77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election

 

“By Thursday the 12th of November, President Donald J. Trump’s election lawyers were concluding that the reality he faced was the inverse of the narrative he was promoting in his comments and on Twitter. There was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough ‘irregularities’ to reverse the outcome in the courts. Mr. Trump did not, could not, win the election, not by ‘a lot’ or even a little. His presidency would soon be over. Allegations of Democratic malfeasance had disintegrated in embarrassing fashion. A supposed suitcase of illegal ballots in Detroit proved to be a box of camera equipment. ‘Dead voters’ were turning up alive in television and newspaper interviews. The week was coming to a particularly demoralizing close: In Arizona, the Trump lawyers were preparing to withdraw their main lawsuit as the state tally showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. leading by more than 10,000 votes, against the 191 ballots they had identified for challenge. ...”

NY Times

*****NY Times: Arrested in Capitol Riot: Organized Militants and a Horde of Radicals

NY Times: Key Takeaways From Trump’s Effort to Overturn the Election

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YouTube: NYT Digs Into Trump....

 The president’s supporters, emboldened by the lie of a stolen election, breached the halls of Congress to stop the certification of the vote.

NY Times: Tracking the Oath Keepers Who Attacked the Capitol

NY Times: Republican Ties to Extremist Groups Are Under Scrutiny

NY Times: How Trump’s Focus on Antifa Distracted Attention From the Far-Right Threat

NY Times: Proud Boys Charged With Conspiracy in Capitol Riot

NY Times: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Controversies Are Piling Up. Republicans Are Quiet.

YouTube: G O P  Quiet as Pressure Mounts to Address Lawmaker’s Conspiracy Claims

 A cartoon depicting a fight on the floor of the Congress Hall in Philadelphia in 1798 between Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont and Representative Roger Griswold of Connecticut.

NY Times: Opinion | Why 1850 Doesn’t Feel So Far Away

NY Times: After Capitol Riot, Elected Officials Under Pressure Back Home

NY Times: Opinion | If Marjorie Taylor Greene Isn’t Beyond the Pale, Who Is?

Old Rivals, New Ideas and Why Some Clubs Are Reluctant to Try

 

Is it possible Rangers and Celtic are too tangled up in their rivalry for their own good?

“Nobody wants to say it is over. Steven Gerrard, the Rangers manager, will not tempt fate. He will only believe the title is won, he has said, when the math says so. Neil Lennon, his counterpart at Celtic, similarly cannot concede defeat. His team, he has said, will keep going, keep fighting, while there is still some small glimmer of hope. But both must surely know that it is over, and has been for some time. It was over long before this last, toxic month, when Celtic staged a winter training break in Dubai in the middle of a pandemic and flew back into a coronavirus-infected storm.It was over before two Celtic players duly tested positive, before pretty much the whole first-team squad had to go into isolation, before criticism rained down on the club from the Scottish government and even its own fans. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: In Brazil, Risk and Reward, Side by Joyous Side

Spiritmuse Records #38: Eastern Jazz Sounds

 

“This is a 2hr set of deep listening and spiritual Eastern jazz sounds. It includes killer Egyptian and Middle Eastern gems, Greek and Armenian folk, Indo-Jazz and hypnotic Arabic delights. This is a MADONJAZZ Classic show recorded 5 years ago in December 2015, revisited and re-edited for your listening pleasure. All tunes in this set are from rare vinyl finds during our digging travels in 2014/15 in Paris, Amsterdam & Thessaloniki. As always, All Vinyl. ...”

MadonJazz (Audio)

A snowstorm on Broadway in the Theater District

 

“Painter John Sloan, born in Philadelphia, moved to New York City in 1904. Throughout his life he depicted scenes of city residents doing everything from dreaming on rooftops to commuting on the elevated to hanging laundry to partying on Election night. But ‘The White Way,’ from 1927, is the first Sloan painting I’m aware of that shows the action and activity of Broadway’s Theater District, specifically at 50th Street. It belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which states this about Sloan’s New York subjects and this work in particular. ...”

