Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Human Nature and Joe Biden

 
Listen to “The Ezra Klein Show”: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, How to Listen

“How do you introduce Noam Chomsky? Perhaps you start here: In 1979, The New York Times called him ‘arguably the most important intellectual alive today.’ More than 40 years later, Chomsky, at 92, is still putting his dent in the world — writing books, giving interviews, changing minds. There are different sides to Chomsky. He’s a world-renowned linguist who revolutionized his field. He’s a political theorist who’s been a sharp critic of American foreign policy for decades. He’s an anarchist who believes in a radically different way of ordering society. He’s a pragmatist who pushed leftists to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 and has described himself as having a ‘rather conservative attitude towards social change.’ He is, very much, himself. The problem in planning a conversation with Chomsky is how to get at all these different sides. So this one covers a lot of ground. ...”

​Video: Riding Mountain Bikes in the Paris Catacombs

 
“Urban travel. A hot topic… Antoni ‘Dante’ Villoni is maybe taking this a little too seriously! The streets of Paris are well known to all, even perhaps the underground Catacombs, which stretch for 1.5km, but few are aware that there are nearly 300km of tunnels several metres below the 'City of Light.' Antoni gives us a guided tour, a descent deep down into the dark depths of the capital city, or to hell… “

2013 February: Catacombs of Paris

Amplifying the Women Who Pushed Synthesizers Into the Future

 
Daphne Oram, a crucial figure of electronic music history, was the first woman to set up her own independent electronic music studio.

“When you hear the phrase ‘electronic musician,’ what sort of person do you picture? A pallid, wildly coifed young man hunched over an imposing smorgasbord of gear? I’m guessing the person you are imagining doesn’t look like Daphne Oram, with her cat-eye glasses, demure dresses and respectable 1950s librarian haircut. And yet Oram is a crucial figure of electronic music history — the co-founder of the BBC’s incalculably influential Radiophonic Workshop, the first woman to set up her own independent electronic music studio and now one of the worthy focal points of Lisa Rovner’s bewitching new documentary ‘Sisters With Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines.’ ...”

 
The film includes footage of Maryanne Amacher cranking up her compositions.

​Cooking with Herman Melville

 
“Whenever I would tell someone I was cooking from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick for my next column, they would gleefully shriek, ‘Whale steaks!’ And I would dither a bit and explain that no, those are illegal in America, and that I was instead planning to make two forms of chowder, clam and cod, that weren’t going to be very different from each other. In our Chowhound-fueled, extreme-eating kind of world, I felt a little silly. Chowder is an easy dish, and while there’s raging conflict over the primacy of New York style (tomato-based) versus New England style (white), and the finer variations of each, the topic seems to inspire passion in inverse proportion to its importance. (Potatoes or no potatoes? Avast.) ...”


Jazz On Film...The New Wave II (2016)

 
“At last, British jazz gets a chance to shine in this monumental series of soundtrack box sets. Dating mainly from the late 1950s/early 60s, the contents of these eight CDs include such landmarks as John Dankworth’s scores for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Criminal, along with All Night Long, a shambles of a film, but with music by Tubby Hayes. There’s also the virtually forgotten Nowhere to Go, sparked by the composition and trumpet playing of Dizzy Reece. Naturally, too, there’s a lot of Michel Legrand – less well-known ones, such as Eva and Cléo de 5 à 7 – plus some American classics, like Too Late Blues. As always, a rich and enjoyable collection. ...”

Fine Drone Partita in a Minor Synth Setup

 
“This is a solid example of the sort of videos I’ve been collating in my YouTube playlist of fine live ambient recordings. The equipment is in full view, and the actions in the video correlate with the generally subtle though sometimes not inconsiderable alterations to the pulsing drone as it proceeds. This video isn’t a tutorial. There are no instructions, just two hands enacting manipulations, turning knobs, clicking buttons. In addition, as the music plays, the ear’s sense of interior activity can find consonance with the eye’s attention to the pace of the various lights, providing clues as to which parts of the assembled tools align with what aspects of the music. ... This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video by Little Ambient Machines, based in Amsterdam, and posted today at YouTube. ...”

