Mirror Blue - Richard Thompson (1994)

 

“Richard Thompson’s superb new album, Mirror Blue, boasts no bold forays or shocking twists, only the same fervid but stringently unsentimental writing and musicianship that has always distinguished this seminal folk rocker’s best work.Like Rumor and Sigh (1991), Blue sounds contemporary without self-consciously striving to be hip. ... As usual, though, Thompson is at his most affecting when in a pensive, rueful mode. On a gorgeous folk ballad called ‘Beeswing,’ he recalls a youthful fling with a woman ‘so fine a breath of air would blow her away.’  On the sensuous ‘Mingus Eyes,’ he admits, ‘Never had the squint of James Dean/Or the Stanislavsky tears’ — although the typically sublime guitar work with which Thompson accompanies this lament, knotty and darkly passionate, rivals either of those assets. But Thompson saves the most devastating track for last. ...”

Rolling Stone

W - Mirror Blue

‘Mirror Blue’: Richard Thompson Reflects On His Expanding Audience (Audio/Video)

amazon

YouTube: Mirror Blue 13 videos

2011 July: Shoot Out the Lights - Richard and Linda Thompson, 2012 February: I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, 2014 March: Videowest 81, 2015 October: Richard & Linda Thompson - Rafferty's Folly (1980), 2015 December: Rumor and Sigh (1991), 2016 March: Hand of Kindness (1983), 2018 December: You? Me? Us? (1996), 2019 July: Across a Crowded Room—Live at Barrymore’s 1985, 2020 July: Bloody Noses (EP 2020)

Leonora Carrington - Eccentricity as Feminism

 

“The first time I read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, I knew nothing about its author, so I had the incredible experience of coming to this short novel in a state of innocence. I was wholly unaware, for instance, that Carrington had been a painter, that she spent most of her life as an expat in Mexico, and that in her youth she had been in a relationship with Max Ernst, one of the greatest surrealists. But the anarchic tone and perverse nature of this little book made a powerful impression, one that has never left me. There are two qualities in fiction that I find particularly astonishing and moving: open-endedness and wild metaphysics. ...”

The Paris Review

Guardian: The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead – review, My ‘wild child’ cousin, the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington (Video)

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artnet

YouTube: Leonora Carrington at Tate Liverpool, Britain's Lost Surrealist

And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur. 1953

Out of the Barrel of a Gun. By Charles Homans. Photographs by Mark Peterson.

“There are 400 million privately owned guns in America, by some estimates, and on Jan. 20, 2020, some 22,000 of their owners arrived at the State Capitol of Virginia, a neoclassical building designed by Thomas Jefferson that sits on a rolling lawn in the hilly center of downtown Richmond. The occasion was Lobby Day, a recent tradition in Virginia, held annually on Martin Luther King’s Birthday, on which citizen groups come to the Capitol to directly air their concerns to their representatives in the State Legislature. The concerns of the gun owners, who were assembled by an organization called the Virginia Citizens Defense League, were in one sense specific: They were protesting a raft of firearms-related bills the Legislature’s new Democratic majority was taking up that would tighten the state’s generally permissive gun laws. Seventy-eight counties in the state, making up the near-entirety of its rural areas, had declared themselves ‘Second Amendment sanctuaries,’ according to the V.C.D.L.  ...”

NY Times (Audio)

Cocktails with a Curator: The Frick Pairs Weekly Art History Lectures with Cocktail Recipes Image

 

Vermeer - Mistress and Maid

“Once upon a time, not so long ago, First Fridays at the Frick were a gracious way for New Yorkers to kick off the weekend. Admission was waived, participants could take part in open sketching sessions or enjoy live performance, and curators were on hand to give mini lectures on the significance and historical context of certain prized paintings in the collection.Rather than pull the plug entirely when the museum closed due to the pandemic, the Frick sought to preserve the spirit of this longstanding tradition with weekly episodes of Cocktails with a Curator, matching each selection with recipes for make-at-home themed drinks, with or without alcohol. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

Claude Monet - Vétheuil in Winter

Habaneros - Julien Temple (2017)

 

