John Lennon and the Politics of the New Left
Watch “Jackson Pollock 51,” a Historic Short Film That Captures Pollock Creating Abstract Expressionist Art on a Sheet of Glass Image
2014 October: Jackson Pollock's Mural
August Wilson, American Bard
“In the woods of Barnesville, Ga., two Black men are running, barely visible in the dusk. There are crickets chirping, dogs barking in the distance and, more immediately, the urgent pants of their breath. This seems to be a familiar horror, but the men aren’t being chased; they’re heading toward a tent. Inside, Ma Rainey — played by Viola Davis, her lips painted burgundy, eyelids smoked with black, cheeks stained merlot — beckons the audience in a royal blue dress. ‘Daddy, daddy, please come home to me,’ she sings, shimmying in the heat. ‘Anytime you see two Black people running in the South, you think the Klan’s somewhere, but, no, they’re not running from something. They’re running to something — to this woman whose voice is telling their story,’ says George C. Wolfe, the director of ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,’ the Netflix film version of August Wilson’s beloved play, which debuts this month. The scene feels appropriate for the opening of a Wilson adaptation: One of the most acclaimed Black playwrights in America, he spent more than three decades telling the story of Black America with pride and verve, with language that beckoned like Ma’s voice in that tent. ...”
2017 July: Fences (2016), 2017 August: The Ground on Which I Stand, a Speech on Black Theatre and Performance (1992), 2018 July: Pittsburgh Cycle, 2018 August: August Wilson in St. Paul: A MN Original Special, 2020 May: August Wilson's Blues Poetry, 2020 July: On Lessons From August Wilson’s Jitneys
Gramsci in the postcolony
2013 July: Gramsci Monument, 2018 January: The Fate of the Party
Bird bath
A male House Sparrow in a birdbath in Makawao, Maui
“A bird bath (or birdbath) is an artificial puddle or small shallow pond, created with a water-filled basin, in which birds may drink, bathe, and cool themselves. A bird bath can be a garden ornament, small reflecting pool, outdoor sculpture, and part of creating a vital wildlife garden. A bird bath is an attraction for many different species of birds to visit gardens, especially during the summer and drought periods. Bird baths that provide a reliable source of water year round add to the popularity and ‘micro-habitat’ support. Bird baths can be pre-made basins on pedestals and columns or hang from leaves and trees, or be carved out depressions in rocks and boulders. ...”
Greatest Hits Music issue: Playlists
8 Famous Writers Writing About Not Writing
Rise of The Troubadour Warriors - Tropical Grooves & Afrofunk International Vol.3
Roman Polanski’s ‘Tess’ is a work of great pastoral beauty as well as vivid storytelling
“Roman Polanski’s arguably only romance film, Tess, is one his critically best accepted works, and the performance of 18-year-old Nastassja Kinski, along with Paris, Texas, is probably the high point of her career. ‘Without Mr. Polanski’s name in the credits,’ wittily stated the New York Times, ‘this lush and scenic Tess could even be mistaken for the work of David Lean.’ This great compliment is wholeheartedly justified–Polanski created one of the best literary adaptations to date. His inspiring vision of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles was greatly empowered by the terrific screenplay he was helped to write by Gerard Brach and John Brownjohn. Interested to see what makes for a truly great adaptation of a 19th century classic? Take a look at this scarce screenplay we were lucky enough to stumble upon. ...”
2014 March: Tess (1979), 2014 July: Chinatown (1974), 2020 February: The Enduring Vision of Chinatown
Because of a Flower - Ana Roxanne (2020)
“The sublime songs comprising New York-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with ‘a drone element and a mood,’ then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. ...”
December Stargazing: The Meaning of Meteorites Image
“Last month, as the Taurids meteor shower was unfolding, the Bay Area was beneath a dome of heavy clouds that obscured the stars above. So I sat on my couch, flipping through a seemingly infinite universe of movies on my Apple TV, until I came upon Werner Herzog’s new documentary, Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds. In it, the inimitable filmmaker explores the strange world of meteors and the unexpected ways these celestial objects have blazed through our imaginations, influencing history, culture, religion, and politics. The film is full of the wonderfully strange quips and idiosyncratic cinematography that we have come to expect from Herzog. But there was one exchange with a historian of science named Simon Schaffer that I found particularly fascinating. Schaffer recounted the story of a famous meteorite strike in 1492 in a field near the walled city of Ensisheim on the border of Germany and France. Today, Ensisheim is a sleepy, bucolic place. ...”
Looking for a Berenice Abbott bar on 56th Street
Various Artists – From Brussels with Love
“Sometimes the past is better experienced in the now. The reissue of the legendary From Brussels with Love cassette wallet is a case in point. First released forty years ago as the debut issue of the iconic Les Disques du Crépuscule, this elusive, almost mystical artefact has now returned, in a guise of high luxury. It wouldn’t be the twenty-first century if the potential purchaser wasn’t dazzled by the choice on offer. One can be as authentic as possible and buy a facsimile cassette package in the PVC wallet. Otherwise one can plump for a gatefold double vinyl edition pressed on coloured vinyl (one black, one white) with the booklet pages printed on the inner gatefold. Or be seduced by the glorious 2XCD pack, demurely encased in a stunning, (it really is stunning), hardback 60 page 10-inch square earbook. There is even a ‘multibundle format’ of various post-punk sweetmeats, which I dare not describe here... “
YouTube: From Brussels With Love 17 videos
Bruegel as Cinema
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Hunters in the Snow, 1565
“Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow is a study of apocalypse. In 1565, the year the painting was completed, as a number of climatologists and historians have noted, Europe was in the midst of the Little Ice Age. People starved. Agricultural communities regressed to hunting and gathering. Good Christians regressed to survival of the fittest. Except for one dead fox and a tiny, full-ish game bag, Bruegel’s hunters have come home empty-handed. They pass a tavern whose sign shows Hubertus, the patron saint of hunting. The sign hangs crookedly, one stiff gust away from falling. ... Bruegel seems like a better fit for a certain type of film than for poetry. His indiscriminate eye; his contempt for obvious ‘takeaways’; his wide, lucid images withholding judgment—in all these ways, he anticipates the ‘slow cinema‘ of the last few decades. It seems appropriate that director Andrei Tarkovsky, a pivotal figure in the flourishing of this kind of cinema, should be the first major filmmaker to put Hunters to work onscreen. ...”