Derek Chauvin Trial Live Updates: Chauvin Found Guilty of Murdering George Floyd

 
“... Judge Peter A. Cahill revoked Derek Chauvin’s bail on Tuesday after he was convicted of murdering George Floyd. Mr. Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who has been free on bail since the fall, was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs and remanded into the custody of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office.Judge Cahill said he expected to begin a sentencing hearing in about eight weeks. Mr. Chauvin was convicted on all three counts he faced at trial — second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Because Mr. Chauvin has no criminal history, the sentencing guidelines for each of the murder charges is 12.5 years. But the maximum sentences for each charge differ: Second-degree murder can result in a term as long as 40 years, while the maximum for third-degree murder is 25 years. By Sean Plambeck. ...”

NY Times (Video)

State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin is a criminal case in the District Court of Minnesota in which former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was tried and convicted of the murder of George Floyd during an arrest on May 25, 2020. Chauvin was charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter; the first charge carries a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison. On April 20, 2021, the jury found Chauvin guilty of all three charges. The trial began on March 8, 2021, at the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was the first of two scheduled criminal trials stemming from Floyd's death. It was also the first criminal trial in Minnesota to be entirely televised and the first in state court to be broadcast live. ...”

Capitalist Greed Created the European Super League

 
Roberto Firmino of Liverpool shoots while under pressure from Éder Militão of Real Madrid during the UEFA Champions League quarter-final second-leg match on April 14, 2021 in Liverpool, England.

Yesterday, once again, the prospect of a breakaway European Super League (ESL) reared its head. The proposal — to carve out a continental competition in which fifteen of the game’s elite clubs could never be relegated — was met with widespread dismay by those who love the game. Despite a year that has shown just how vital fans are for the ‘spectacle’ of football, it was the match-going fans that once again were of least concern. Instead, if the plans go ahead, the future of football will be shaped by television and advertising — an entertainment industry that the top clubs estimate will deliver them £300 million per year, far outstripping their current domestic and Champions League revenues. It’s important to point out that the Super League isn’t an anomaly. ...”

Twin Peaks Supercut: Every Mention of Pie and Coffee

“Here it is at last! The Twin Peaks coffee and pie supercut! It took the Internet 23 years and Bryan Menegus plenty of hours of work, but Twin Peaks fans worldwide can finally enjoy this, excuse me, damn good video montage of probably every mention of ‘pie’ and ‘coffee’ on the show. Good for 3 minutes and a half of delicious footage. Bryan, I feel like we, the fans, owe you something for making this supercut… Like a cup of coffee and a slice of cherry pie perhaps? Let me know. My treat! BONUS (via Slacktory): Here’s a pie chart of every sip of coffee in Twin Peaks by character. Dale Cooper unsurprisingly leads the way, but who are the other big coffee drinkers in town?”

What an artist captured on 1950s Orchard Street

 
“When Joseph Sherly Sheppard painted these three scenes of Orchard Street in the 1950s, this eight-block stretch of the Lower East Side was devoted to cut-rate commerce. Unglamorous tenement storefronts jockey for space, merchandise spills onto the sidewalk, and sign after colorful sign advertised such utilitarian items like coats, linens, eyeglasses, and hosiery. Orchard in the 1950s seems emptier than it had been in the early decades of the 20th century, when it was a packed Jewish immigrant enclave. ...”

Top 10 Night Sky Objects for Amateur Astronomers

 
“Although there are thousands of astronomical objects worth observing in the night sky, all astronomers, both amateur and professional alike, will tell you that they have their own personal favorites. These might include lingering early memories, such as the first sighting of the Milky Way‘s largest globular cluster, Omega Centauri, or the first splitting of a difficult binary star system, such as observing the double star Albireo in Cygnus, whose brighter yellow star presents a striking contrast to its fainter blue companion. Whatever the case may be, the following list looks at ten celestial objects most astronomers agree are worth a second look. ...”

Pet Shop Boys Share Live Cover Of Blur's 'Girls & Boys'

 
“The infernally catchy 'Girls & Boys' is arguably Blur's best pop song. So what happened when the world's best pop band covered it in Rio in 1994? Why, everyone went nuts, as you can see in the footage above. From their earliest inception, PSB have been pop magpies, always excited about what's happening in the cultural milieu around them, and in 1994, they paid homage to Blur just as that band were about to hit the big time. Essentially the performance has everything you'd want from the Pet Shop Boys – Neil looks amazing in a big white shirt and black waiscoat! Some lads come onstage in Brazil football strips to do keepy-uppies! Chris looks nonchalant in DKNY hat and sunglasses! ...”