“A brief history of the Cuban capital of Havana, backed by a vibrant soundtrack of son cubano, salsa, jazz, rumba, mambo and hip hop. Drawing on archive footage, animations, movie excerpts and interviews with Havana residents, eyewitnesses and experts, Habaneros runs through key moments in the city’s modern history, from the abolition of slavery at the end of the 19th century to the Spanish–American War, and from the dictatorship of General Batista to the revolution of Fidel Castro. The film concludes by wondering what the future holds. Many Havana locals are encouraged by President Obama’s relaxation of sanctions, but much uncertainty remains. Will the historic city center soon be crammed with McDonald’s and Trump Towers? Will Havana still be Havana? As one person puts it, ‘If there is too much money, Havana can disappear. It could become gentrified or turned into a Cancun on the shores of the Caribbean.’”

IDFA

Criterion (Video)

W - Julien Temple

Dub Music: Exploring The Genre’s Jamaican Origins

 

“Earth-shattering thunderclap reverb, interstellar space echoes, mind-boggling delay, high pass filters – that’s what the world loves about dub. In the 21st century, the word dub is associated with remixes, particularly dance music. Modern techno, grime, house, dubstep tunes will often have a ‘dub’ edit or remix. Its origins, invention, development and progression, like much in modern dance music, firmly owes Jamaica its dues. It was in the late 60s that the origins of ‘dub’ can be traced. Sound Systems in Jamaica were the main form of entertainment, especially for the poorer classes who couldn’t afford Kingstons’ uptown clubs. Downtown in open-air ‘lawns’ every weekend, and most weeknights, outdoor dances would be held with the Caribbean starlit sky as the roof. ...”

udiscover (Audio/Video)

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An Introduction To Dub In 10 Songs (Video)

Dub London: Bassline of a City (Video)

2018 August: The Roots of Dub

Joralemon Street Tunnel

 

1913 postcard illustrating the tunnel and City Hall station

“The Joralemon Street Tunnel, originally the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, is a pair of tubes carrying the IRT Lexington Avenue Line (4 and ​5 trains) of the New York City Subway under the East River between Bowling Green Park in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn, New York City. The Joralemon Street Tunnel served as an extension of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT)'s first subway line from the Bowling Green station in Manhattan to the IRT Eastern Parkway Line in Brooklyn. The tubes were constructed using the shield method and are each 6,550 feet (2,000 m) long and 15.5 feet (4.7 m) wide. The tubes are lined with cast-iron ‘rings’ formed with concrete. Their maximum depth is 91 to 95 feet (28 to 29 m) below the mean high water level of the East River, with a maximum gradient of 3.1 percent. The construction of the tunnel also saw the conversion of 58 Joralemon Street, in Brooklyn, into a ventilation building and emergency exit. The Joralemon Street Tunnel was the first underwater subway tunnel connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. ...”

Wikipedia

Walkabout: The Tunnel That Ate Brooklyn, Part 2

Janek Schaefer - The haunting beauty of plunderphonics, field recordings and sonic art Image

 

“Back in the early nineties, while I was studying architecture in Manchester and well before I discovered my interest in sound, I learned about the importance of context in creative process and production. I was drawn to artists like Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachael Whiteread, James Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy who worked with the materials around them in-situ. I also taught myself how to develop and print photographs with my inherited Nikon F1, capturing the light/image of a situation in a fraction of a second, and using the camera as a tool for adventure to explore my environment, to bump into chance observations. ...”

The Vinyl Factory (Audio)

ARTFORUM: Janek Schaeffer discusses Vacant Space (Video)

Janek Schaefer (Video)

Bandcamp (Audio)

W - Janek Schaefer

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Janek Schaefer - Topic

A Quiet Life of Loud Home Runs: Hank Aaron in Photographs Image

 

After a short stint in the Negro leagues and two seasons in the minors, Aaron reached the majors as a 20-year-old outfielder for the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. He did not make the All-Star Game that season, but he did in every other year from 1955 to 1975.

