City Bakery founder opening a hot chocolate bar in Greenwich Village

 

"City Bakery founder Maury Rubin has spent the past weeks in a 'Wonka-ish frenzy,' Grub Street tells us, as he prepares to launch his latest venture: the Wonderbon Chocolate Co. Rubin and his partner have taken out a three-month lease on a storefront at 257 Bleeker Street—most recently occupied by Sugar and Plumm—which will feature a menu of twelve hot chocolate flavors in an espresso-bar setting. The opening comes just in time for February, the month Rubin made famous for his hot chocolate festival at City Bakery, a tradition he began in 1992 that attracted more than 50,000 customers each year. ..."

6sqft 

NY Times: A New Home for the City Bakery’s Hot Chocolate  

Wonderbon

The Real Deal - The Warriors (1979)

 

"I don’t know with absolute certainty if The Warriors is a kids movie, but it’s a movie about kids that I saw as a kid myself. So let’s start there. The premise is simple enough: a New York street gang from Coney Island, the titular Warriors, must get from the Bronx back to their home turf after being framed for a murder they didn’t commit. It’s a survive-the-night feature—a premise much scarier and realer to me as a child than as an adult. As a kid, I was afraid of the dark and by extension, the night. ... The Warriors packs a slightly different punch as an adult. First of all, it’s silly. Really silly. Maybe even a little campy. ..." 

Bright Wall/Dark Room 

2015 September: Cast of 'The Warriors' to Reunite in Coney Island One Last Time

Art Blakey And His Jazz Messengers With Sabu ‎– Cu-Bop (1959)

 

"... A fantastic Johnny Griffin leads this Latin-tinged session along with Bill Hardman's unmistakable trumpet. The album opens with an excellent rendition of Dizzy's 'Algo bueno (Woody 'n' You)' and is followed by a rather intense jam ('Sakeena') in which Sabú Martínez shines throughout while the rest of the guys try to keep up on various percussion instruments. The tune resolves sensationally in a very Cuban way, although Dockery could have added a bit of mambo there. ... More jamming can be heard on the last track, 'Dawn on the Desert' (originally composed by Charlie Shavers), with its memorable riff that Charlie Parker used to quote so much. This is the Messengers' most Latin album and one I would always recommend to fans of Cuban and jazz music alike. ..."

Holland Tunnel  

W - Cu-Bop  

YouTube: Cu-Bop! (Full Album)


Lockdown Be Damned! Raffaello 1520–1483: An Exhibition in Rome

 

"Like the artist himself, the long-anticipated Raphael exhibition that opened in Rome on March 5, 2020, was struck down by infectious disease. Raphael succumbed to a sudden fever on April 6, 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday. The exhibition that marked the five hundredth anniversary of his death lasted only four days. On March 9, the Italian government issued a decree prohibiting 'every form of gathering in public places' to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and every public institution in Italy shut its doors. Raphael’s birthday came and went with his legacy under lockdown. ..."

Riot Material  

YouTube: A walk in the exhibition 12:51



Fassbinder and Kraftwerk: A Marriage Made in a New Germany

 

 "According to Kraftwerk member Wolfgang Flür, it was toward the end of the group’s first U.S. tour when his bandmates Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider grew fascinated by the phenomenon of American radio. Their time in the States had been successful largely thanks to local stations in the U.S., which, in the halcyon days before corporations like Clear Channel dictated playlists, had disseminated their music and conducted interviews with them. But the concept was a novelty to these nerdy young men—at that time, there were no local German radio stations on either side of the wall. ..."

Criterion (Video)

2014 May: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2014 June: Effi Briest (1974), 2014 July: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), 2014 September: A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema, 2014 October: Lola - (1981 BRD Trilogy), 2014 October: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979 BRD Trilogy), 2014 December: Veronika Voss (1982 - BRD Trilogy), 2015 January: Digital Anthology: Rainer Werner Fassbinder - $0.99, 2016 February: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), 2019 June: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

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, 2020 September: Tour de France Soundtracks (2003)

Harvey Pekar: The Splendor of Ordinary Life

 

"Harvey Pekar carried himself with a slouch. He had a disheveled comb-over and dark, haunted eyes. A file clerk at the Veterans Administration hospital in Cleveland, he spoke with a cantankerous rasp. If you sat next to him on the bus, you might not even notice him. Yet this ordinary man, who died this week at age 70, made his unremarkable day-to-day life in a typical city immortal, thanks to his comic, 'American Splendor.' Through these autobiographical comic books, Pekar found a devoted following, moved by the way he captured the particular loneliness of American life. ..."

