Interview: Suzanne Ciani, Synth Pioneer
Trump, in Taped Call, Pressured Georgia Official to ‘Find’ Votes to Overturn Election
Fierce tigers and eagles on a 58th Street co-op Image
Hélène Vogelsinger
“... Illumination was born in March this year, exactly 5 days before the lockdown in France. But the process of its creation really started a month earlier, when I first visited the place, which was about to be my muse. What was your process when creating this piece? At that moment, I was experiencing different creative processes.On previous tracks, I used to first create the foundations and then search for a place to record it. A place which was aligned in terms of energies.
I focused on abandoned places. I love the fact that they have layers of stories and histories, with different occupants, often crossing-times, and always full of beautiful and melancholic poetry. ...”
‘Goodfellas’ at 30: Martin Scorsese’s Anthropological Goodlife Through a Lens
Eivind Aarset & Jan Bang - Snow Catches on her Eyelashes (2020)
“Although they had been collaborating since the early 90s, the first recording on which the Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset and American-born, Norway-resident Jan Bang appeared together was Bang's Pop Killer (Virgin, 1998). In the years since, Aarset and Bang have collaborated on many more albums, but this is the first to credit them as a duo. ... While Aarset's guitar, and Bang's production, mixing and sampling have been crucial ingredients in the sound of much modern Norwegian music, it would not be proper to neglect many other musicians who have also contributed, particularly as quite a few make appearances on this album, including trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, vocalist Sidsel Endresen and sampler and synth player Erik Honore.
Vanitas
Abraham Mignon, The Nature as a Symbol of Vanitas, c. 1665-79
“I like flowers all right, I suppose. I like having them around, I like how they smell. I like their delicate skins, their manner of shedding yellow everywhere in a fine powder. I try to stop on the street, when I can, to bend down and look directly into their faces. I have mild flower preferences, in a bodega-selection way: ranunculus over chrysanthemums, peonies over roses, lilies over hydrangeas. Having lived in New York City my entire adult life, bodega-flower choice has been more or less the extent of the relationship. It’s possible that I no longer live in New York City, a fact that won’t be decided until next year sometime and which I only relay here because the place I currently inhabit has a lot of wildflowers and no bodegas....”
Leatherstocking Tales – James Fenimore Cooper (1841-27)
"The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, set in the eighteenth century era of development in the primarily former Iroquois areas in central New York. Each novel features Natty Bumppo, a frontiersman known to European-American settlers as 'Leatherstocking', 'The Pathfinder', and 'the trapper'. Native Americans call him 'Deerslayer', 'La Longue Carabine' ('Long Rifle' in French), and 'Hawkeye'. ... The story dates are derived from dates given in the tales and span the period roughly of 1740–1806. They do not necessarily correspond with the actual dates of the historical events described in the series, which discrepancies Cooper likely introduced for the sake of convenience. ..."
1919 endpaper illustration for The Last of the Mohicans by N. C. Wyeth.
Long Live the King: King Tub’s Dub in 5 Tracks
Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life
amazom: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956 – 1963
2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956, 2018 January: Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story
Notable Literary Deaths in 2020
Diego Maradona, anti-imperial symbol
Flexi disc
YouTube: Records: The Flexi Disc or Sound Sheet, Another Beatles Christmas Record (1964), National Geographic - Songs of the Humpback Whale 33 1/3 (1979)
The Radical Legacy of Erroll Garner
Your Year In Maps
Emily Erdos/Bloomberg CityLab
“How were the landscapes of our lives reshaped by 2020? At the close of a year unlike any other, we asked CityLab readers to create their own maps that show what their worlds look like after coronavirus and its coinciding economic, environmental and social sea changes. This marked a continuation of a project we started in April, as the first wave of stay-at-home orders and shutdowns swept hundreds of countries around the globe. Like the maps we received earlier this year, the sample below is a remarkable tour of Covid-19’s reach, representing stories from four continents and many walks of life. ...”
How Did Madagascar Become the World’s Biggest Producer of Vanilla?
Armed guards look after a pile of vanilla pods in Bemalamatra, Madagascar.
“It’s pretty likely that there is exactly one product from Madagascar in your home right now—no more, no less. That product is vanilla, and Madagascar is at the moment the world’s leading producer of this ubiquitous natural flavor—despite the fact that Madagascar is a very strange country to be the world’s leading producer of vanilla.Vanilla, at least the vanilla we eat, is not native to Madagascar; it originated some 10,000 miles away. Madagascar is also a chaotic place to do business, as an article in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine showed in 2019. The modern vanilla industry in Madagascar involves crushing poverty, splurge-producing wealth, theft, murder, and money laundering—in addition to natural disasters and the leveling of pristine forests.
Drawing of the Vanilla plant from the Florentine Codex (c. 1580) and description of its use and properties written in the Nahuatl language
The Lenox Hill carriage houses from a fairytale
“There’s nothing like walking through Manhattan during Christmastime and coming upon a row of elfin former carriage houses that look like they were made out of gingerbread and belong in a holiday fairytale. This ‘stable row,’ as it was known in the late 19th century, is on East 69th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues. The north side of the street is home to several conjoined carriage houses of different architectural styles and sizes—but all with the traditional arched entryway to fit not just horses but the tall carriages they pulled. ...”
