The Swamp That Trump Built

 

"It was springtime at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, and the favor-seekers were swarming. In a gold-adorned ballroom filled with Republican donors, an Indian-born industrialist from Illinois pressed Mr. Trump to tweet about easing immigration rules for highly skilled workers and their children. 'He gave a million dollars,' the president told his guests approvingly, according to a recording of the April 2018 event. Later that month, in the club’s dining room, the president wandered over to one of its newer members, an Australian cardboard magnate who had brought along a reporter to flaunt his access. Mr. Trump thanked him for taking out a newspaper ad hailing his role in the construction of an Ohio paper mill and box factory, whose grand opening the president would attend. ..."  

NY Times 

NY Times: Trump Engineered a Sudden Windfall in 2016 as Campaign Funds Dwindled  

NY Times: An Editor’s Note on the Trump Tax Investigation

O.A. Jensen of Nordland, Norway

 

"Deep swells. Soft shadows. Rhythmic elements buried under dense drones. A sense of motion in constant contrast with a sense of stillness. These are all shared elements of a certain type of ambient music, and they are in full effect in 'Ninas Garden' from the musician Havdis, aka O.A. Jensen of Nordland, Norway. Those aspects here are expertly executed. What distinguishes the work further arrives about halfway through, when it nudges ever so slightly to something song-like, as shifts between chords become apparent, lending structure to the gathered sounds. The change isn’t quite glacial, but it is subtle, excellently so. Track originally published at soundcloud.com/havdis."

disquiet (Audio)  

Discogs  

SoundCloud (Audio)

What Jacques Derrida Understood About Friendship

 

The intimacy of friendship, Jacques Derrida writes, lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another.

 "... In the late nineteen-eighties, the philosopher Jacques Derrida delivered a series of seminar lectures on the subject of friendship. He was, at that point, one of the most famous philosophers in the world, having become more or less synonymous with the idea of deconstruction. Derrida wanted to disrupt our drive to generate meaning through dichotomies—speech versus writing, reason versus passion, masculinity versus femininity. These seeming opposites were mutually constitutive, he pointed out: just because one concept prevailed over the other didn’t mean that either was stable or self-defined. Straightness exists only by continually marginalizing queerness. ..."

New Yorker

2010 January: Jacques Derrida, 2014 August: Derrida (2002) 

Can Democracy Work in Soccer?

 

Ronald Koeman is the new Barcelona head coach

 "These may be the last days in office for Josep Maria Bartomeu, Barcelona’s embattled, unpopular president. An insurgent group, frustrated by the decline of the team and furious at how close the club came to losing the star forward Lionel Messi, has succeeded in collecting the signatures of more than 16,000 members required to call for a vote of no confidence in his board. The walls are closing in. Bartomeu must now choose an interim candidate to take his post while he awaits the results of a referendum on his leadership. ..."

NY Times  

NY Times: How Barcelona Lost Its Way (Feb. 25, 2020)

‘Maggie May’: Rod Stewart’s Epic Trek From Twickenham Station To No.1

 

"The gap between the first break for Rod Stewart, when Long John Baldry heard him playing harmonica on Twickenham railway station and the singer’s first British chart-topper, was just three months shy of eight years. Rod’s rocky road to No.1 was completed, when the chart for 9 October 1971 showed 'Maggie May' climbing to the top. Not bad for what was originally a B-side. Stewart’s long apprenticeship included his days with Baldry in the Hoochie Coochie Men and then Steampacket, Shotgun Express and then as lead vocalist with the Jeff Beck Group. ..."  

udiscover (Video)

2016 November: Gasoline Alley (1970), 2017 May: Every Picture Tells a Story (1971), 2019 July: Never A Dull Moment (1972)

Into Africa by Stanley Crouch (December 1985)

"Africa is one of the centerpieces of fantasy in our time. Its ambiguity and variety have always challenged the imagination, partly through dark and brutal acts, partly through a vitality that interweaves the subtle and the sizzling. Though Africa’s cooperation fueled the Atlantic slave trade, though its conquest stands as a repulsive record of colonial misjudgments and excesses, and though its periodic coups are usually the work of blue­-ribbon brutes, the continent’s people constitute a startling and inspiring catalogue of languages, customs, and physical types. ..."  