Collectors Weekly

2009 December: Harvey Pekar, 2018 August: Jazz Jams With Harvey Pekar, 2020 August: Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History 

An Apocalyptic Collage Made Entirely of Media Images From Trump’s Presidency

 


"At eye level, artist Chris Santa Maria’s six-foot-high collage 'PRESIDENT TRUMP' (2016-2020), currently on view at Jim Kempner Fine Art in Manhattan, depicts a gargantuan figure hovering above a densely populated landscape. However, a closer look reveals thousands of individual photographs — some as small as three-eighths of an inch — meticulously cut out from newspapers, magazines and internet print-outs in the last four years. Patches of orange-tinted skin, tiny puckering mouths, and eyes evocative of genitalia crystallize into the immediately recognizable head of the giant. He floats in a galaxy of emojis, jungle animals, reclining nudes from famous paintings, and tabloid shots of pop culture figures, from Barack Obama to Kanye West. Every element in the cacophonous scene, a hybrid of a Where’s Waldo puzzle and Hieronymus Bosch’s 'Garden of Earthly Delights,' has been culled from the unsettlingly familiar visual torrent of Trump’s presidency. ..." (Mike B.)

Hyperallergic  

Chris Santa Maria

Jo Johnson & Hilary Robinson - Antenna Echoes (2020)


 "Jo Johnson and Hilary Robinson’s album Antenna Echoes has its origins in chance and error: a meeting in a shared neighborhood, and a broken piano. The result of those external influences is a Covid-era collaboration of deeply interior music, all cavernous echoes and warm feedback. Piano is the near constant through the album’s three tracks ('Maze Echoes,' 'Antenna Gain,' 'Fresh Air and the Usual Low-grade Hedonism'), but it would be inaccurate to claim its presence necessarily grounds the plush synthesizer and pervasive sound-design drones. ..."

disquiet (Audio)  

Discogs


182 Days of Marcel Proust

 

"This is a journal about reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time at the rate of at least ten pages a day. The text I've chosen is the recent Penguin translation, the first four volumes of which were published in America by Viking. The last three have not been published here because of copyright limitations, but are available in paperback editions imported from Britain. The page numbers, unfortunately, may not correlate with other editions, so I've added the beginning and ending phrases for each day's section. ..."

182 Days of Marcel Proust  

182 Days of Marcel Proust: Day-by-Day Summary  

182 Days of Marcel Proust: People, Places, Things, Ideas  

Got a Spare 153 Hours? Listen to Proust’s Masterpiece, Unabridged, Naxos Audio

"Landscape with a Calm (Un Tem[p]s calme et serein)," Nicolas Poussin, 1650 - 1651.

2008 June: Marcel Proust, 2011 October: How Proust Can Change Your Life, 2012 April: Marcel Proust - À la recherche du temps perdu, 2013 February: Marcel Proust and Swann's Way: 100th Anniversary, 2013 May: A Century of Proust, 2013 August: Paintings in Proust - Eric Karpeles, 2013 October: On Reading Proust, 2015 September: In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel, 2016 January: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (1919), 2016 February: Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy and Translator, 2016 May: The Guermantes Way (1920-21), 2016 August: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time — Patrick Alexander, 2016 October: My Strange Friend Marcel Proust, 2017 March: Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-1922), 2017 August: Letters To His Neighbor by Marcel Proust; translated by Lydia Davis, October: Proust's À la recherche – a novel big enough for the world, 2017 October: Proust Fans Eagerly Await Trove of Letters Going Online, 2017 December: The Prisoner / The Fugitive (1923-1925), 2018 May: Time Regained (1927), 2018 September: Céleste Albaret, 2018 November: In the Footsteps of Marcel Proust, 2019 February: On the Anxiety and Vanity of Marcel Proust, Debut Novelist

The Ghosts of Newspaper Row

 

Newsboys and newsgirls on Newspaper Row, Park Row, NYC.