Ephemeral New York

2009 August: John Sloan, 2011  November: American realism, 2012 December: Old New York, 2015 May: Spectator of Life, 2015 October: Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917, 2015 October: Tenderloin, 2015 October: McSorley's Bar - John Sloan (1912), 2015 December: "Red Kimono on the Roof," 1912, 2016 January: “The Hell Hole,” 1917, 2016 February: Gloucester Days, 2016 March: “Hanging Clothes,” 1920, 2016 May: "Roof, Summer Night," 1906, 2016 October: "Spring Rain," 1912, 2016 October: "The Lafayette" (1927), 2016 December: The Old House at Home by Joseph Mitchell (April 1940), 2020 September: Elevated rails, rooftops, and McSorley’s: How painter John Sloan captured 20th-century Manhattan

“America" - Garrett Bradley (2019)

 

“According to the Library of Congress, around 70 percent of all feature-length films made in the US between 1912 and 1929 no longer exist. In America (2019), artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley imagines Black figures from the early decades of the 20th century whose lives have been lost to history. A multichannel video installation, it is organized around 12 short black-and-white films shot by Bradley and set to a score by artist Trevor Mathison and composer Udit Duseja. Bradley intersperses her films with footage from the unreleased Lime Kiln Club Field Day (1914), believed to be the oldest surviving feature-length film with an all-Black cast.’I see America as a model for how…the assembly of images can serve as an archive of the past as well as a document of the present,’ Bradley has said. Her installation cites historical events, ranging from African American composer and singer Harry T. Burleigh’s publication of the spiritual ‘Deep River’ in 1917, to the murder of popular jazz bandleader James Reese Europe in 1919, to the founding of baseball’s Negro National League in 1920. ...”

Disrupting the algorithm around "America" | Introducing Virtual Views: Garrett Bradley's "America" (Video)

Garrett Bradley on Her Short Film ‘America’: ‘I Didn’t Want to Shy Away From What it Would Mean to Title it After My Country’ (Video)

BAM - Garrett Bradley’s America: A Journey Through Race and Time

MoMA - Garrett Bradley (Video)

W - Garrett Bradley

YouTube: Shorts Competition: America

150 Years Ago Brooklyn Renumbered All Its Streets. It Was a Disaster.

 

Ferry House, Atlantic Street, Brooklyn in 1850. 

“Walk a mile in a Brooklynite’s shoes, whether on brownstone-lined blocks or the streets filled with vinyl-sided houses, and you’re bound to notice address plates crowded with fractions. On Norman Avenue in Greenpoint, you’ll find three in one short stretch: 68½, 72½ and 78½. When hailing an Uber, repeating street names might give you pause: Are you going to Washington Street in Dumbo or Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill? Today’s Brooklyn map is a relic of a massive 19th-century project to renumber every building and rename dozens of streets — an example of how decisions made by bureaucrats can leave an imprint on urban life for decades or even centuries. ...”

NY Times

 

 A map from 1888 shows a street with “No official numbers” in Weeksville.

The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup

 

“Do you think you would recognize a coffee plant if you came across one in the wild? Not that it’s likely outside the so-called ‘coffee belt,’ the region of the world most rich in soil, shade, mild temperatures, and copious rainfall. Farmed coffee plants ‘are pruned short to conserve their energy,’ the National Coffee Association notes, but they ‘can grow to more than 30 feet (9 meters) high. Each tree is covered with green, waxy leaves growing opposite each other in pairs. Coffee cherries grow along the branches. Because it grows in a continuous cycle, it’s not unusual to see [white] flowers, green fruit and ripe [red] fruit simultaneously on a single tree.’ That’s a festive image to call to mind when you brew—or a barista brews—your coffee beverage of choice. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

The Life of a Coffee Bean: From Plant to Cup

2010 September: Espresso, April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee

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

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‘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)

W - Dub music

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

W - Hank Aaron

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