“Hank Aaron wasn’t as loud as some other stars, on or off the field. He was a steady presence, a fixture in right field, a mainstay at the All-Star Game and a terror at the plate. His path was often difficult, and his name is sometimes overlooked when rattling off the greatest to ever play the game. But make no mistake: To his peers — or the closest thing baseball could offer in terms of peers — Aaron was nothing short of a god among men. There were many special seasons in Aaron’s career, but nothing could quite match 1957, when he blossomed into one of the game’s best players and led the Milwaukee Braves to a World Series title — the franchise’s first championship since 1914 and the only one while the team was based in Milwaukee. Aaron received the Most Valuable Player Award after the season. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Hank Aaron, Home Run King Who Defied Racism, Dies at 86

The Ringer: The Staggering Greatness of Hank Aaron, by the Numbers

NY Times: There Are Hall of Famers, and Then There’s Hank Aaron

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ESPN: Longtime MLB home run king Hank Aaron dies at 86 (Video)

YouTube: Remembering Hank Aaron, one of the greatest MLB players ever

Celestial Love - Sun Ra

 

“Originally released in 1984, Celestial Love was recorded at Variety Studios in New York City in September of 1982, and was Sun Ra's last studio album to be released by El Saturn Records. Much of the album's content also appeared on the full-length Nuclear War record which was issued in Europe by post-punk label Y Records in 1984. Far from the brash, apocalyptic radicalism of the single "Nuclear War," this set is closer to the more straightforward end of the Arkestra canon. As with much of Ra's later, Philadelphia-period work, this release incorporates earlier jazz and swing tunes as well as his own compositions, linking jazz's past with its present and future. Duke Ellington is paid tribute in the form of two tracks, ‘Sophisticated Lady’ (which starts out slow and blue, then emerges swinging at full power) and a truly cheerful ‘Drop Me Off in Harlem.’ Both of the numbers sung by June Tyson are, of course, absolutely delightful. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Celestial Love 1 / 9

Here to Learn: Remembering Paul Bowles

Paul Bowles outside of Tangier

“In the spring of 1982 I was working as a deck machinist on a cable-laying ship based out of Norfolk, Virginia. In a copy of the Village Voice that I’d picked up while on shore leave, I saw an advertisement for a writing workshop with Paul Bowles in Tangier, Morocco, scheduled for that summer. I immediately sent away for an application form, and when it arrived, I carefully filled it out and put it in an envelope along with a couple of short stories, the quality of which, according to the enclosed information brochure, would be the determining factor in my being accepted. I gave the envelope to the purser and it went off with the next batch of ship’s mail. My hopes of being accepted were not high. ...”

Empty Mirror

                                              Bowles’ study in the the Immeuble Itesa.

2007 November: The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site, 2010 February: Paul Bowles (1910-1999), 2011: January: Halfmoon (1996), 2013 July: Tellus #23 - The Voices of Paul Bowles, 2014 January: Let It Come Down: the Life of Paul Bowles (1998), 2014 March: The Sheltering Sky (1949), 2015 January: Things Gone & Things Still Here, 2015 October: The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles – a cautionary tale for tourists, 2015 November: The Rolling Stone Interview (May 23, 1974), 2016 June: Let It Come Down (1952), 2016 December:  Paul Bowles & the Music of Morocco, 2017 July: Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles, 2018 July: The Sheltering Sound, 2019 September: Jane Bowles, 2019 December: So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles?, 2020 June: A Distant Episode (1947), 2020 September: Paul Bowles in Exile - Jay McInerney

 

Watching Paris, Texas—in Texas

 

“If you are looking to take a road trip to the shooting locations of Paris, Texas, you will be making pitstops at a lot of Texas towns like Galveston and El Paso, but not the actual city of Paris, Texas itself. Although named after the tiny Texan city, the true location of Paris is actually a quaint little town on Highway-82, 90 miles northeast of Dallas and has a 45-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower paying homage to its French counterpart. However, the now-iconic feature film never actually shows its namesake or shoots in it. German director and film pioneer Wim Wenders’ avant-garde art house western swept the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1984 with its visual enticement, subtle poetic emotional unveiling and existential solitude. The screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winner Sam Shepard opens with Travis, a character famously played by the great Harry Dean Stanton, stumbling into the desert with no preamble and soon embarks on a road trip across the desolate albeit hauntingly picturesque landscape of west Texas. ...”

