Jeannine Schulz’s “Rooms and Surfaces I”

Rooms, Surfaces And A Painting

“Here’s another fine piece from Jeannine Schulz, whose ’Intense’ I wrote about earlier this week. Like that track, this new one, posted just today, ‘Rooms and Surfaces I,’ shows an internal development, a means of altering over time, that is often lacking in standalone SoundCloud ambient recordings. What makes it so special to listen to is how that change occurs according to some unheard metronome, in phases whose distinct qualities are imperceptible as they shift, but are fully recognizable when you scan through the piece, dropping the metaphoric needle here and there: first the rising drones, then heart-pulsing percussion, then that same rhythm rendered as a glitch-like filter, later a halo effect an octave higher, then an octave higher still, then a cello-like line slow and mournful. ...”

A forgotten artist and the city’s ‘terrible beauty’

 
“Downtown Street,” 1926

“Glenn O. Coleman’s career as a celebrated Gotham illustrator and painter was a short one. Born in Ohio in 1887, he grew up in Indiana and arrived in Manhattan in 1905 to attend the New York School of Art, studying under Robert Henri and Everett Shinn. Coleman earned a name for himself in the 1910s and 1920s city art scene with ‘personal depictions of simple, struggling humanity,’ as the Spellman Gallery put it. His illustrations (some of which he made into lithographs) and paintings reflected the subject matter of his Ashcan teachers: Bowery bums, election night bonfires, slum kids, cops, criminals, ‘silk-hatted tourists,’ bar stool sitters, and other denizens of Lower Manhattan’s pockets and corners, typically at night. ...”

 
“Coenties Slip,” 1928

Stambali: the last dance with the spirits

 
Stombali, stambali or stambeli… The origin of the word is multiple and imprecise. Some suggest a reference to ‘Istanbul’ – in Arabic, stambali means ‘who comes from Istanbul’ – while others think that the term derives from ‘stambeli’, which describes an ensemble of possession rituals among certain Nilo-Saharan peoples, such as the Songhai: ‘we can safely say that the stambeli is a cult, or more precisely a type of African rite, modified yet embraced by Islam,’ explains Amine Metani. A musician and founder of the electronic trance label Shouka, Amine – much like Tunisian producer Ghoula and artists of the Arabstazy collective – draws largely on influences within this sound shrouded by secrecy. ...”

PAM 

 Nefta, in the Tunisian Djerid. Mohamed, a guardian of the sanctuary of Saint Sidi Merzoug, devoted to the spirits of the Banga, wears the clothes of Bou Saadiya, a mythological character within the stambali community. He holds a pair of chkacheks – a metallic percussion instrument that forms an essential part of the ceremony. 

Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society - Mandance (1982)

 
“... [Ronald Shannon] Jackson formed his band, The Decoding Society, in 1979, as a showcase for his blend of avant-garde jazz, rock, funk, and ethnic music. The instrumentation and arrangements, along with Jackson's compositions and drum style, brought The Decoding Society critical acclaim. Although considered to be part of the ‘new fusion’ movement that emerged from Ornette Coleman's harmolodic concepts, Jackson was able to implement a voice of his own. The Decoding Society's music can be hot, savage, and danceable, or cool, gentle, and contemplative. American, Eastern, and African sounds are distilled under Jackson's guidance. Meters, feels, tempos, and stylistic references are heard throughout different compositions; many times within a single piece of music. ...”

Life on Venus? The Picture Gets Cloudier

 
A false-color view of Venus taken by Japan’s Akatsuki Venus Climate Orbiter in 2018.

“A team of astronomers made a blockbuster claim in the fall. They said they had discovered compelling evidence pointing to life floating in the clouds of Venus. If true, that would be stunning. People have long gazed into the cosmos and wondered whether something is alive out there. For an affirmative answer to pop up on the planet in the orbit next to Earth’s would suggest that life is not rare in the universe, but commonplace. The astronomers, led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales, could not see any microscopic Venusians with their telescopes on Earth. Rather, in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, they reported the detection of a molecule called phosphine and said they could come up with no plausible explanation for how it could form there except as the waste product of microbes. ...”

 
A colorized mosaic of the surface of Venus, seen through its clouds by the Magellan spacecraft in the early 1990s.

Take a Road Trip with Cyberspace Visionary William Gibson, Watch No Maps for These Territories (2000)

 
“‘I probably worry less about the real future than the average person,’ says William Gibson, the man who coined the term ‘cyberspace’ and wrote books like Neuromancer, Idoru, and Pattern Recognition. These have become classics of a science-fiction subgenre branded as ‘cyberpunk,’ a label that seems to pain Gibson himself. ‘A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list,’ he says to David Wallace-Wells in a 2011 Paris Review interview. Yet the popularity of the concept of cyberspace — and, to a great extent, its having become a reality — still astonishes him. ... A dozen years earlier, in Mark Neale’s biographical documentary No Maps for These Territories, the author tells of how he first conceived it as ‘an effective buzzword,’ ‘evocative and essentially meaningless,’ and observes that, today, the prefix ‘cyber-’ has very nearly gone the way of ‘electro-’: just as we’ve long since taken electrification for granted, so we now take connected computerization for granted. ...”

A Natural Work of Art May Be Hiding Among Indian Cave Masterpieces

 
Cave paintings at the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in Madhya Pradesh in India.

