Flair Magazine: The Short-Lived, Highly-Influential Magazine That Still Inspires Designers Today (1950)

 

“All magazines are their editors, but Flair was more its editor than any magazine had been before — or, for that matter, than any magazine has been since. Though she came to the end of her long life in England, a country to which she had expatriated with her fourth husband, a Briton, Fleur Cowles was as American a cultural figure as they come. Born Florence Freidman in 1908, she had performed on herself an unknowable number of Gatsbyesque acts of reinvention by 1950, when she found herself in a position to launch Flair. Her taste in husbands helped, married as she then was to Gardner ‘Mike’ Cowles Jr., publisher of Look, a popular photo journal that Fleur had helped to lift from its lowbrow origins and make respectable among that all-powerful consumer demographic, postwar American women. ...” Open Culture (Video)

2009 March: Jean Cocteau, 2016 February: In Which Jean Cocteau Gives Elan To This Milieu, 2019 October:  Orpheus (1950)

Sagitta

“Sagitta is a dim but distinctive constellation in the northern sky. Its name is Latin for 'arrow', not to be confused with the significantly larger constellation Sagittarius, the archer. It was included among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations defined by the International Astronomical Union. Although it dates to antiquity, Sagitta has no star brighter than 3rd magnitude and has the third-smallest area of all constellations. Gamma Sagittae is the constellation's brightest star, with an apparent magnitude of 3.47. It is an ageing red giant star 90% as massive as the Sun that has cooled and expanded to a diameter 54 times greater than it. Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, and Theta Sagittae are each multiple stars whose components can be seen in small telescopes. ...”

W - Sagitta

W - Urania's Mirror

Card 32 illustrates twelve constellations: nine modern ones (Corvus, Crater, Sextans [here Sextans Uraniæ], Hydra, Lupus, Centaurus, Antlia [here Antlia Pneumatica], and Pyxis [here Pyxis Nautica]), the now-subdivided Argo Navis, and the former constellations Noctua and Felis.

2021 storming of the United States Capitol

“On January 6, 2021, supporters of U.S. president Donald Trump stormed the United States Capitol. The event disrupted a joint session of Congress during which the Electoral College vote was to be certified, affirming Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election. The event followed numerous failed attempts by Trump and his supporters to overturn the election results. ... The demonstration culminated in a riot, in which the Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters. Congress was in session at the time, conducting the Electoral College vote count and debating the results of the vote. As the protesters arrived, Capitol security evacuated the Senate and House of Representatives chambers and locked down several other buildings on the Capitol campus. Protesters broke past security to enter the Capitol, occupying the evacuated Senate chamber while guards drew handguns to prevent entry to the evacuated House floor. Several buildings in the Capitol complex were evacuated, and all buildings in the complex were subsequently locked down. ... The crowd was dispersed out of the US Capitol later that evening. The process to certify Electoral College results resumed shortly after 8 p.m. and continued to its conclusion the following morning. The riots and storming of the Capitol were described as insurrection, sedition, and domestic terrorism. Some news outlets labeled the act as an attempted coup d'état by Trump. The incident was the first time the Capitol had been overrun since the 1814 burning of Washington by the British during the War of 1812. ...”

Wikipedia (Video)

Politico - ‘Is This Really Happening?’: The Siege of Congress, Seen From the Inside (Video)

YouTube: Trump Supporters Storm US Capitol, US Lawmakers and Global Leaders Condemn Attack, Who Were The Capitol Hill Rioters, And The Woman Who Was Shot?, Inside the US Capitol as Trump supporters storm building

NY Times - Biden’s Win Is Confirmed, but Nation Is Shaken (Video)

Jacobin: Republican Elites Are Responsible for Today’s Storming of the Capitol

The Atlantic: The Sun Is Up. Impeach and Convict.

