new Spiritual Jazz compilation featuring SteepleChase (Video)
Jazzman Records dives into the vaults of SteepleChase on latest Spiritual Jazz compilation (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Spiritual Jazz 11: SteepleChase (Full Album, 2020)

Mary Lou Willliams

Debatable: Are we slipping into fascism?

"In a tweet on Thursday morning, President Trump floated the very bad idea of delaying the presidential election. (He does not have the legal authority to do so, though that doesn’t mean there are no reasons for concern — more on those here.) Within hours, the president’s statement was being condemned, by conservatives and progressives alike, as fascism. It’s a word that’s been appearing with increasing frequency recently, including in The Times. But what does fascism actually mean? To what extent can American politics, present and past, be described as fascist? And is it even a useful word anymore? Here’s what people are saying. ..."
NY Times (Video)

Frontispiece of Book II of Boethius' 'De Consolatione Philosophiae'

"The frontispiece to Book II of Boethius’ ‘On the Consolation of Philosophy’ is a beautiful example for French manuscript illumination in the fifteenth century. The finely painted miniature shows the philosopher Boethius in a pink robe listening to instructions from the female figure, the personification of Philosophy. To the right Fortune turns a wheel on which are four figures, kings and other aristocrats, symbolising the capricious nature of Fate. Read more about this manuscript cutting in our Search the Collection pages..."
Wallace Collection
W - The Consolation of Philosophy

Inside the Battle for Downtown Portland

"Scenes of billowing tear gas, burning fires and federal agents in riot gear have made Portland a national flash point and spurred debate over the authority of the federal government to respond to protests. As negotiations continue over when the agents will leave the city, here’s a look at how many recent nights of protest and confrontation have unfolded. The clashes with federal officers were largely confined to a two-block stretch of downtown Portland. The mood tended to follow a predictable pattern, with large, peaceful gatherings in the evening turning to chaos later at night. The map below shows the general extent of major downtown protests. ..."
NY Times

2020 July: Portland Protest Tactics: Umbrellas, Pool Noodles and Fire

Place depicted in Van Gogh's final painting found with help of postcard

"The exact location from where Vincent van Gogh is likely to have painted his final masterpiece, perhaps just hours before his death, has been pinpointed with the help of a postcard. The scene in Tree Roots, a painting of trunks and roots growing on a hillside near the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, was first spotted on a card dating from 1900 to 1910 by Wouter van der Veen, the scientific director of the Institut Van Gogh. Following a comparative study of the painting, the postcard and the current condition of the hillside, researchers at the Van Gogh Museum and Bert Maes, a dendrologist specialising in historical vegetation, concluded that it was “highly plausible” that the place where Van Gogh made his final brushstrokes had been unearthed. ..."
Guardian
NY Times: A Clue to van Gogh’s Final Days Is Found in His Last Painting

2010 March: Van Gogh Museum, 2010 May: Why preserve Van Gogh's palette?, 2012 April: Van Gogh Up Close, 2015 May: Van Gogh and Nature, 2016 January: Van Gogh's Bedrooms, 2016 November: Wheat Fields - Van Gogh series, 2019 April: At Eternity’s Gate - Julian Schnabel (2018), 2020 April: The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen (1884)

Fela Kuti - He Miss Road (1975)

"He Miss Road was produced by none other than Ginger Baker, who was a semi-regular jamming partner of Fela Kuti's as well as a close friend. And the tunes Fela wrote for this platter are wild, cosmic, sexy as hell, and deeply saturated in funk à la James Brown. The B-3 solo at the beginning of the title track is simply a device for inviting the band in. The B-3 is way up in the mix, supercharged. The echo effects Baker used on the organ and the horns add a nice touch and create a different textural quality, one that is spacious, to be sure, but still rooted in the shamanic repetition as the riff goes on forever no matter what instruments enter or leave the mix. The vocals show up midway through as everything gets tense and explodes. ... This is one of Fela's cookers, an album from his most creative period, and it reigns among the best in his extensive catalog."
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
amazom
YouTube: He Miss Road (Full Album)

Cooking with D. H. Lawrence - Valerie Stivers

I crusted the gamekeeper’s “simple chop” with mushrooms—not what Lawrence intended but I’ve made the recipe (from his fellow Briton Mary Berry) half a dozen times since.
"Few people could have been more off-grid than the English writer D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) during his sojourn at a cabin eighteen miles northwest of Taos, New Mexico, where he and his wife, Frieda, lived without electricity, kept chickens, built an outdoor oven, made adobe bricks and 'a meat safe to hang from a tree branch,' evicted nests of rats, and traveled two miles on horseback for their milk and mail, their butter and eggs. The time Lawrence spent at this place—called 'punishingly remote' by the biographer John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider—was relatively short, a span of months in 1924 and 1925, but he considered it home, and after his death, Frieda returned there to live until she died in 1956. ..."
The Paris Review