Voice  

NYBooks: The Stanley Crouch I Knew (Sep. 2020)

Zama - Lucrecia Martel (2017)

"Zama is a 2017 Argentine period drama film directed by Lucrecia Martel, based on the 1956 novel of the same name by Antonio di Benedetto. It premiered at the 74th Venice International Film Festival. It was also screened in the Masters section at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. ... In the late 18th century Don Diego de Zama is a functionary in a remote outpost in Argentina. His wife and children are far away from him and he longs to be assigned to a post in Lerma, a change he believes is imminent. The town is plagued by rumours of the feats of Vicuña Porto, a man who robs and rapes at will and who others are always claiming to have met and defeated. Uninterested by the gossip, Zama spends his time trying to seduce the wealthy, married, Spanish noblewoman Luciana Piñares de Luenga who rebuffs him. ..." 

Wikipedia,  NYBooks: The Crazed Euphoria of Lucrecia Martel’s ‘Zama’, Vanity Fair - Zama Review: This Surreal Period Piece Is 2018’s Best Film So Far  

YouTube: Zama, In conversation with... Lucrecia Martel on Zama 34:25

Director Lucrecia Martel, Venice, August 31, 2017

The Rings of Sebald - Daniel Mendelsohn

"... That odd youthful pastime of mine is no doubt why I was so strongly affected by a certain passage toward the end of a novel called The Rings of Saturn, originally published in 1995 as Die Ringe des Saturn, by the late W. G. Sebald, the German writer who had emigrated in the sixties to the United Kingdom, where he spent the rest of his life and which is the setting for much of his writing. It was in England that Sebald wrote his dissertation, in English, on another German writer, Alfred Döblin, author of the masterwork Berlin Alexanderplatz and a Jewish refugee from Hitler—just as was, for example, the great scholar Erich Auerbach, whose magisterial study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature begins with an analysis of the looping, digressive style, known as ring composition, that is found in Homer’s Odyssey. Döblin and Auerbach, in fact, died within weeks of each other, in 1957: the kind of near-coincidence beloved of Sebald, as we shall see. ..."  

The Paris Review

2011 July: The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald, 2015 February: ‘Drowned in a sea of salt’ Blake Morrison on the literature of the east coast, 2015 April: Patience (After Sebald) - (2010)  

'Regard sur le passé': when Bembeya Jazz sang Samory Touré's epic anthem of resistance

"On October 2, 1958, Guinea became independent. Ten years later, the country paid tribute to the towering figure of Samory Touré, a hero of the anti-colonial struggle, in a masterful work, crafted by the Bembeya Jazz National. Today Guinea celebrates the 62nd anniversary of its independence. An opportunity for PAM to revisit the amazing Regard sur le passé ('Looking back at the past'), which tells the story of Samory Touré; the last great West African resistance fighter against French colonial invasion. Only Bembeya Jazz could put such a story into music, in the great griot tradition. The album; published in 1969, would go on to inspire many more orchestras including Rail Band, Super Mama Djombo and many more. ..."  

PAM (Video)

W - Samory Touré

The Wassoulou Empire at the end of the 19th century

At Liberalism’s Crossroads - The vexed legacy of Richard Hofstadter.

"In the famously long, hot summer of 1968, when Columbia University was coming apart like the rest of America, the historian Richard Hofstadter seemed like the one person who could hold the fraying school together. Anti-war militants were demanding that Columbia end its cozy relationship with the Pentagon. Other activists decried the university’s haughty disregard for its Harlem neighbors, most visible in the proposed building of a gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park—dubbed Gym Crow and leading to accusations of segregation because it would have separate entrances for Columbia students and the community in Harlem and unequal access to its facilities. After months of butting heads with Columbia’s administration, students occupied campus buildings, and the school threatened to call in the cops, which is what university president Grayson Kirk did that spring, resulting in more than 700 arrests and nearly 400 police brutality complaints. ..."  

The Nation 

2019 May: "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964)

The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation

"All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick. It’s right there in the name of one of the earliest devices used to project slides: the magic lantern. If you take an image of an open hand and an image of a fist and project the two in sequence, you’ll convey the illusion of a clench. ..."  