The Atlantic: What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America

MOB STORMS CAPITOL, INFLAMED BY ANGRY TRUMP SPEECH

“Protesters loyal to President Trump stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, halting Congress’s counting of the electoral votes to confirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory as the police evacuated lawmakers from the building in a scene of violence, chaos and disruption that shook the core of American democracy. Around 2:15 p.m., as the House and Senate debated a move by a faction of Republicans to overturn the election results, security rushed Vice President Mike Pence out of the Senate chamber and the Capitol building was placed on lockdown after angry pro-Trump demonstrators surged past barricades and law enforcement toward the legislative chambers. For a time, senators and members of the House were locked inside their respective chambers. Images posted on social media showed scenes of supporters violently tussling with the police as at least one protester took to the rostrum of the House chamber to declare his support for Mr. Trump. ...”

NY Times: Pro-Trump Mob Swarms Capitol (Video)

*******NY Times: Trump Is to Blame for Capitol Attack

Love and Hate in a Different Time - Gabriels (2020)

“Introducing Gabriels - an LA based group made up of singer Jacob Lusk and producers Ari Balouzian and Ryan Hope. ‘Love and Hate in a Different Time’ is their new single and the perfect taster of their genre-defying sound. Their debut single ‘Loyalty’ was released on the seminal R&S Records, that and their follow up ‘In Loving Memory’ received support from the likes of Gilles Peterson, Virgil Abloh and Benji B. Both tracks served as solid stepping stones to reach this point in their fledgling career with a full debut EP due for release before the end of the year.  ...”

Piccadilly Records

Bandcamp (Audio/Video)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Love and Hate in a Different Time (Short Film)

Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism - Philippe Soupault (1963)

 

"Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism is a diminutive, stylish book that kicks off by appreciatively documenting a curiously seedy period of transition within the anti-rationalist French avant-garde: from Dada to Surrealism. Published by legendary City Lights in late 2016, this alluring collection of amiable reminiscences was penned by co-founding Surrealist poet Philippe Soupault (1897–1990) and first appeared in French in 1963 as Profils perdus. City Lights has bracketed this English translation with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti, the director of the publications program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an afterword by poet Ron Padgett. ..."  

A French Surrealist’s Eclectic Remembrances of His Cohort, Finally in English  

W - Philippe Soupault  

City Lights  

amazon

Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution

“Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is a revolutionary novel of profound scope and depth, about a day in the life of a woman who runs a few errands, sees an old suitor and gives a dull party. It’s a masterpiece created out of the humblest narrative materials. Woolf was among the first writers to understand that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them. In ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ Woolf insists that a single, outwardly ordinary day in the life of a woman named Clarissa Dalloway, an outwardly rather ordinary person, contains just about everything one needs to know about human life, in more or less the way nearly every cell contains the entirety of an organism’s DNA. With ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ Woolf asserted as well that we are all embarked on epic journeys of our own, even though, to the untrained eye, some of us, many of us, might look as if we’re only there to tidy up or to do our best to amuse our bosses. ...”

NY Times

Michael Cunningham on the Novel That Would Become Mrs Dalloway

2019 April: Bloomsbury Group, 2020 August:  How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters

Interview: Suzanne Ciani, Synth Pioneer

“A synth pioneer and adventurous electronic composer since the early ’80s, Suzanne Ciani has defied hasty assumptions about genre, sound design and nerdism ever since. Suzanne’s ongoing romance with the synthesizer started at an early age, precisely when she was first introduced to sound modulation via the Buchla synth. And as a trained piano and keyboard player (Suzanne Ciani was also the first woman on the cover of Keyboard magazine), she devoted a large part of her musical endeavours to coaxing feminine sensibilities out of the machines, providing a stark counterpoint to the inherent machismo of the tech world. ...”

