Imagining Nora Barnacle’s Love Letters to James Joyce Image

James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, seated on a wall in Zurich.

“The fact is no one should be able to read the intimate words that anyone writes to their partner—those outpourings are composed for two people only: the lover and the loved. But when you’re writing a novel about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, and the letters are published and are, well, just there, they become impossible to ignore. Whenever I told anyone I was writing a bio-fictional novel about Nora and Joyce, they would remark, with glow-eyed glee, ‘Oh, no doubt you’ll include the letters.’ And, yes, I have included them. But not quite as you might think. ...”

The Story Behind the Iconic Bass-Smashing Photo on the Clash’s London Calling

 
Pennie Smith was not a fan. Maybe that’s what made her the perfect photographer for The Clash. ‘She was never particularly into rock music,’ writes Rob Walker at The Guardian; she wasn’t starstruck or overawed by her subjects; and she also wasn’t even particularly in love with the most famous shot of her career — the iconic photo of bassist Paul Simonon raising his Fender Precision at New York’s Palladium, seconds before smashing it to bits.  ...”

N.C.A.A. Tournament Brackets: A Guide to the Madness

“Chaos is coming. A promise of every March but one since 1939 — that the N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments will thrill, infuriate, delight and fuel delusions of every sort — is about to have its pandemic-era test. But no one really doubts that the tournaments, assuming they happen as planned, will conjure up the full range of emotions that can make college basketball fans a proudly obsessive lot. No matter your level of fandom, here’s what you need to know about filling out your brackets, how the tournament will operate, where to watch the games, and more. ...”

Best Alt.Country Musicians: 10 Essential Artists

 
“The musicians who came to define the alt.country boom of the late 80s and 90s believed themselves to be outside of the country music establishment and its ethos of the time. As Lucinda Williams, one of the best alt.country musicians of the era, put it, ‘I definitely don’t feel a part of what I call the straighter country music industry of Nashville. I’m definitely not connected with that world. I guess I’m sort of considered an outlaw here, along with Steve Earle.’ The term alt.country (sometimes dubbed ‘insurgent country’) describes a number of musicians who eschewed the pop-infused country music that had begun to take hold in the late 70s and 80s. Though its roots reach back to country music icons such as Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, the most direct relevant forerunners to alt.country are Gram Parsons and The Flying Burrito Brothers, who were playing a mix of traditional country music and rock from the late 60s. ...”

Tracing Berenice Abbott’s steps in today’s Bowery

 
“After spending the 1920s as a cutting edge portrait photographer in Paris, Berenice Abbott returned to the United States to find that her documentary-like style of photography was out of fashion. In New York, Abbott ‘was unable to secure space at galleries, have her work shown at museums, or continue the working relationships she had forged with a number of magazine publications,’ states the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Lucky for Abbott—and for fans of her unromanticized images that speak for themselves—the Federal Art Project came calling. In 1935, it gave her the means to photograph the streets, buildings, and people of New York City. More than 300 resulting images were collected in Changing New York, published in 1939. ...”

Police Shrugged Off the Proud Boys, Until They Attacked the Capitol

 
Trump supporters stormed Congress on Jan. 6 to thwart the certification of the presidential election, leading to the deaths of five people.

A protester was burning an American flag outside the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland when Joseph Biggs rushed to attack. Jumping a police line, he ripped the man’s shirt off and ‘started pounding,’ he boasted that night in an online video. But the local police charged the flag burner with assaulting Mr. Biggs. The city later paid $225,000 to settle accusations that the police had falsified their reports out of sympathy with Mr. Biggs, who went on to become a leader of the far-right Proud Boys. Two years later, in Portland, Ore., something similar occurred. A Proud Boy named Ethan Nordean was caught on video pushing his way through a crowd of counterprotesters, punching one of them, then slamming him to the ground, unconscious. Once again, the police charged only the other man in the skirmish, accusing him of swinging a baton at Mr. Nordean. ...”

Mr. Biggs pummeled Gregory Johnson, above, a member of the Communist Party who burned the American flag at a protest in 2016.