"The reporters would pant up five flights of stairs to reach their dingy, dim newsrooms, where light eked through the dirt-cloaked windows and the green shades over the oil lamps were burned through with holes. They wended through hobbled tables piled high with papers, walked past cubbies so chaotically stuffed with scrolled proofs no outsider could guess the system. The reporters reeked of five-alarm smoke, or had coat pockets bulky with notes and a pistol from the front, or were tipsy from a gala ball, or dusty from a horse race. If they held important news in those notebooks, a copy boy would crowd by their elbow as they wrote, snatch the ink-wet sheets from their hands, and rush them off to the copyholder to 'put them into metal.' The center of news in the nineteenth century lined the streets around City Hall Park, only a short sprint to Wall Street, close to the harbor. ..."

The Paris Review

R.I.P., G.O.P.

 

"Of all the things President Trump has destroyed, the Republican Party is among the most dismaying. 'Destroyed' is perhaps too simplistic, though. It would be more precise to say that Mr. Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals. Tomato, tomahto. However you characterize it, the Republican Party’s dissolution under Mr. Trump is bad for American democracy. ..."

NY Times: The Editorial Board  

Rolling Stone - R.I.P., GOP: How Trump Is Killing the Republican Party (Video)  

Pell Center: R.I.P., G.O.P. 

amazon: RIP GOP: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans, Stanley B. Greenberg  

YouTube: 6 Crucial Races That Will Flip the Senate | Robert Reich, Kornacki Breaks Down Where Things Stand In Battleground States Heading Into Final Debate, Battleground Tracker: Tight race in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina

2020 October: Trump

1959 The Year that Changed Jazz

 

"1959 was the seismic year jazz broke away from complex bebop music to new forms, allowing soloists unprecedented freedom to explore and express. It was also a pivotal year for America: the nation was finding its groove, enjoying undreamt-of freedom and wealth social, racial and upheavals were just around the corner and jazz was ahead of the curve. Four major jazz albums were made, each a high watermark for the artists and a powerful reflection of the times. Each opened up dramatic new possibilities for jazz which continue to be felt Miles Davis Kind of Blue Dave Brubeck, Time Out Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um; and Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come. Rarely seen archive performances help vibrantly bring the era to life and explore what made these albums vital both in 1959 and the 50 years since. ..."

YouTube: 1959 The Year that Changed Jazz 58:58


Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe

 

"What shall we read before bed? Georgia O’Keeffe was a fan of cookbooks, telling her young assistant Margaret Wood that they were 'enjoyable nighttime company, providing brief and pleasant reading.' ... In addition to recipes—inscribed by the artist’s own hand in ink from a fountain pen, typed by assistants, clipped from magazines and newspapers, or in promotional booklets such as the one published by the Waring Products Company—the box housed manuals for O’Keeffe’s kitchen appliances. The booklet that came with her pressure cooker includes a spattered page devoted to cooking fresh veggies, a testament to her abiding interest in eating healthfully. O’Keeffe had a high regard for salads, garden fresh herbs, and simple, locally sourced food. ..."

Open Culture  

NY Times: Own the Recipes of Georgia O’Keeffe  

amazon


Horace Andy - In the Light/In the Light Dub (1977)

"Regarded as one of reggae's most distinctive voices, vocalist Horace Andy had wild success early on with his career-defining single 'Skylarking' as well as a host of other hits. As far as full-length statements are concerned, Andy's 1977 album In the Light may be his strongest. The album's ten tracks found Andy's quivering vocals floating in a dreamlike tension above tightly wound rocksteady rhythms, looming darkly on pensive tracks like 'Problems' (a tune that revisits the burning bassline from one of Andy's earlier hits, 'Mr. Bassie'), exploding on fun jaunts like 'Do You Love My Music,' and lingering meditatively on the lighthearted anthem of self-awareness and cultural pride that is the title track. ... Skillfully remastered and even stronger with both originals and dubs occupying the same space, In the Light/In the Light Dub is a triumph of roots reggae and a necessary chapter for anyone even remotely enthusiastic about Jamaican music and culture, especially at this critical point of reggae's evolution in the late '70s. ..."

all music (Audio)W - Horace Andy  

Discogs: In The Light (Video), In The Light Dub (Video) 

amazom  

YouTube: In The Light + Dub, Government Land + Dub

Get the Birds To Come To You

 

"Hosting a gathering of friends at your home may not be advisable at this time, but getting together with a flock of feathered friends is a great diversion. During the pandemic, birding has become a popular escape with sales for seed suppliers, birdhouse builders and other bird related businesses 'through the roof,' according to Audubon Magazine. Extending an invitation to the bird community is simply a matter of offering a meal. A backyard rich with trees and shrubs is an ideal place to hold the get together, but a patio or rooftop will suffice. ..." 