FAR OUT (Video)

Watching Paris, Texas—in Texas

2010 April: New German Cinema, 2010 November: The American Friend (1977), 2012 March: Paris, Texas (1984), 2015 October: Places, Strange and Quiet

The Home Diaries - Whitelabrecs (2020)

 

“Home Diaries is an invitation to artists and musicians to create an album or EP to document their personal experience during the lockdown or social distancing conditions that are upon us, due to the coronavirus outbreak. The series reflects a range of sounds, styles and ideas, as each artist portrays their own reflections uniquely. Each release is digital only for now, as we hope to raise what we can to help keep our label ticking over at this time. The releases feature a recurring polaroid image of a small lonely house, with a coloured filter chosen by the artist for each respective release. We also interview each artist and this is included as a bonus PDF with the download. You can also check out the Home Diaries series direct from the artist themselves in most cases or on Spotify if you prefer. Hit play on the mini album players below to check out the series. ...”

Whitelabrecs (Audio)

Travelogue: The Whitelabrecs Home Diaries (Audio)

Bandcamp: The Home Diaries (Audio)

Discogs

Newcastle United's old St James' Park and a striking vision of bygone football

 

St James' Park, Newcastle, 1930, by Byron Dawson 

“This wonderful depiction shows St James’ Park as it was nine decades ago. It’s a far cry from the towering concrete, steel and glass structure that occupies the same site and dominates the Newcastle skyline today. It was painted in 1930 by the artist Byron Dawson. The fans, seemingly all male, are smartly dressed in coats and hats. There isn’t a black and replica shirt in sight!On the left of our painting is the old West Stand. Built in 1906, in the midst of United’s Edwardian golden era, the stand was St James’ main seating area for decades, as well as home to the players’ dressing rooms, the boardroom and press area. ...”

Chronicle

W - History of Newcastle United F.C.

 

Set of 50 Hints On Association Football Cigarette cards in album (1934)

 

Draw Your Lockdown Life with Teresa Wong

 

“Discover how drawing mundane objects can be a way in to seeing the beauty and meaning all around us with Teresa Wong. You can pick up a copy of Teresa’s book Dear Scarlet from our friends at Bookshop, where proceeds will help benefit The Believer and independent bookstores.Watch the video of the livestream below, and follow these steps to create your own list-style comic of mundane objects. ...”

Believer (Video)

How to Make a Tape Loop in 9 Steps

 

“There’s something special about the sound of a cassette, they produce this amazing warmth and warble as they pass the electromagnetic reader heads that amplify the electric signal. Tapes can be used for much more than listening back to music in an old boombox or car stereo.In fact, the cassette has been used to record and create music for quite a long time. One of the most interesting uses of the cassette tape is the tape loop. It’s a creative way to generate infinite, sprawling sounds that are completely analog and require no digital technology. Let’s take a look at how tape loops work, how to make one of your own, and how to use them in your own music. ...”

LANDR (Video)

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2018 April: Slow Awakening - r beny, 2018 February: why tapes matter, 2017 September: Terry Riley On Tape Loops, 2017 October: Blank Tape: Electronic Cassette Culture, 2018 August: Introductory Loop-Making

How ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ Became Sergio Leone’s Butchered Swan Song

 

“... The great Italian director Sergio Leone established himself as the inventor of the spaghetti Western genre in the mid-1960s thanks to his Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) starring the legendary Clint Eastwood. His three following and equally adored films would become known as the Once Upon a Time trilogy and would end up spanning three decades—the first installment, called Once Upon a Time in the West, was released in 1968, the second one Duck, You Sucker! came out three years later in 1971, and the last one titled Once Upon a Time in America took him over a decade to make. ...”