Vulture (Video)

Women's March on Versailles

Women's March on Versailles, 5 October 1789

"The Women's March on Versailles, also known as the October March, the October Days or simply the March on Versailles, was one of the earliest and most significant events of the French Revolution. The march began among women in the marketplaces of Paris who, on the morning of 5 October 1789, were near rioting over the high price and scarcity of bread. Their demonstrations quickly became intertwined with the activities of revolutionaries, who were seeking liberal political reforms and a constitutional monarchy for France. The market women and their various allies grew into a mob of thousands. Encouraged by revolutionary agitators, they ransacked the city armory for weapons and marched to the Palace of Versailles. The crowd besieged the palace, and in a dramatic and violent confrontation, they successfully pressed their demands upon King Louis XVI. The next day, the crowd compelled the king, his family, and most of the French Assembly to return with them to Paris. ..."

Wikipedia

Map of Versailles in 1789

Leaf Peeping Is Not Canceled: 6 Drives and Hikes to Try This Fall

"A leafy drive in Nashville, hikes in the Appalachian wilderness, a spin on a scenic Colorado byway: There are many ways to savor autumn while being mindful of pandemic travel precautions. Below are six fall outings in Massachusetts, Ohio, West Virginia, Maine, Tennessee and Colorado, replete with apple cider doughnuts, a highway ghost and sightings of otters, beavers and wild turkeys. ..." 

NY Times

A Guide to Chicano Soul on Bandcamp

 "Pioneered by artists from San Antonio, Texas like The Royal Jesters and Sunny & the Sunliners, 'Chicano Soul' refers to a specific fusion of mid-century Mexican-American and Black musical cultures. The music found an enthusiastic audience among Latino communities and sock-hopping youth throughout the southwestern United States. Over the course of the ‘60s, in places like El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and L.A., a growing crop of new bands gave the movement regional flavor, bookended by the conjunto-inflected deep soul of the San Antonio bands on one side, and the R&B- and jazz-heavier 'Eastside' L.A. sound on the other. These artists established a vital, DIY musical subculture that would pave the way for the Chicano cultural movement of the ’70s. ..."

Bandcamp (Audio)

At the Pershing: But Not for Me - Ahmad Jamal (1958)

"At the Pershing: But Not for Me is a 1958 jazz album by pianist Ahmad Jamal. According to the album jacket, the tapes were made on January 16, 1958, at the Pershing Lounge of Chicago's Pershing Hotel and each set played that night was recorded, a total of 43 tracks, of which 8 were selected by Jamal for the album. ...  The 1958 Down Beat review was mildly negative, referring to Jamal as playing 'cocktail music'; the reviewer acknowledged Jamal's skill and influence on other jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, but wrote, 'The trio's chief virtue is an excellent, smooth light but flexible beat', and 'Throughout the music is kept emotionally, melodically, and organizationally innocuous. In August 1958, Jet magazine referred to the album as 'a nationwide hit'. ..."

Wikipedia

“It Was Beyond My Wildest Dreams” Pianist Ahmad Jamal Recalls ‘At The Pershing’ (Audeio/Video)

YouTube: But Not for Me, Poinciana, Woody'n You

Hank Willis Thomas’s Colonialism and Abstract Art

"Hank Willis Thomas helps us reimagine the world we think we know. More than a decade ago he removed the brand references from magazine advertisements that targeted or featured Black Americans (such as the one above from 1979), drawing our attention to their underlying stereotypes and asking us to reflect critically on the construction of racially biased narratives. His installations and public art projects similarly invite questions, and creative civic participation—such as his work with For Freedoms and, most recently, the Wide Awakes 2020. ..."

MoMA  

[PDF] Hank Willis Thomas’s Colonialism and Abstract Art

Tracing Trump’s Contacts Before He Tested Positive for Coronavirus

"President Trump’s announcement Friday that he and the first lady, Melania Trump, had tested positive for the coronavirus sent government officials scrambling to determine who else might have been exposed. Two senators who attended a White House event last Saturday said they had tested positive, too, as did Chris Christie, who is advising Mr. Trump’s campaign. Several people who met with the president this week said they had since tested negative. But it can take days for someone who has been exposed to the virus to develop symptoms or to test positive. Here is a look at where Mr. Trump traveled and the people with whom he met in the days before his positive test. ..."  