Screaming Target - Big Youth (1973)

"Achieving his first success on wax with 'S 90 Skank' for producer Keith Hudson in 1972, Big Youth recorded Screaming Target, his debut full-length, one year later for Gussie Clarke. That album, along with a handful of 45s from the period, was largely responsible for bringing the DJ art form forward after U-Roy's innovations. Here, in place of hip, jive-derived phrases, listeners find Big Youth ruminating on themes that exemplified the new consciousness of the 1970s. The set-opening title track, for instance, finds the DJ promoting literacy and general positivity, Youth-style, over K.C. White's 'No No No.' Similarly, he chants down slavery and calls for equal pay for equal work on 'Honesty.' ... "
allmusic (Audio)
W - Screaming Target
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Be Careful - Higher Light Remix, Screaming Target 1972 01 Screaming Target

A Half-Century After Wallace, Trump Echoes the Politics of Division

George C. Wallace, Governor of Alabama
"The nation’s cities were in flames amid protests against racial injustice and the fiery presidential candidate vowed to use force. He would authorize the police to 'knock somebody in the head' and 'call out 30,000 troops and equip them with two-foot-long bayonets and station them every few feet apart.' The moment was 1968 and the 'law and order' candidate was George C. Wallace, the former governor of Alabama running on a third-party ticket. Fifty-two years later, in another moment of social unrest, the 'law and order' candidate is already in the Oval Office and the politics of division and race ring through the generations as President Trump tries to do what Wallace could not. ..."
NY Times (Video)

Mr. Trump after security forces cleared protesters from Lafayette Square on June 1. The president has recently portrayed the nation’s cities as hotbeds of chaos.

A Step-By-Step Walk Through ‘Just Kids’ and Patti Smith’s New York

St. Mark's Church
"... In the process of telling the story of her life, Smith also vividly captured a very specific moment in time in a very specific New York City. The unadorned, detailed prose paints vivid pictures of the streets and the subways, the people and the places that resound with the reader whether or not you are from that era. It’s the kind of book that can make you homesick for somewhere you never lived. It’s also a chronicle of the faded, the forgotten and the missing places in the city. Unsurprisingly, most of the places mentioned in Just Kids are gone (CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City); others exist in some physical form, even if the spiritual facet of the location has been obliterated (Chelsea Hotel, Scribner’s Books). And a few, like Electric Lady Studios and St. Mark’s Church, are still with us and still fulfill their original mission. ..."
Voice

586 Fifth Avenue, where Scribner's has left an imprint

In the 1990s, Feminism Found a New Ally: Computers

"... Once the forum opened, thousands of conference-goers trekked across the mud each day and waited patiently for their turn at one of the 200 machines donated by Apple and Hewlett-Packard.They were greeted by Farwell’s all-female team, whose warmth and efficiency demonstrated their mastery of new technology and comfort in using it. When something went wrong with a machine or a server, they fixed the problem. When a visitor had trouble sending a message to a loved one or finding a document from the conference, a member of the team taught her how to do it for herself. Navigating computers at this time was a specialized skill set, and onlookers marveled at such technological prowess. ..."
LitHub

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

Sun Ra Space II, New York City, 1978
"Let me tell you a story about a boy. He was born on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. His mother, Ida Blount, was a waitress. Her favorite performer was a vaudeville stage magician named Black Herman, who did all manner of tricks: levitation, rabbit conjure, escape. The highlight of his act was a ghastly, blasphemous miracle: he would get buried alive in 'Black Herman’s Private Graveyard,; then be exhumed three days later to make a triumphant return to the stage. Ida admired Black Herman so much that she named her son after him. With such a bold, phantasmagoric performer for a namesake, it’s perhaps no surprise that young Herman Poole Blount became a musical prodigy. By age twelve, he was sight-reading piano music and composing his own. As a teenager, he could reproduce from memory the big-band concerts that came through Birmingham, led by greats like Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. While attending the segregated Industrial High School, Herman joined a handful of jazz and R&B bands, including one led by his biology teacher, Ethel Harper. ..."
NYBooks

Sun Ra Space I, New York City, 1978

Transit chimes by chord interval

"One of the first things I notice when I travel to a new city is the announcements on the public transit system, particularly the chimes and bells that signal doors are closing. Apparently I’m not the only person who’s interested in 'doors closing announcements' as I found compilations galore that have racked up millions of views (???) down a weird YouTube rabbit hole. Now that I’m not traveling anywhere in the near future, it was fun to watch these videos from different cities and listen to the subway chimes, something mundane to those who live there but can be surprising for those who’ve never been. ..."
Medium (Video)

Tokyo Metro