Guedra Guedra: Vexillology review – splicing Moroccan culture with sub-bass

 
“From the spiritual polyrhythms of gnawa to the looping vocalisations of Sufism and the percussive tessellations of Berber folk, the world of north African cultures meet in the music of Morocco. Producer Abdellah M Hassak, AKA Guedra Guedra, has taken these rhythms as the core of his work. His name comes from the Berber dance music performed on the guedra drum; his debut EP, 2020’s Son of Sun, explored these diffuse roots through a dancefloor filter, with added field recordings and electronic Midi sequencing, a junglist collage that straddles tradition and contemporary dance musics. ...”

SoundCloud (Audio)

The Misfits - written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston (1961)

The Misfits is a 1961 American drama western film written by Arthur Miller, directed by John Huston, and starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. The supporting cast features Thelma Ritter, Eli Wallach and Kevin McCarthy. The Misfits was the last completed film for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe. For Gable, the film was posthumously released, while Monroe died in 1962. The plot centers on a newly divorced woman (Marilyn Monroe) and her time in Reno and Northern Nevada, spent with her friendly landlady Isabelle Steers (Thelma Ritter), an old school cowboy (Clark Gable), the cowboy's tow truck-driving and plane-flying friend (Eli Wallach) and their rodeo-riding, bronc-busting friend (Montgomery Clift) in Dayton, Nevada, and in the western Nevada desert in 1960. ... The making of The Misfits was troublesome on several accounts, not the least of which was the sometimes 100 °F (38 °C) heat of the northern Nevada desert and the breakdown of Monroe's marriage to writer Arthur Miller. Miller revised the script throughout the shoot as the concepts of the film developed. Meanwhile, while her marriage to Arthur Miller had issues, Marilyn Monroe was drinking too much after work, and was using prescription drugs; according to Huston in a 1981 retrospective interview, he was ‘absolutely certain that she was doomed’ a conclusion he reached while working on the film. ... Huston shut down production in August 1960 when Monroe went to a hospital for relaxation and depression treatment. ...”

The City Review

“John Huston’s The Misfits is a studious, daring vision of American life depicting the same type of protagonists that always appealed to the great filmmaker—people who could be easily called losers, but whose streak of idealism and hopefulness, in the midst of their isolating displacement, makes them attractive and quite easily relatable for the audience. The status of this 1961 drama gained an additional burst by the fact that it was the last film Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe ever worked on, but its value hardly lies in trivialities like this. The main strengths of Huston’s celebrated film can be found in superb acting by Monroe, Gable, Montgomery Clift and Thelma Ritter, as well as Arthur Miller’s genuinely inspired script and director of photography Russell Metty’s astonishing black-and-white visuals. In its production phase, the film basically had to go through hell. ...” John Huston’s ‘The Misfits’ stands tall as a pearl of the sixties which isn’t going to fade into public oblivion any time soon (Video)

2012 June: Before Air-Conditioning (1998), 2014 December: The Crucible (1953), 2015 December: A View from the Bridge (1955), 2016 January: Arthur Miller’s Brooklyn, 2017 October: Death of a Salesman (1949), 2019 August: The Chelsea Affect

New Yorks Underground Societies | Cities of the Underworld

 
“Today, New York is the biggest city in the country... but it's got some dark secrets in its past. It was founded by covert groups, overrun with gangs and mob bosses, and ruled by secret societies. This is the true foundation of the city that never sleeps, and host Don Wildman is headed deep beneath the skyscrapers, taxicabs and street vendors into a New York that few have ever seen before. From a hidden Freemason tunnel and secret world of the Sandhogs, to mobster hideaways and gang escape routes, we're uncovering the secret societies that built New York--from the underground up.“