NY Times

Quebec City and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

Quebec City
"Quebec City officially Québec is the capital city of the Canadian province of Quebec. ... The Algonquian people had originally named the area Kébec, an Algonquin word meaning 'where the river narrows', because the Saint Lawrence River narrows proximate to the promontory of Quebec and its Cape Diamant. ... The city's landmarks include the Château Frontenac hotel that dominates the skyline and the Citadelle of Quebec, an intact fortress that forms the centrepiece of the ramparts surrounding the old city and includes a secondary royal residence. The National Assembly of Quebec (provincial legislature), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec), and the Musée de la civilisation (Museum of Civilization) are found within or near Vieux-Québec. ..." (Bill D. + Max B. 1986, Wesley D. 1991)
W - Quebec City
YouTube: Quebec City, Quebec

Culture of Quebec
""The Culture of Quebec emerged over the last few hundred years, resulting predominantly from the shared history of the French-speaking North Americans majority in Quebec. It is noteworthy in the Western World; Quebec is the only region in North America with a French-speaking majority, as well as one of only two provinces in Canada where French is a constitutionally-recognized official language. ..."
Battle of Quebec (NHL)

Kingsburg and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

"Kingsburg is a village in Nova Scotia, Canada. The community is approximately 130 kilometers from Halifax Regional Municipality, 30 kilometers from Bridgewater and 25 kilometers from Lunenburg and now primarily a summer vacation and weekend getaway destination. Kingsburg features two large beaches, Hirtle's Beach and Kingsburg Beach. There is also a protected cape which features hiking trails called Gaff Point. Kingsburg has three large and two smaller ponds that are used for swimming. ...  For many decades Kingsburg was mixed a fishing and farming community. By the mid twentieth century, with the widespread decline of small-scale Atlantic fishery, most fishing culture has disappeared. ..." (Bill D. + Max B. 2001, Wesley D., Renata D.)
W - Kingsburg, Nova Scotia
YouTube: Hirtle's Beach
"Lunenburg /ˈluːnənbɜːrɡ/ is a port town on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. Founded in 1753, the town was one of the first British attempts to settle Protestants in Nova Scotia in an effort to displace the French Roman Catholic Acadians and indigenous Mi'kmaq. The economy was traditionally based on the offshore fishery and today Lunenburg is the site of Canada's largest secondary fish-processing plant. The town flourished in the late 1800s, and much of the historic architecture dates from that period. ..."
W - Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
W - Bluenose II
YouTube: Lunenburg Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

What is Surrealism? - André Breton (1924)

 

"Four Surrealist Manifestos are known to exist. The first two manifestos, published in October 1924, were written by Yvan Goll and André Breton, the leaders of rivaling Surrealist groups. Breton published his second manifesto for the Surrealists in 1929, and wrote his third manifesto that was not issued during his lifetime. Leading up to 1924, two rival surrealist groups had formed. Each group claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Guillaume Apollinaire. One group, led by Yvan Goll, consisted of Pierre Albert-Birot, Paul Dermée, Céline Arnauld, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pierre Reverdy, Marcel Arland, Joseph Delteil, Jean Painlevé and Robert Delaunay, among others. ..."

Wikipedia

The Avantgarde Nature of Surrealist Manifesto

What is Surrealism? - André Breton

amazon

2016: DADA Companion, 2016: The Growing Charm of Dada, 2012 December: Impressionism and Fashion, 2017: How Baudelaire Revolutionized Modern Literature, 2017: The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology - Mary Ann Caws, 2018 May: Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vintage Documentary on the Two Great Art Movements, Dada & Surrealism (1978)

The Best Ambient Music on Bandcamp: September 2020

 

"The electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel celebrated her 75th birthday this past September, and her sage and scientific criticisms of contemporary music ring truer with each passing year. Spiegel, one of the first artists to create music with digital synthesizers, described the boundless possibilities of art with electronic instruments. Computerized music gave her 'the complete freedom to define any world you wanted and work within it.' The artists featured in this month’s column similarly found inspiration from the endless capabilities and combinations of digital instrumentation, whether Jonathan Fitoussi’s combined orchestras of Buchla, Moog, and Korg synthesizers or numün’s spellbinding loops of acoustic instrumentation. ..."