Peering Into Soccer’s Future
The world’s best clubs are already getting a competitive edge through psychology, data and nutrition. The next frontier? Better set pieces.
“Occasionally, back in the days when we had things like parties and social lives, someone would find out, no matter how hard I tried to avoid telling them, that I was a journalist, and ask a question to which there is no answer: How do you decide what to write about? The first problem is that the reality of journalism — asking people questions and then writing down what they say — is frequently much less creative than it is in the popular (and the journalist’s) imagination. At times it can feel like a craft, the act of mining and polishing the raw material of information, rather than the more writerly art of conjuring it from the depths of your imagination.The second is that articles arise in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes, you decide to write about something because you are told to write about something. ...” Rory Smith
Not all of soccer’s innovations make sense in the test phase.
Future Days (Remastered) - Can (2014)
2011 September: Can, 2011 February: Plight & Premonition, 2011 June: Persian Love, 2013 October: Flux + Mutability - David Sylvian and Holger Czukay (1989) , 2014 June: Holger Czukay - Der Osten Ist Rot, Rome Remains Rome (1984/7), 2012 June: The Lost Tapes, 2016 March: Invaders Of The Heart - Jah Wobble (1982), 2017 April: Jah Wobble, The Edge, Holger Czukay - Snake Charmer (1983), 2017 June: The Legend Lives On… Jah Wobble In Betrayal (1980), 2017 July: Can - The Singles (2017), 2017 September: Holger Czukay (1938-2017), 2019 September: Holger Czukay - Cinema (2018)
The world’s most mysterious silver cups
A detail portrays a scene where Livia and her infant son Tiberius escape a forest fire
“Rome, 1604: Pietro Aldobrandini, an aristocratic Italian cardinal and patron of the arts, is hosting a grand meal at his private residence. Surveying the dining room, one of his guests, Fabio Masetti, ambassador to the Duke of Modena and Reggio, is impressed by the awe-inspiring collection of silver on display, glittering in the candlelight. The following day, Masetti writes to his boss, singling out a set of monumental silver objects that caught his eye: ‘I observed 12 [large serving dishes] with the 12 Caesars, and within sculpted all their triumphs and famous accomplishments, valued at 2,000 scudi.’ His words describe the so-called 'Silver Caesars' – a set of 12 silver-gilt 'standing cups' that together comprise a stunning example of Renaissance silverware, arguably the most important suite of silver to have survived from the period. ...”
The Artists Who Redesigned a War-Shattered Europe
For the dust jacket of the book “Ten Years Without Lenin” (1934), the designer Mikhail Razulevich montaged the Soviet revolutionary into a panorama of housing blocks, factories, and army detachments.
“... That’s the conclusion of ‘Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented,’ a momentous new show that papers the walls of the Museum of Modern Art with posters, magazines, advertisements and brochures from an earlier age of upheaval. Exactly a century ago, a cross-section of artists from Moscow to Amsterdam opened their eyes in a continent reshaped by war and revolution. Rapid advances in media technology made their old academic training feel useless. They were living through a political and social earthquake. And when the earthquake hit, what did these artists do? They rethought everything. They disclaimed the autonomy that modern art usually assigned to itself. They plunged their work into dialogue with politics, economics, transport, commerce. Nothing was automatic for these artistic pioneers, who took it upon themselves to recast painting, photography and design as a kind of public works job. ...”
The designers Elena Semenova and Lydia Naumova collaborated on a suite of informational posters for trade unions, such as this one from 1929. The headline to Stalin’s right reads: “Every worker must keep a keen eye on how the net cost of production is lowered at their workplace.”
Rediscovering the Mystic Beauty of UK Psych-Folk Outfit Trees
YouTube: Trees (50th Anniversary Edition) 37 videos
Pure Sonic Foam
2020 November: Cross-Device Ambient
Winter wonderland
Winter Landscape - Hendrick Avercamp (about 1630). “Winter was fun in the 1630s to judge from this painting by a Dutch artist who specialised in snowy scenes. They had no central heating or modern thermal clothes, bubonic plague remained rife and famine was a threat – but the people in this picture couldn’t care less. They’re too busy enjoying the ice, whose vast expanse is crowded with fun-seekers. There’s even a game of ice-golf. Avercamp sets it all in a mysterious pale world of frozen whites and misty yellows. His art of winter reflects the period known as the Little Ice Age when temperatures plummeted in Europe and scenes like this also occurred on the River Thames.” National Galleries of Scotland
Frosty Morning - JMW Turner (1813). “A man and girl stop to watch workers on a frozen roadside while another figure comes up the cold lane towards them. The earth is a hard glistening mystery. Morning’s light reveals a terrible chill in the atmosphere. Turner makes us see the beauty and bitterness of the countryside in winter.” Tate
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