NY Times

Wild Days, New Faces and a Ticking Clock

 

"The season is still young. The sample size is far too small to draw conclusions. Over the next month or two, order most likely will be restored. As the weeks clog with matches, as muscles tire and injuries occur, chances are that the familiar faces will be the ones left standing. That is the privilege of having deep pockets, of course: They tend to contain the deepest squads. But a glance at the standings across Europe’s major leagues this week is enough, at least, to make you wonder if something strange is happening, if something, however small, has shifted, if all those factors that might have made this season less predictable — the absence of fans, the shortened preseason, the compacted schedules — have had some sort of effect. ..."

NY Times - Rory Smith

Leventhal Map & Education Center

 

"... This trivia event, hosted by the Leventhal Map & Education Center in collaboration with the Boston Public Library's Department of Special Collections, utilizes ATLASCOPE, a completely free online and app-based resource for exploring and browsing the Map Center's incredible digitized urban atlases collection. The atlases appear as continuous, zoomable web layers, allowing users to pull up specific maps for all areas of Boston, and compare the current streetscapes with historical records to answer questions in a geographic scavenger hunt. ..."

The Boston Calendar Blog  

Leventhal Map & Education Center  

YouTube: Leventhal Map & Education Center

Marcus Belgrave ‎– Gemini II (1974)

 

'Originally released in 1974 on the independent Tribe Records, this album features many of the Detroit heavyweight artists such as Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin, who have both had releases on Chicago's Hefty Records where they have worked with and been re-mixed by current artists such as Telefon Tel Aviv, Morgan Geist, Prefuse 73 and Kirk Degiorgio amongst others. Marcus Belgrave's musical career spans over 4 decades. He has worked with everyone from Sun Ra to Charles Mingus, from McCoy Tyner to Clifford Brown. He worked as part of the Tribe collective in Detroit, working with the same ideology as their musical neighbours, The Art Ensemble of Chicago. ..."

Holland Tunnel  

Discogs (Video)  

YouTube: Gemini II 38:50

First Look: New York’s Digital Subway Map Comes Alive Today

 

"The date was April 20, 1978; the scene, the Great Hall of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on Astor Place. On the stage where Abraham Lincoln once spoke sat two men, the Italian modernist Massimo Vignelli and the cartographer John Tauranac, constituting two sides of the Great Subway Map Debate. Six years earlier, Vignelli’s firm had reimagined the New York subway map into a groovy rainbowlike diagram, one that graphic designers loved and many riders found hard to navigate. ..."

Curbed  

vimeo: The Map 10:08


Seeking Solar System’s Secrets, NASA’s OSIRIS-REX Mission Touches Bennu Asteroid

 

A set of images taken by the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft showing a full revolution of the asteroid Bennu.

"A NASA robot pogo-sticked off an asteroid on Tuesday and grabbed a sample of dirt and rocks, material that could give scientists new insights to the birth of the solar system. From first impressions recorded 200 millions away on Earth, the OSIRIS-REX spacecraft pulled off its collection of bits of asteroid, a carbon-rich rock known as Bennu, perfectly. It then backed away and headed back to orbit. ... It will take a few more days before scientists can completely declare success. At present, they can only say that the spacecraft executed its instructions exactly as programmed. What is not yet known is how much material was actually grabbed. Scientists are hoping for at least a couple of ounces, but the sampling mechanism can hold up to four pounds. ..."

NY Times  

W - 101955 Bennu

Carl Gari / Abdullah Miniawy - Whities 023 (The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor) EP

 

"Early in 2016, Will Bankhead’s eclectic electronic label The Trilogy Tapes dropped a thrilling run of club-melting 12"s from Rezzett, Four Legs, and Call Super’s Ondo Fudd alias. Slotted among these was an eerie, queasy release credited to Carl Gari and Abdullah Miniawy, with a stark photograph of Tahrir Square and the scorched exterior of the former parliament building in Cairo. The music matched that smoldering, post-revolutionary scene; the heavy atmosphere of the country and the bitterness of the military dictatorship resonated in haunting drones, ominous throbs, and a voice incanting in digitally processed Arabic. ... The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor is a harrowing and desolate listen that captures the mood and mindset of Miniawy and numerous other Egyptians living under the brutal oppression of the Al-Sisi regime. ..."

Pitchfork (Audio)  

Bandcamp (Audio)  

Discogs (Video)  

amazon

What Happens if Roe v. Wade Is Overturned?