Bandcamp (Video)

Feminize Your Canon: Alice Dunbar-Nelson

"In April 1895, the up-and-coming poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed 'the most promising young colored man in America,' saw a poem by a young writer, Alice Ruth Moore, accompanied by a photograph in which she appeared stylish and beautiful. He wrote to her immediately at her home on Palmyra Street in New Orleans, expressing his admiration, and they began an intense epistolary courtship that lasted two years. ..."  

The Paris Review

QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic

"... Sociologists and journalists have struggled to precisely categorize the shambolic conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Is it a political movement? A new religion? A cult? It has elements of all these things. There is a basic set of beliefs: namely that President Trump is waging a holy war within the government against a secret cabal of pedophiles, whose members included top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and her advisers. There are accompanying behaviors and rituals: the serial viewing of YouTube videos that embed the watcher deeper into the world of QAnon; the frantic decoding of 'Q drops,' or tersely worded message-board posts, which now number more than 4,000. There is a prophet, Q, and a God-like figure, Trump. ..."
New Republic
NY Times: What Is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory?
New Yorker: What’s New About Conspiracy Theories?
Scientific American: People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features
W - QAnon, W - Conspiracy theory

Crazy ideas have long been a fixture of American life. Now paranoia thrives at the center of power, not just the fringes.

Sam Myers - I Got The Blues

"... Sam Myers was born in Laurel, Mississippi. He acquired juvenile cataracts at age seven and was left legally blind for the rest of his life, despite corrective surgery.] He could make out shapes and shadows, but could not read print at all; he was taught Braille. He acquired an interest in music while a schoolboy in Jackson, Mississippi, and became skilled enough at playing the trumpet and drums that he received a nondegree scholarship from the American Conservatory of Music (formerly the American Conservatory School of Music) in Chicago. Myers attended school by day and at night frequented the nightclubs of the South Side. There he met and was sitting in with Jimmy Rogers, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Little Walter, Hound Dog Taylor, Robert Lockwood, Jr., and Elmore James. ..."
YouTube: "I Got The Blues"
W - Sam Myers

Fennesz

"Christian Fennesz (born 25 December 1962) is an Austrian producer and guitarist active in electronic music since the 1990s, often credited simply by his last name. His work utilizes guitar and laptop computers to blend melody with treated samples and glitch production. He lives and works in Vienna, and currently records on the UK label Touch. ... Fennesz was born and raised in Austria and studied music formally in art school. He started playing guitar around the age of 8 or 9. He initially performed as a member of the Austrian experimental rock band Maische before signing to electronic music label Mego as a solo artist. The influence of techno led him to begin composing with a laptop. ..."
Wikipedia
Fennesz
Red Bull - Fennesz (Video)
Discogs
YouTube: Agora, We Trigger the Sun, Rainfall
Boiler Room: St. John Sessions (Live) 43 min.

Lionel Bicknell Constable, 1828–1887

Cloud Study, c. 1850
"Once thought to have been painted by John Constable, this sketch was later attributed to his son. The artist experiments with color in this atmospheric study, using gray, blue, and white pigments to indicate rain clouds gathering ominously above the thin strip of land visible along the bottom edge of the image. ..." The Clark, "... Lionel taught himself to paint by studying his father's work and for many years his paintings – including this one – were attributed to John Constable. Lionel always worked on a small scale, and the low horizon and pinky-mauve of the sky are typical of his style. ..." Art UK
artnet

Study of Clouds with a Low Horizon, c.1850

Luc Sante: ‘Money doesn’t kill people, but it changes the fabric of daily life’