Arto Lindsay: Space, Parades, and Confrontational Aesthetics

 
“I first Met Arto Lindsay at a party I hosted at my house to preview a new set by my band Zs.  Of course it was an honor and a privilege to have the man in my house—founding the band DNA alone makes him a legend! Arto and I have a mutual friend, Arto’s manager Ryu Takahashi, and through him we had occasion to meet a number of times over the next couple of years.  As I got to know Arto and his work better, I began to appreciate the breadth of his artistic vision.  Not only had Arto founded arguably the most important band from New York’s early-’80s No Wave scene, he is a well-known figure in Brazilian pop, collaborator of Matthew Barney’s, leader of parades, and thrower of sounds in space. Alexis de Tocqueville has said that Americans ‘cut through the form to the substance.’  Punk, which is quintessentially American, does just that.  Born of an urgency around reaching people through disruptive and confrontational aesthetics and social practice, punk is inherently populist at the level of essence. ...”

Tobias Karlehag: Karlehag’s “Spring”

“This is a dream of a piece by Tobias Karlehag, whose ‘Spring’ is an evershfting melodic line, supported by a shimmering sequence of ambient pads. The melody is quite brief and cyclical, and yet something about the accumulation of tones, the slight variations in permutations, the occasional appearance of what seem to be choral vocal samples, all adds up to something far more life-like than the individual parts might suggest. Throughout, Karlehag’s darts in and out of view, maintaining the balance, implementing small changes. This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at YouTube. More from Karlehag at tobiaskarlehag.tumblr.com. ...”

Meet Alnilam, Orion's Belt Buckle

 
Alnilam in Orion, the Hunter, as seen in early winter.

Alnilam is the middle star in the famous three-member belt of Orion, the Hunter. The belt is so easily recognizable because all three stars are spaced evenly in a (roughly) straight line and appear to be about the same brightness. But Alnilam stands out for being super massive, super distant, and, perhaps most intriguingly, super luminous. Picture the Sun on a hot summer day; think about the light you see and the heat you feel. This energy is so strong that it powers photosynthesis in plants, and in turn, almost everything other living thing on Earth. ...”

The Ojibwe constellation of the Wintermaker includes the familiar stars of our Orion but his outstretched arms reach to include Procyon in Canis Minor and Aldebaran in Taurus.

A Special Day - Ettore Scola (1977)

 
A Special Day (Italian: Una giornata particolare) is a 1977 Italian drama film directed by Ettore Scola and starring Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni and John Vernon. Set in Rome in 1938, its narrative follows a woman and her neighbor who stay home the day Adolf Hitler visits Benito Mussolini. It is an Italian-Canadian co-production. Themes addressed in the film include gender roles, fascism, and the persecution of homosexuals under the Mussolini regime. ... Much of the film's themes revolve around gender roles and the model of masculinity under fascist Italy. Antonietta is the donna madre, a mother figure who meets her feminine responsibilities in the regime by having six children, boasting one more will secure her the government bonus established for large families in 1933. The Fascist regime equates homosexuality with depopulation, and thus, Gabriele is suspected of treason. The bachelor tax of 1926 was a measure against this, and Gabriele has to pay it. While the stay-at-home mother and homosexual neighbor would seem to be an improbable pairing, both are minimized by the regime, and find comfort and some sympathy in each other. At the end of the film, domestic life will continue as usual, but "inner resistance" to Fascism has been awakened. ...”

The New American Poetry 1945–1960

 
“... For many, Grove Press really defined the character of the international literary underground. Donald Allen, the first editor at Grove (other than Rosset), edited the anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960, the importance and influence of which cannot be overestimated—San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, Beat, the New York School, are all here brought together and center stage. This book might well be considered the ‘flash point’ for the renaissance in literary writing and small press publishing that would flourish within a few short years of its publication. Along with its stable of European writers, Grove also published such Americans as Ted Berrigan (The Sonnets went through two printings totaling 6,000 copies), Paul Blackburn, William S. Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Jr., Richard Brautigan, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson, among many others. ...”
April 2019: Networking the New American Poetry

Patti Smith - People Have The Power (1988)