 

"The almost-certain confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court has increased the chances that Roe v. Wade will be weakened or overturned. If that were to happen, abortion access would decline in large regions of the country, a new data analysis shows. Legal abortion access would be unchanged in more than half of states, but it would effectively end for those living in much of the American South and Midwest, especially those who are poor, according to the analysis. (The analysis incorporates more recent data on research we wrote about last year.) ..."

NY Times  

Planned Parenthood - Roe v. Wade: The Constitutional Right to Access Safe, Legal Abortion  

What If Roe Fell?

Russet, the Color of Peasants, Fox Fur, and Penance

 

Pieter Bruegel - The Return of the Herd (1565)

 "... Embroidery was deemed 'unseemly' as were 'light and variant hues in clothing, as red, blue, yellow and such like, which declare the lightness of mind.' Instead, the Scots were told to wear simple fabrics in 'grave colour,' such as 'black, russet, sad grey, or sad brown.' This depressing list comes from a summary of the 1575 General Assembly of the Kirk, recorded in the Domestic Annals of Scotland. Although the upper classes continued to wear silks and velvets and pretty bright dresses, most people wore their sad rags. It was more practical, to be dressed in dark gray and black and brown. Life for the lower classes was hard. The clothing reflected this fact. And yet, thrown in with those drab colors was russet. ..."

The Paris Review  

W - Russet (color)

Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me

 


"Because senator Kamala Harris is a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been following her political rise, with the same focus that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes. Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors, my friends and I were exchanging tales of being railroaded by them. Shackled in oversized green jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax County, Va., courtroom tell a judge that in one night I’d single-handedly changed suburban shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor said I did was true — I carried a pistol, carjacked a man, tried to rob two women. ..."

NY Times (Audio)


“Crawl Into The Promised Land” - Rosanne Cash (2020)

 

 

"Rosanne Cash has released the 'scathing yet hopeful' new song 'Crawl Into The Promised Land,' complete with an official video by Phyllis Housen and Eric Baker. Esteemed four-time Grammy winner Cash co-wrote the song with its producer, John Leventhal, and its appearance is a call to the resilience of the human spirit as America leads into next month’s presidential election. Proceeds from the single will be donated to the Arkansas Peace & Justice Memorial Movement. The educational online memorial commemorates the victims of lynchings in the state of Arkansas, in collaboration with the Equal Justice Initiative and Coming To The Table. ..."

See Rosanne Cash’s Video For Forthright ‘Crawl Into The Promised Land’ (Video)

2010 March: Rosanne Cash, 2012 January: Black Cadillac, 2012 April: "I Was Watching You", 2012 July: The Wheel, 2012 February: Live From Zone C, 2014 February: The River & the Thread (2014), 2014 August: Rules of Travel (2003), 2015 June: King's Record Shop (1987), 2016 June: 10 Song Demo (1996), 2017 January: Rodney Crowell - "It Ain't Over Yet (feat. Rosanne Cash & John Paul White)", 2019 August: Everyone But Me, 2020 March: Long Way Home By Rosanne Cash

Growing Up Absurd - Paul Goodman (1960)

 

"Growing Up Absurd is a 1960 book by Paul Goodman on the relationship between American juvenile delinquency and societal opportunities to fulfill natural needs. Contrary to the then-popular view that juvenile delinquents should be led to properly regard society and its goals, Goodman argued that young American men were justified in their disaffection because their society lacked the preconditions for growing up, including meaningful work, honorable community, sexual freedom, and spiritual sustenance. The book drew from Goodman's prior works, psychotherapy practice, and personal experiences and relations in New York City. ..."

Wikipedia  

Writing the Riots  

NY Times: Gadfly of the ’60s, Getting His Due 

NY Times: It's Purpose That Counts; GROWING UP ABSURD. ... By John K. Galbraith (Oct. 30, 1960) 

amazon 

YouTube: Paul Goodman Changed My Life (2011) Trailer

Vin Gordon ‎– African Shores (2019)

 


In 2019, British saxophonist Nat Birchall is celebrating twenty years as a bandleader. His specialism is post-John Coltrane spiritual jazz. Since 1999 he has released an album every two years or so. The most recent was the outstanding Cosmic Language (Jazzman, 2018). The next is due later this year. ... Before Birchall became a jazz musician, his big love was reggae, which is where African Shores is coming from. The album is released on Birchall's reggae-focused label Tradition Disc. It is headlined by Jamaican trombonist Vin Gordon with Birchall sharing the frontline and the writing credits. ..."