Red Bull Music Academy (Video)

Modular Love: Suzanne Ciani Interviewed

2019 July: Suzanne Ciani: a masterclass in modular synthesis

Trump, in Taped Call, Pressured Georgia Official to ‘Find’ Votes to Overturn Election

“President Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to ‘find’ him enough votes to overturn the presidential election and vaguely threatened him with ‘a criminal offense’ during an hourlong telephone call on Saturday, according to an audio recording of the conversation. Mr. Trump, who has spent almost nine weeks making false conspiracy claims about his loss to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., told Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, that he should recalculate the vote count so Mr. Trump, not Mr. Biden, would end up winning the state’s 16 electoral votes.’I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,’ Mr. Trump said during the conversation, according to a recording first obtained by The Washington Post, which published it online Sunday. The New York Times also acquired a recording of Mr. Trump’s call. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

NY Times: An Insurgency From Inside the Oval Office

NY Times: Republicans Begin New Congress Feuding Over Bid to Overturn Election

Washington Post: ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’: In extraordinary hour-long call, Trump pressures Georgia secretary of state to recalculate the vote in his favor (Video)

POLITICO: 117th Congress kicks off with GOP civil war, calls for impeachment and plexiglass

Fierce tigers and eagles on a 58th Street co-op Image

“Midtown East is the land of elegant 1920s-era apartment houses: handsome buildings of 10, 11, maybe 12 stories that usually feature understated brick and limestone facades. But 339 East 58th Street has something else going on: fierce creatures in cast stone above Medieval columns and decorative Romanesque arches. Adorning this co-op, built in either 1920 or 1929 depending on the source (I’m betting on 1929), are two eagle figures standing ramrod straight like soldiers high above the canopied entrance. ...”

Ephemeral New York

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. ...”

Chosen Waves 019: Hélène Vogelsinger – Illumination

Fifteen Questions Interview with Hélène Vogelsinger (Video)

Contemplation (Audio)

YouTube: Helene Vogelsinger

YouTube: Patch Notes: Hélène Vogelsinger***

‘Goodfellas’ at 30: Martin Scorsese’s Anthropological Goodlife Through a Lens

“As far back as I can remember, director Martin Scorsese has been synonymous with wiseguys, mooks, goombahs, and spin-on-a-dime funny-how guys delivering a gut punch to the senses, all choreographed to a wowser wall of sound. Young pretenders like Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright certainly learnt how to make up a killer score not, conversely, on the streets, but at the church of St Martin. The rest is bullshit (but that’s another film). We’re here to talk about Goodfellas (1990), surely his most guilty thrill ride until The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), the white-collar larcenous flip side to the saga of Henry Hill, an initial outsider like the young, asthmatic Scorsese in Little Italy, who finds an in to the neighbourhood mobster way of life. Scorsese indulges in the seductive surface appeal of these dodgy foot soldiers, gradually peeling away the layers like finely chopped garlic to reveal the lousy, grifting, desperate and moral hollow at the centre. ...”

Cinephilia & Beyond (Video)

2009 August: Marty Scorsese, 2015 March: Mean Streets (1973), 2015 April:  The Departed (2006), 2018 August: Taxi Driver - Martin Scorsese (1976), 2020 June: The Age of Innocence (1993), 2020 December: The Irishman (2019)

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. 

All About Jazz

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Snow Catches On Her Eyelashes 42:09

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....”

The Paris Review

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. ..."

W - Leatherstocking Tales

W - Natty Bumppo

The Complete Leatherstocking Tales (Audio), amazon

1919 endpaper illustration for The Last of the Mohicans by N. C. Wyeth.

Long Live the King: King Tub’s Dub in 5 Tracks

Oct. 2019 - “30 years since the assassination of Dub’s founder, the King’s legacy still looms large over the world of music. To pay tribute to the King, hailed as the godfather of dub, PAM focuses on 5 tracks that represent the diverse talents and innovations of the late King Tubby. Looking into King Tubby, born Osbourn Roddick in 1941 Kingston Jamaica, is like staring into the guts of an amplifier and trying to understand its relationship to sound. If you’re not an expert it’s one dense electronic mystery, but even to the untrained eye, there is an ordered beauty in the mangle of wires, power tubes, and speaker jacks. ...”