Miles Davis (tpt); Charlie Parker (as); Joe Albany (p); Addison Farmer (b); Chuck Thompson (d)
"Gazing out of the window of a smart hotel on the Bowery, a street once known as Manhattan’s Skid Row, Luc Sante is getting gently high on memory. 'Over there, next to the flophouse hotel, is where Nan Goldin lived and worked. Forty years ago there were still lots of vacant lofts here that had been burlesque and vaudeville theatres during the era when storefronts were saloons. There were bars solely inhabited by bums, their heads down on the counter. At night they’d be lined up outside the missions and Salvation Army hostels – veterans from world war two, from the Korean war, from the Vietnam war. At night, trash fires would be lit in oil drums …' The Belgian-born Sante is one of America’s most admired cultural topographers. ..."
Guardian (Video)

Luc Sante: ‘America still has this Puritan backbone, still this Calvinist restraint: Paris is the inverse of that’

2015 December:The Other Paris

How Storyboarding Works: A Brief Introduction to How Ridley Scott, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson & Other Directors Storyboard Their Films

"When you're making a film with complex shots or sequences of shots, it doesn't hurt to have storyboards. Though professional storyboard artists do exist, they don't come cheap, and in any case they constitute one more player in the game of telephone between those who've envisioned the final cinematic product and the collaborators essential to realizing it. It thus greatly behooves aspiring directors to develop their drawing skills, though you hardly need to be a full-fledged draftsman like Ridley Scott or even a proficient comic artist like Bong Joon-ho for your work to benefit from storyboarding. You do, however, need to understand the language of storyboarding, essentially a means of translating the rich language of cinema into figures (stick figures if need be), rectangles, and arrows — lots of arrows. ..."
Open Culture (Video)
W - Storyboard
What is a storyboard and why do you need one? (Video)

Trump's Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax

"Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made. As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million. The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. ..."
NY Times
NY Times: Charting an Empire: A Timeline of Trump’s Finances
NY Times: An Editor’s Note on the Trump Tax Investigation
NY Times: Trump’s Financial Records Show Long History of Tax Avoidance (Video)
****NY Times: Opinion - The Picture of a Broken Tax System

On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)

"Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish intellectual of kaleidoscopic abilities and interests – literary critic, philosopher, translator, essayist, radio presenter – has always fascinated academics and intellectuals. His dense academic prose, his unique reading of Marxism, his fascination with Jewish mysticism, but more importantly, his ability to capture some of the major transformations of the early 19th century Europe in a series of literal and temporal frames that distilled the very material which gave it consistency – iron, concrete, shopping arcades, new technologies such as photography and film, ideological propaganda – into words, earned Benjamin a cult-like following which continues today. Artists, philosophers, theorists from every discipline, continue to offer different readings and meanings to his work, which remains strikingly relevant to social and political transformations today. ..."
Public Domain Review

2015 September: In praise of dirty, sexy cities: the urban world according to Walter Benjamin

Ross Gay: Have I Even Told You Yet About the Courts I’ve Loved?

"The very first would be the ones in the apartments where I grew up, where I have the firm memory of my father dunking while still wearing his Pizza Hut duds—my brother confirms this—, and where I marked spots (x’s with medical tape) to practice for the hot shot competition, shoveling snow from the court (cue little-kid-shoveling-snow-so-he-can-practice-basketball music) which, yeah whatever, Craig won. Sometimes at this court there were two hoops, sometimes one (a hoop can get pulled down by a big kid, you know? I have been that big kid. Who even knows what a big kid is anymore?), always it was crooked, often there were puddles, perpetually there were little craters in the asphalt which, if the game was serious, someone would probably take a little bit of that asphalt home in their palm or knee. ..."
LitHub

2012 November: Your Guide to the Brooklyn Nets, 2013 March: March Madness 2013, 2013 October: Rucker Park, 2014 January: History of the high five, 2015 February: Dean Smith (February 28, 1931 – February 7, 2015), 2015 June: Basketball’s Obtuse Triangle, 2015 September: Joint Ventures: How sneakers became high fashion and big business, 2015 October: Loose Balls - Terry Pluto (2007), 2015 December: Welcome to Smarter Basketball, 2016 January: The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams (1994), 2016 January: A Long Hardwood Journey, 2016 March: American Hustle - Alexandra Starr, 2016 November: 2016–17 College Basketball, 2017 November: 2017-18 College Basketball, 2017 March: N.C.A.A. Bracket Predictions: Who the Tournament Experts Pick, 2017 June: The Rise and Fall of the High-Top Sneaker, 2018 January: Chaos Is This College Basketball Season’s Only Constant, 2018 March: The End of March Madness?, 2018 March: The 2018 March Madness Cinderella Guide, 2018 August: Ancestor Work In Street Basketball, 2018 November: Where Have College Basketball’s Star Point Guards Gone?, 2019 November: Players to Watch in the 2019-20 College Basketball Season