All About Jazz  

Discogs (Video)  

YouTube: African Shores 9 videos


Angel Of Death: Reframing Montgomery Clift At 100


 "... On paper at least, Montgomery Clift had everything: matinee idol good looks, natural acting talent bolstered by training from legends of the New York theatre, the education of an aristocrat. It’s why Hollywood pursued him for more than a decade, trying to tempt him over to the movies with increasingly tantalising offers, until he finally relented. Cinema audiences saw Clift for the first time the year he turned 28, in post-WWII drama The Search, which earned him his first of four Oscar nominations, and the western Red River, which was a huge box office success on release. These two films, each a showcase for a novel kind of leading man practicing an immersive new style of acting that would come to be known simply as ‘the Method’, made Clift an instant star. ..."

The Quietus


Le Mellotron: Bomba Tropical - Lucho Pacora

 

"Music journalist, cultural manager, booker, manager and DJ from Perú. Lucho Pacora has been a Dj resident at El Directorio and Victoria Bar. His interest in tropical roots music led him to found, with your partner Marco Caballero, the project called 'Bomba Tropical', which rescues the sound memorabilia of the vinyls records where many Latin American tropical styles were published such as mambo, guaracha, porro, cumbia, chicha, salsa, guaguancó, son, marimba, among others. This project has taken the original Latin sounds to countries like Mexico, Brazil, Spain and France. ..."

Soundcloud (Audio) 58:18  

YouTube: Bomba Tropical • 45rpm Vinyl Set 58:18

The East Village, Home of Punks and Poets: Here's a Tour

 

"By the 1960s, the neighborhood took on its bohemian title: the East Village, home to Beats, hippies and no wave bands, to Allen Ginsberg, W.H. Auden, Abbie Hoffman, Fillmore East and the Poetry Project, to graffiti artists — and, in recent years, to droves of New York University students. It used to be simply the northeast quadrant of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where, to repurpose a phrase by another former resident, William S. Burroughs, layers of history are 'wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes.' During the 17th century Lenape settlements gave way to Dutch plantations. By the 1830s, the Georgian-style St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery, which took on a Greek Revival spire and cast-iron portico, had risen on a piece of Peter Stuyvesant’s former estate. ..."

NY Times

2015 December: The Other Paris - Luc Sante, 2020 September: Luc Sante: ‘Money doesn’t kill people, but it changes the fabric of daily life’


Euro 2020 Simulation

"As of the writing of this blog post, there are over two million cases of coronavirus worldwide. Sports have been particularly affected, having all major seasons, events, and tournaments canceled. One of the most prominent of which is the rescheduling of the Euro. Obviously, these precautions were enacted with the safety of the athletes and their families in mind. However, personally, as a fan, I have deeply missed spectating these contests. As a result, I decided to simulate the tournament that was supposed to be played this summer. I simulated these matches using the FootySimulator. For each match, I simulated 99 games at a neutral venue. For elimination games, I played extra time and then penalty kicks, while just full time was used for group stage matches. The aggregate goal differential was recorded for the group stage in the event of a need for a tiebreaker. ..."  

Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football (April 2020)

Cape Breton Island

 

"Cape Breton Island is an island on the Atlantic coast of North America and part of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada. ... Although the island is physically separated from the Nova Scotia peninsula by the Strait of Canso, the 1,385 m (4,544 ft) long rock-fill Canso Causeway connects it to mainland Nova Scotia. The island is east-northeast of the mainland with its northern and western coasts fronting on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence; its western coast also forms the eastern limits of the Northumberland Strait. The eastern and southern coasts front the Atlantic Ocean; its eastern coast also forms the western limits of the Cabot Strait. Its landmass slopes upward from south to north, culminating in the highlands of its northern cape. ... Approximately 75% of the island's population is in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) which includes all of Cape Breton County and is often referred to as Industrial Cape Breton, given the history of coal mining and steel manufacturing in this area, which was Nova Scotia's industrial heartland throughout the 20th century. ..."  W - Cape Breton Island 

 "Alistair MacLeod, OC FRSC (July 20, 1936 – April 20, 2014) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and academic. His powerful and moving stories vividly evoke the beauty of Cape Breton Island's rugged landscape and the resilient character of many of its inhabitants, the descendants of Scottish immigrants, who are haunted by ancestral memories and who struggle to reconcile the past and the present. MacLeod has been praised for his verbal precision, his lyric intensity and his use of simple, direct language that seems rooted in an oral tradition. ... In 2000, MacLeod's two books of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986), were re-published in the volume Island: The Collected Stories. MacLeod compared his fiction writing to playing an accordion. ..."