 
“People have the power, is probably one of the most famous and powerful protest songs of all time. It was written by Patti Smith and her late husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, and released as a lead single from the 1988’s album Dream of Life. Notably, we could say that this is the most ‘universal’ and ‘optimistic’ protest song written ever: it could easily adapt to any cause and eventually inspires optimism in those who sing the song, clearly stating that we have the individual power to realize our dreams of a better society by standing together.In an interview released at NME, Patti explained how she and her late husband tried to infuse the spirit of the ’60s into a modern protest song: We had both protested the Vietnam War when we were young. We had been part of the ’60s, where our cultural voice was really strong, and we were trying to write a song that would reintroduce that kind of energy. It’s sad for me but quite beautiful. It was really Fred’s song — even though I wrote the words, he wrote the music; the concept was his, and he wanted it to be a song that people sang all over the world to inspire them for different causes. ...”

Dennis Brown - Money In My Pocket (1979)

 
“Originally a Jamaican hit for Dennis Brown in 1972, the self-penned 'Money In My Pocket' was recut by the singer-songwriter six years later, with the updated version proving even more successful, breaching the UK pop charts on 3 March 1979 before peaking five weeks later. ...”

French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 
Woman with a parasol and small child on a sunlit hillside c. 1874–76 - Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“More than 100 impressionist masterworks, including 19 Monet paintings, will travel to Melbourne from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this year as part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Winter Masterpieces exhibition. NGV director Tony Ellwood announced the blockbuster exhibition on Monday as part of the gallery’s unveiling of its 2021 program – an announcement delayed by two weeks due to Melbourne’s snap five-day lockdown in February. Along with the Monet works, paintings from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and Mary Cassatt will headline French Impressionism, which is scheduled to open at the NGV International in June.Seventy-nine of the paintings have never been exhibited in Australia before. ...”

An Old Bee Farm (c 1900) - Clara Southern.

The Journals - Paul Blackburn (1975)

 
THE JOURNALS to my mind are Blackburn's quintessential work, and demonstrate the way his work knew to go, the power of music he could charm out of everything that came his way, or even looked as if it were thinking about it. The poems and entries are also his last work. The latest writing in it comes up to six weeks of his death in September 1971. From his papers, it is clear that in those last weeks he tried to collect the Journal pages together, and did sense them (as many of his readers from 1968 onward did) as a continuous and coherent book. The present text follows generally the order of what he had collected together and erratically paginated as The Journals. When repetitions, revisions, and versions have been taken away, our inheritance in this particular amounts to a typescript of some 160 pages. ... - Edited By Robert Kelly

Perfection, Art and Manchester City

 
“... The iteration of Manchester City that Pep Guardiola has crafted this season is, without question, a marvel of engineering: fine-tuned and slick and working in almost flawless, mechanical synchronicity. The Premier League has been unable to resist: City has won 15 league games in a row, conceding only five goals in the process and building an unassailable 14-point lead over its nearest challenger, and this weekend’s opponent/victim, Manchester United. Guardiola’s team has one foot in the Champions League quarterfinals. It has already reached the same stage of the F.A. Cup, and the final of the Carabao Cup.  ...”

Futuro Antico ‎- Futuro Antico (1980)

 
“For the first time on vinyl and CD this obscure gem of the italian project Futuro Antico, released just on tape in 1980, this record contains the hypnotic session of Walter Maioli (Aktuala) and Riccardo Sinigaglia. Analog and warm sounds, a perfect mix of drone synth and ancient flutes (found in oriental countries) gives you the idea to fly on a spaceship towards some exotic sites. This records terribly remember the astonishing live Köln jam of Terry Riley and Don Cherry, the comparison fits! This reissue maintains the first tape artwork + info and photos in the innerfolder. ...”