Still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, 1972
2010 May: Peasant, 2011 March: "The Harvesters", Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 2012 February: The Mill and the Cross - Lech Majewski, 2012 December: The Lord of Misrule and the Feast of Fools., 2013 July: Netherlandish Proverbs, 2014 August: Children's Games (1560), 2016 May: The Hunters in the Snow (1565), 2018 November: Peeling Back the Paint to Discover Bruegel’s Secrets 2012 May: Solaris, 2018 October: Andrei Rublev (1966)
The Libraries of My Life By Jorge Carrión Image
The Chemists’ Club library in New York, New York, ca. 1920.
“I was thirteen and wanted to work. Someone told me that you could get paid to referee basketball games and where to go to find out about such weekend employment. I needed income to bolster my collections of stamps and Sherlock Holmes novels. I vaguely remember going to an office full of adolescents queueing in front of a young man who looked every inch an administrator. When my turn came, he asked me if I had any experience and I lied. I left that place with details of a game that would be played two days later, and the promise of 700 pesetas in cash. Nowadays, if a thirteen-year-old wants to research something he’s ignorant about, he’ll go to YouTube. That same afternoon I bought a whistle in a sports shop and went to the library. ...”
The Sopranos - Season 6
YouTube: Season 6 Trailer - Official HBO, The Sopranos - Season 6 107 videos
Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink Image
“In the fall of 2019, before any rumours of a strange new virus that had taken root, far away in China, Ralph and his family sat down to a pub lunch at their local haunt, The Chequers Inn in Loose. With them was Steve Crist, publisher of Proud to Be Weird keen to discuss the idea of a retrospective book covering Ralph entire 60 year career, from his student days to his most recent work. The project began as one might expect, with calls to agents, contract negotiations and the sharing of extensive visual files from the Ralph Steadman Art Collection Archives. The book would be 300 pages long so Steve Crist spent November 2019 until January 2020 slowly whittling down the choices ready to have originals photographed during the first week of February. A local photographer, Ollie Harrop, who had previously photographed Ralph for a book called The Artist in Time was hired to take the stills while the studio elves would scurry around locating the selected artworks. ...”
Trump’s Crazy and Confoundingly Successful Conspiracy Theory Image
W - Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory
***Taking Giuliani’s Insane, Un-American Press Conference Seriously (Video)
****** NY Times: He Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It.
March 2020: Can YouTube Quiet Its Conspiracy Theorists?, 2020 October: QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic
Cyberpunk
“Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a ‘combination of low-life and high tech‘ featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction. ... Released in 1984, William Gibson's influential debut novel Neuromancer would help solidify cyberpunk as a genre, drawing influence from punk subculture and early hacker culture. ... Minnesota writer Bruce Bethke coined the term in 1983 for his short story ‘Cyberpunk,’ which was published in an issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories. The term was quickly appropriated as a label to be applied to the works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan and others. Of these, Sterling became the movement's chief ideologue, thanks to his fanzine Cheap Truth. John Shirley wrote articles on Sterling and Rucker's significance. ...”
Sugar Minott - Sugar Minott @ Studio 1
“So as the Soho based crew gradually make their way around all the singers and players in Coxsone's stable, its about time we requested they begin sticking out the original output by The African Brothers. For this is where Lincoln Sugar Minott started in 1969, alongside Tony Tuff and Derrick Howard, and anyone who ever heard their 'Righteous Kingdom' will know what I'm talking about. From the beginning then it seemed Lincoln was destined to run with Studio One, and after just one single there with the Brothers, Minott remained as in-house guitarist, backing vocalist and percussionist, all the while carrying his experience growing up next to a dancehall where Sir Coxsone a played, and then as teenage selector for Gathering of Youth and Sound of Silence Keystone systems. ... One all along. Spanning work from 1978 to 1982, this is lovely music by anyone's standards, and Sugar remains our favourite Son of Studio One. ... Respect.”
AIAC RADIO: Freetown’s musical soup
“In our last season of Africa Is a Country Radio, we explored the idea of international blackness with music and interviews on black identity from the United States to Latin America to Europe. It was recorded in conjunction with my work on the INTL BLK platform and featured several friends and collaborators in Los Angeles. After a few months break, we are now back with a new season and a new home, London-based web radio station Worldwide FM. This season’s theme will take inspiration from Paul Gilroy who suggests that to understand black culture we must look its routes of exchange, rather than its perceived roots of origin, and how hybridity and the navigation of empire have shaped modernity, nationality, and identity in the world today. Our focus will be port cities as connecting nodes in the international network of cultural exchange that is the Black Atlantic. Each month we will take a deeper dive into the music and cultural politics of a different port city on the African continent. ...”
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