Tour de France Soundtracks - Kraftwerk (2003)

"Tour de France Soundtracks (renamed to Tour de France for its remastered release) is the tenth studio album by German electronic music band Kraftwerk. It was first released on 4 August 2003, through Kling Klang and EMI in Europe and Astralwerks in North America. The album was recorded for the 100th anniversary of the first Tour de France bicycle race, although it missed its intended release date for the actual tour. It includes a new recording of their 1983 song of the same name, the cover artwork of both releases being nearly identical. The announcement of the release caused much anticipation, as it had been 17 years since the group had put out a full album of new studio material (1986's Electric Café, also known as Techno Pop). ..."
Wikipedia, W - Tour de France (song)
allmusic (Audio)
Discogs (Video)
amazon
YouTube: Tour De France (Official Music Video), Tour De France - Prologue + Tour De France Étape 1+2+3, Tour De France (1983) 49:13

2008 April: Kraftwerk, 2011 March: Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution, 2011 March: Kraftwerk - Documentary, 2011 April: Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, 2011 May: Autobahn, 2011 October: Trans-Europe Express, 2012 February: Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, 2012 October: Radio-Activity, 2014 May: "The Telephone Call" (1987), 2014 November: Kraftwerk - live at Cirkus, Stockholm

David Hockney’s Portraits on Paper

"Opening next week at the Morgan Library & Museum, 'David Hockney: Drawing from Life' is the first major exhibition to focus on the artist’s portraits on paper. Spanning more than half a century, the works showcased in 'Drawing from Life' see Hockney returning again and again to some of the individuals he holds dearest: the designer Celia Birtwell, his friend and former curator Gregory Evans, the printer Maurice Payne, his mother, and himself. Evident everywhere is Hockney’s mastery of color and his devotion to capturing the subject at hand. A selection of images from the show appears below. ..."
The Paris Review
Guardian - David Hockney: Drawing from Life review – stripping subjects down to their gym socks
amazon
NPG (Video)
YouTube: Exhibition Review - David Hockney: Drawing from Life at the National Portrait Gallery

Self Portrait, 1954, collage on newsprint, 16 1/2″ X 11 3/4″

2011 March: The Responsive Eye (1966)

Elevated rails, rooftops, and McSorley’s: How painter John Sloan captured 20th-century Manhattan

"Many artists have been inspired by the scenes of life in New York City, particularly Lower Manhattan. But perhaps no artist captures the feeling of New York during the hot, heavy days of August like the painter John Sloan. Sloan was one of the leading figures of the 'Ashcan School' of artists of the early 20th century, a loosely-defined movement which took its name from a derisive reference to the supposed lowbrow quality and themes of their work, and the smudgy, impressionistic brushstrokes they utilized. His workaday subjects and hazy images of city life capture the heaviness of the air of New York during its dog days. Here’s a look at some of those paintings of life in our city 100 years ago. ..."
6sqft

Yeats at Petitpas’ (1910-1914)

2009 August: John Sloan, 2011 November: American realism, 2012 December: Old New York, 2015 May: Spectator of Life, 2015 October: Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917, 2015 October: Tenderloin, 2015 October: McSorley's Bar - John Sloan (1912), 2015 December: "Red Kimono on the Roof," 1912, 2016 January: “The Hell Hole,” 1917, 2016 February: Gloucester Days, 2016 March: “Hanging Clothes,” 1920, 2016 May: "Roof, Summer Night," 1906, 2016 October: "Spring Rain," 1912, 2016 October: "The Lafayette" (1927), 2016 December: The Old House at Home by Joseph Mitchell (April 1940)