W - Alistair MacLeod
A LESSON IN THE ART OF STORYTELLING: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALISTAIR MacLEOD
amazon: Alistair MacLeod
NY Times: "Out With the Tide" (Audio)
NY Times - "No Great Mischief" (Audio)
Guardian: The isle is full of noises 

"Cape Breton fiddling is a regional violin style which falls within the Celtic music idiom. Cape Breton Island's fiddle music was brought to North America by Scottish immigrants during the Highland Clearances. These Scottish immigrants were primarily from Gaelic-speaking regions in the Scottish Highlands and the Outer Hebrides. Although fiddling has changed considerably since this time in Scotland, it is widely held that the tradition of Scottish fiddle music has been better preserved in Cape Breton. ..."

Wikipedia 
The Cape Breton Musical Heritage Series
The Amazing Music of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia
YouTube: Angus Chisholm - Cape Breton Fiddle, Angus Chisholm - Rodeo, A.A Gillis Johnnie Cope - Cape Breton, Donald MacLellan - Strathspey & Reel Cape Breton, W.H (Bill) Lamey - Scottish Reels, Alick Gillis - Go To The De'il And Shake Yourself, Margaree's Fancy, Villeneuve & Bouchard - Set du Lac St-Jean, Willie Kennedy traditional Cape Breton Fiddle (Live), Fiddler Robbie Fraser at the Red Shoe in Mabou N.S. (Live), Cape Breton Fiddle | John MacDougall (Live)
Cape Breton Island - Protest Song (2012), Songs of Steel, Coal and Protest (2012)
"On Cape Breton Island, where coal mining and steel making were once an essential part of the region’s culture and economy, protest song and verse are found in abundance. ..."
Protest Songs, Protest Songs – Volume 1 (Audio), Songs of Steel, Coal and Protest – Volume 2 (Audio)
Industrial heritage remembered
YouTube: Albert Lionais - He Walked Right In

Palo Alto - Thelonious Monk (2020)

 

"Thelonious Monk once said: 'Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.' By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, people hadn’t just gotten around to his oblong, minimalist take on jazz—they’d left it behind. After decades of toiling in New York’s clubs to little outside recognition, Monk had briefly tasted superstardom, culminating in a 1964 Time magazine cover. ... The live album Palo Alto is a grainy snapshot of Monk and his classic quartet taking a break from their two-week stand at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop to cut loose and get paid. ..."

Pitchfork  

NY Times: 52 Years Ago, Thelonious Monk Played a High School. Now Everyone Can Hear It. LondonJazz  

Discogs (Video)  

amazon YouTube: Live At Palo Alto High School, Palo Alto, CA / 1968 1/7 

2012 September: Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser, 2013 August: Five Spot Café, 2014 February: Thelonious Monk - Genius of Modern Music, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, 2015 February: "Epistrophy" - Thelonious Monk / Kenny Clarke (1941), 2016 November: Underground (1968), 2017 May: The Thelonious Monk Quartet: The Complete Columbia Studio Albums Collection (2012), 2018 May: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (2017)

End Our National Crisis

"Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II. Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds. The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box. Nov. 3 can be a turning point. This is an election about the country’s future, and what path its citizens wish to choose. ..."

NY Times 

2020 October, Trump

Precious and Rare: Islamic Metalwork from The Courtauld

 

"Islamic metalwork — more than any other form of Islamic craftsmanship — represents a meeting point of different cultures, patterns, and traditions. Drawing on some of the finest objects from the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, Cultures in Conversation presents a modern-day interpretation of Islamic metalwork in The Courtauld Gallery and the History of Science Museum collections. From stunning court fashion and intricate astrolabes to beautiful bowls and candlesticks, immerse yourself in six centuries of Islamic artisanship. Discover how each precious and rare object is a cultural conversation which starts and ends in a different place. And those cultural conversations continue today in the online exhibition, with objects and stories from the Multaka-Oxford volunteers and local community — including an interactive digital programme where online visitors can design their own Islamic-inspired patterns. ..."  

University of Oxford (Video)