PAN (Video)

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life

“... The exception is Sylvia Plath, who, with her perfect blond pageboy, wide smile and cinched-waist dresses, looked less like a proper poet and more like Doris Day. ... In the intervening decades she has become a protean figure, an emblem of different things to different people, depending upon their viewpoint — a visionary, a victim, a martyr, a feminist icon, a schizophrenic, a virago, a prisoner of gender — or, perhaps, a genius, as both Plath and Hughes maintained during her lifetime. ... One would think there is little to be added, if only because of the avalanche of books — biographies, meta-biographies, pathographies (to borrow Joyce Carol Oates’s term), memoirs, critical studies, letters, journals, novels — that have been published about Plath since her suicide (which, for some people, is the only thing they know about her). In the last few years alone, two fat volumes of her correspondence have been published and parsed by a whole raft of reviewers (including me). ...”

NY Times

LitHub: What We Don’t Know About Sylvia Plath

NY Times: Who Bought Sylvia Plath’s Stuff?

LitHub: A Tale of Two Sylvias: On the Letters Cover Controversy

Guardian: Unseen Sylvia Plath letters claim domestic abuse by Ted Hughes

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

“The year is at an end, and I think I speak for pretty much everyone when I say: good riddance. (While we don’t have any guarantee that 2021 will be an improvement, it seems like it would have to be.) Among the many unhappinesses of this year, we lost what seems like an unusually large number of members of the literary community, from poets to novelists to editors to critics to publishers to booksellers. To them, we say a last thank you, and goodbye. They will be missed. ...”

LitHub

Diego Maradona, anti-imperial symbol

“Even in death, Diego Maradona continued to torment the peculiar empire-nostalgic milieu that is conservative England. The scars of Mexico ’86 have clearly still not healed. The Times painted a portrait of a ‘self-obsessed’ and ‘self-destructive’ figure whose ‘rare gifts were ruined by self-indulgence,’ with paternalism dripping from the page: ‘That such a supreme talent could be so undisciplined, that he felt he needed to cheat … was perhaps a pointer to the unhappy times ahead.’ The Telegraph obituary could wait no longer than the end of the first sentence to denounce him ‘a liar, a cheat and an egomaniac,’ concluding that whatever about his talents, ‘ultimately Maradona remained a boy from the barrios.’ This was not meant as a compliment, and the snobbish tones were nothing new to British media depictions of Maradona. ...”

Africa Is a Country

Flexi disc

 “The flexi disc (also known as a phonosheet, Sonosheet or Soundsheet, a trademark) is a phonograph record made of a thin, flexible vinyl sheet with a molded-in spiral stylus groove, and is designed to be playable on a normal phonograph turntable.  Flexible records were commercially introduced as the Eva-tone Soundsheet  in 1962, and were very popular among children and teenagers and mass-produced by the state publisher in the Soviet government. Before the advent of the compact disc, flexi discs were sometimes used as a means to include sound with printed material such as magazines and music instruction books. A flexi disc could be moulded with speech or music and bound into the text with a perforated seam, at very little cost and without any requirement for a hard binding. One problem with using the thinner vinyl was that the stylus's weight, combined with the flexi disc's low mass, would sometimes cause the disc to stop spinning on the turntable and become held in place by the stylus.  ...”

W - Flexi disc

NPR: It's Thin, It's Plastic, It's Back: Flexi Discs Find New Fans (Audio/Video)

Bend But Dont Break: The Resilience Of The Flexi Disc

The Wacky, Wiggly, Razor-Thin World of the Flexi Disc (Video)

Discogs

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

“If jazz polls don’t become collateral damage of COVID-19, Erroll Garner: The Octave Remastered Series (Mack Avenue) is the odds-on favorite for best reissue of 2020. It’s a 12-CD release, one for each LP that the Pittsburgh-born pianist (1921-1977) and his manager Martha Glaser (1921-2014) co-produced on their own Octave Records between 1959 and 1973. ... He debuted that megahit on a 1954 Mercury session, and would interpret it in practically every set he played for the rest of his life, usually before SRO audiences (his contract mandated that they be racially integrated) in concert halls and upscale nightclubs, where both “civilians” and cognoscenti honed into Garner’s instantly identifiable sound—melody-centric, ever-swinging—and highly developed technique. ...”

Jazz Times

W - Erroll Garner

You Tube: Erroll Garner live 63' & 64' 1:03:03

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. ...”

Bloomberg CityLab