“Ten thousand years ago or more, people started painting the walls of caves near Bhopal, India. Over the millenniums they made thousands of images in what are now called the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters: men, women, a couple having sex, dancers, children, hunts, battles, about 29 different animal species and mythical beasts like a part-boar part-ox part-elephant. Over time, art styles shifted. Human figures donned clothes. Horses and elephants sprouted riders. Wars danced across sandstone faces. Today, many of the cave walls are now palimpsests, with medieval warriors covering Chalcolithic art on top of even older Mesolithic drawings. ...”

The Trencherman: Punched in the Face by the Ghosts of St. Marks

 
“Ever wonder why a barfly sits so still? Both the question and the answer came to me at once one night last week. It’s the fear of falling over. I was sitting on a tall stool at the long bar in the narrow room. Not unlike the millions of other quiet Atlases that have done and will strike the same hunched-over pose, I was weighed down by the weight of the world. Events had knocked me off course. Nothing a stiff drink couldn’t solve, I thought, ordering one off the lengthy menu at the William Barnacle Tavern, the singular institution at 80 St. Marks Place between First and Second avenues. But the stool was high and the legs were slender and my guts were still so much in turmoil, I didn’t want to tempt fate by moving around too much. So I sat like a gargoyle and watched other people in the mirror.  There was a lot to see and more to think about. ...”

Bill Evans Live in Munch Museum, Oslo (1966)

 
“Today, a 30-minute video of Bill Evans performing in Oslo, Norway, at the Edvard Munch Museum on October 28, 1966. The trio consisted of Evans, bassist Eddie Gomez on bass and Danish drummer Alex Riel. Filmed by the Norwegian Broadcasting Co., the trio performed in a hall just below Munch's massive work, The Researchers, and features one of Evans's finest performances of Nardis. The songs performed, in order, are Very Early, Stella by Starlight, If You Could See Me Now, Autumn Leaves, Time Remembered, Nardis and Five.  ...”

Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers -The Virtual Tour

 
“Join Design Museum curators Gemma Curtin and Maria McLintock, as they guide you through key moments of the exhibition. On your virtual tour, listen to exclusive interviews from:  Internationally acclaimed artists such as Jean-Michel Jarre, Shiva Feshareki, Alan Oldham and A Guy Called Gerald. Ground-breaking designers and visual artists such as Judas, Kate Moross, Pier Schneider and François Wunschel of 1024 Architecture, Yuri Suzuki and Weirdcore. Jean-Yves Leloup, co-curator of the exhibition. Meet the inventors and trailblazers of electronic music from early 20th century pioneers to Daphne Oram, Jeff Mills and more. Explore the birth of house and techno in Chicago and Detroit, New York’s historic dance culture and the UK's Second Summer of Love. ...”

On Hustles

“I can always tell which one of my friends didn’t grow up around hustlers by how they look up and lock eyes with the person at the mall kiosk, who—by virtue of that enchanting eye contact—doesn’t even have to wave them over. They drift into the grasp of the salesperson without even being aware of it. And that’s when their money is no longer theirs. ... White Men Can’t Jump dissects the hustle solely as a game of optics. Billy Hoyle used to hoop in college but now makes a living hustling streetballers. He’s white, wears baggy shirts and a backward hat to the courts populated by Black players who are taller, fitter, dressed for the game. But, most importantly, he’s white. Sidney Deane is Billy’s initial, primary target. Sidney is talented, loud, boastful, approaching a caricature of a nineties streetball archetype. ...”

The Art of the Chore: Roberta Cantow’s Feminist Classic Clotheslines

 
“Domestic work offers both an agonizing ennui and the satisfaction of a necessary task being completed. In the 1981 documentary Clotheslines, filmmaker Roberta Cantow mines these two moods, as well as the subtler emotions that fill the distance between them. Over the course of this thirty-two-minute, nearly ekphrastic meditation on the art of laundry, we listen to twenty-one women reconcile their feelings about this mundane chore. Cantow’s interviews with them play out over impressionistic 16 mm footage of high-hanging delicates, vigorous handwashing, and socks being clipped one by one onto nearly invisible lines. ... Clotheslines expands on a tradition of feminist cinema established in the seventies by a wave of filmmakers who aired their own grievances on similar themes, including Chantal Akerman, Julia Reichert, Amalie R. Rothschild, and Claudia Weill. ...”

The Great Gatsby Is Now in the Public Domain and There’s a New Graphic Novel image

 
“If you’ve ever dreamed about mounting that ‘Great Gatsby’ musical, or writing that sci-fi adaptation based on Gatsby but they’re all androids, there’s some good news: as of January 1, 2021, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel finally entered the public domain. (Read a public domain copy here.) Creatives can now do what they want with the work: reprint or adapt it any way they like, without having to negotiate the rights. Or you could, just like Minneapolis-based artist K. Woodman-Maynard adapt the work into a beautiful graphic novel, pages of which you can glimpse here. Her version is all light and pastel watercolors, with a liberal use of the original text alongside more fantastic surreal imagery, making visual some of Fitzgerald’s word play. At 240 pages, there’s a lot of work here and, as if it needs repeating, no graphic novel is a substitute for the original, just…a jazz riff, if you were. ...”

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. ...”

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. ...”

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. ...”

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. ...”

“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. ...”

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. ...”

 
 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. ...”