Cinephilia Beyond

2016 July: Once Upon a Time in America  (1984)

The Complete List of Trump’s Twitter Insults (2015-2021)

 

“As a political figure, Donald J. Trump used Twitter to praise, to cajole, to entertain, to lobby, to establish his version of events — and, perhaps most notably, to amplify his scorn. This list documents the verbal attacks Mr. Trump posted on Twitter, from when he declared his candidacy in June 2015 to Jan. 8, when Twitter permanently barred him. More recent insults are highlighted. ...”

NY Times

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask - Isaac Julien (1995)

 

“Isaac Julien and Mark Nash’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996) is a film portrait of the revolutionary, writer and psychiatrist, whose classic publications The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin White Mask (1952) remain the bibles of decolonisation. One of the leading black intellectuals of the twentieth century, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) trained in psychiatry in France. He explored the ‘black is beautiful’ Negritude movement and entered into a dialogue with Jean-Paul Sartre about the experience of being black. He wrote his first major work, Black Skin White Masks as his graduate psychiatry thesis, focusing on the psychological interdependence of the colonised and colonisers, with particular reference to the French colonies. ...”

Victoria Miro

Isaac Julien

Criterion

W - Black Skin, White Masks, PDF

Victoria Miro: Black Skin White Masks trailer

2017 October:  The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Carlos Pinto and John Sear Fashion Elegant Mosaic Mural of Endangered Swan for “The Audubon Mural Project” in Uptown Manhattan

 

“163rd Street off Broadway was the place to be last week. Multidisciplinary artists Carlos Pinto and John Sear brought their wondrous skills to The Audubon Mural Project, adding two elegant trumpeter swans to the approximately 100 uptown murals featuring endangered birds. The Audubon Project’s first mosaic mural fashioned entirely with recycled objects — from shards of glass to shattered plates  — garnered a huge welcome from the neighborhood, with volunteers eager to assist in the process. Featured above is the completed mural that was captured this past Monday. The images that follow were taken last week as the mural was still in progress: Carlos Pinto at work ...”

Street Art NYC

The Journey of the Antihero Image

 

David Goodis at Warner Bros. One of the bleakest of all the noir authors, he set his 1946 novel, Dark Passage, in San Francisco.

“What is noir? It’s one of those catch-all concepts, an I-know-it-when-I-see-it designation, as elusive as a Santa Ana wind. It’s an American genre with a French name, a literary style perhaps best understood through the lens of film: atmospheric black and white. As a category, noir dates back to the 1920s and the writers who contributed to the pulp magazine Black Mask. These included Raymond Chandler, who published his first story there in 1933, as well as Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Dashiell Hammett—who introduced the Continental Op, an archetypal detective who never reveals his name, in October 1923—and the now largely forgotten Paul Cain, whose brutal, jazzy 1933 novel, Fast One, reconfigured Southern California crime fiction with a bang. ...”

Alta

Speaking Up for the Armchair Fan

 

Critics of television’s influence on soccer ignore that it’s still the way most fans experience the game.

“Television is not a dirty word. It is not the sort of word that should be spat out in anger or growled with resentment or grumbled through gritted teeth. It is not a loaded word, or one laced with scorn and opprobrium and bile. It is not a word that has a tone. Not in most contexts, anyway.In soccer, television is treated as the dirtiest word you can imagine. It is an object of disdain and frustration and, sometimes, hatred. Managers, and occasionally players, rail against its power to dictate when games are played and how often. They resent its scrutiny and its bombast. Television is never cited as the root of anything pleasant. Television is the cause of nothing but problems. There is no need to linger for long on the irony and the hypocrisy here. Television, of course, is also what pays their wages. ...”

NY Times

The violin over the door of a Turtle Bay mansion Image

 

“Old New York City houses hold the most interesting clues—like this bas relief of an angel and horns. It sits over the doorway of 225-227 East 49th Street in Turtle Bay, a mostly brownstone block with the exception of this unusual Tudor-style building. Now a carved up rental, it was once a single-family mansion…and the hint about its most famous occupant is inside this bas relief.See the violin and musical notes? This is the former home of Efrem Zimbalist, the Russian-born violinist whose career spanned much of the 20th century. (If you aren’t familiar with him, you might have heard of his actor son, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., or his actress granddaughter, Stephanie Zimbalist.) ...”

Ephemeral New York