Forty Daze of R. Crumb: The Complete Collection and Then Some

 
“It was the Bicentennial year. What could be more appropriate than to give an avatar of the counterculture free rein across the pages of the Village Voice? The country was still floundering after Watergate and almost two years of bumbling from the appointed caretaker in the Oval Office, Jerry Ford. Many years later, speaking to an interviewer about a collected edition of the Voice’s Mr. Natural strips, Crumb said, ‘Well, by the mid-Seventies I was feeling kind of lost. The hippie thing was falling apart. The whole optimism of the Sixties was getting ground down.’ ... Crumb can never be accused of viewing the world through rose-colored glasses, and the backgrounds behind Mr. Natural’s ruminations are chockablock with junked cars, smokestacks, discarded tires, and other blots on the American arcadia. We get classic Mr. Natural: Sage or crackpot or charlatan? ...”

In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers

 
“It’s one of the mightiest rivers you will never see, carrying some 30 times more water than all the world’s freshwater rivers combined. In the North Atlantic, one arm of the Gulf Stream breaks toward Iceland, transporting vast amounts of warmth far northward, by one estimate supplying Scandinavia with heat equivalent to 78,000 times its current energy use. Without this current — a heat pump on a planetary scale — scientists believe that great swaths of the world might look quite different. Now, a spate of studies, including one published last week, suggests this northern portion of the Gulf Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing. Pushing the bounds of oceanography, scientists have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the Atlantic to better understand the complex network of currents that the Gulf Stream belongs to, not only at the surface, but hundreds of feet deep. ...”

Jazz legend, after house partially collapses, gets help from philanthropist, neighbors

 
Marshall Allen, 96, has led Sun Ra's Arkestra since 1993 and still lives in the Sun Ra House in Germantown.

“The terrestrial headquarters of the Sun Ra Arkestra is a three-story rowhouse in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood, where the famously intergalactic jazz ensemble has lived, rehearsed, and pushed the boundaries of music for more than 50 years.The house has partially collapsed, but Marshall Allen, 96, the band’s founding saxophone player and current leader, still lives and works there. The first Sun Ra Arkestra album in 20 years, ’Swirling,’ was released last October to wide acclaim. The house is now undergoing major structural repairs funded by a Miami-based art and jazz philanthropy, the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation.The pump for the radiator heating system can’t heat the upper floors of the house, and the basement had been deteriorating for years. Allen has lived in the house since 1968, with a rotating cast of band members, and took over leadership of the Arkestra after Sun Ra’s death in 1993. ...”

A Sun Ra poster remains affixed to the wall above the space where the floor collapsed into the sub-basement at the Sun Ra house in Germantown.

Erica Hunt

Erica Hunt at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church, New York City, 2010

Erica Hunt (born March 12, 1955) is a U.S. poet, essayist, teacher, mother, and organizer from New York City. She is often associated with the group of Language poets from her days living in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but her work is also considered central to the avant garde black aesthetic developing after the Civil Rights Movement and Black Arts Movement. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Hunt worked with several non-profits that encourage black philanthropy for black communities and causes. ... Hunt attended University of Vermont - where she studied the philosophy of language, anthropology and folklore — and received in 1980 a BA in English from San Francisco State University, where she studied poetry with Kathleen Fraser and Michael Palmer. During her time in the Bay Area in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Hunt was an active part of the poetry scene, particularly the group of so-called Language poets who held readings at The Grand Piano, a coffeehouse at 1607 Haight Street in San Francisco. ...”

Soul Of A Man: Al Kooper Live (1995)

 
“A gift from heaven is the only adequate way of describing this superb double-CD set, which comes in a slipcase with a neat little booklet. It is the definitive Al Kooper solo project, and a career reconsideration and retrospective, but it's also damn close to definitive as a document of the Blues Project and the original Blood, Sweat & Tears as well. At three February 1994 gigs at New York's Bottom Line, Kooper got together the original members of both bands (with BS&T billed as ‘Child Is Father to the Man’) and his own Rekooperators, including John Simon and Harvey Brooks, with John Sebastian sitting in on harmonica, to perform new versions of 33 years' worth of repertory. ... The beautiful part of this set, beyond the superb performances and the excellent sound quality, is that the music has been treated with respect in the packaging -- the heavily annotated booklet even lists each soloist on every number, in the manner of proper jazz releases. ...”