2008 September: Pet Shop Boys, 2010 November: Pet Shop Boys - 1985-1989, 2011 January: Behaviour, 2011 May: Very, 2011 December: Bilingual, 2012 March: "Always on My Mind", 2012 August: Nightlife, 2012 September: "Where the Streets Have No Name (I Can't Take My Eyes off You)", 2012 December: Release, 2013 March: Pandemonium Tour, 2013 November: Leaving, 2014 April: Introspective (1988), 2014 August: Go West, 2015 January: "So Hard"(1990), 2015 February: "I'm with Stupid" (2006), 2015 July: Thursday EP (2014), 2016 May: "Twenty-something" (2016), 2017 September: Left To My Own Devices / The Sound of the Atom Splitting (1988), 2019 May: It's A Sin (1987)

Avant Gardening - New Age Steppers (2021)

 
“In the tradition of archival On-U Sound compilations of recent years such as the Return Of The Crocodile and Churchical Chant Of The Iyabinghi sets for African Head Charge; and the Displaced Masters LP of early Dub Synidcate rarities, we’ve gone through the tape vaults to put together this special record of unreleased versions and rarities from the white hot early days of the New Age Steppers, the group that launched the On-U Sound label by appearing on both the first single and album. Highlights include a restored track from their infamous and long-lost 1983 John Peel session (an ebullient cover of Atlantic Starr’s ‘Send For Me’ featuring a beautifully spirited vocal performance from the much-missed Ari Up), the Jah Woosh deejay cut of ‘Love Forever’, some rare dubs previously only available on Japanese import CDs, all bookended by two very different takes on Chaka Khan’s ‘Some Love’. An essential set for collectors of post-punk, dub and other outernational sounds. ...”

Birds by the Billions: A Guide to Spring’s Avian Parade

 
An Eastern bluebird at the Greenwich Audubon Center in Greenwich, Conn. Eastern bluebirds are found in the East and Midwest; at the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin, for instance, sightings of them spike beginning in late April.

“... The Northeast: a festival of songbirdsI came to birding relatively late. My parents had a bird feeder on the Jersey Shore where I grew up, and I’d watch house finches and sparrows come and go. But I knew nothing about the migrations of songbirds until my late 20s when I interviewed Roger Tory Peterson, author of the iconic fields guides. With the spring migration underway, this is the time to discover — or rediscover — the allure of birding. ... Each day brings platoons of warblers, vireos, thrushes, tanagers and other migrants. The first thing you learn when you pick up your binoculars and head out is that you are not ‘bird-watching,’ but ‘birding.’ Bird-watching implies a sedentary activity, while birding is proactive. ...”

Banknote embroidery as political art – in pictures

 
“American artist Stacey Lee Webber has embroidered money for more than a decade. She started as a way to question the value of work by meticulously stitching patterns on to worthless one dollar bills. The latest incarnation – the Insurrection Bills – is a response to the US’s febrile political climate. Webber, a trained metalsmith who lives and works in an old industrial building in Philadelphia , doesn’t feel the end of the Trump era has changed much. ‘The political situation in the US is not peaceful. The country is completely divided politically.’ ...”

A Guide to the Extensive Musical Legacy of Mills College

 
Ana Roxane, Pauline Oliveros, Gregg Kowalsky, Holly Herndon

“When he started teaching at Mills College in the late 1990s, Fred Frith already had an extensive resume. He had founded British avant-rock pioneers Henry Cow and collaborated with legends such as Richard Thompson, Brian Eno, and John Zorn. Yet he still found himself intimidated by Mills’ status as a breeding ground for inventive and influential experimental musicians. As he later told the L.A. Times, ‘When I first got here, I was a little overwhelmed by the history.’ It’s hard to blame him. The musical legacy of Mills College is dauntingly vast. Just listing all the artists who have passed through as students and professors—figures as diverse as Terry Riley, Laurie Anderson, Phil Lesh, and Joanna Newsom—could take days. ...”

 
The composer Robert Ashley in 1970. Through the ’70s Ashley was a guiding presence at Mills.

Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds

 
The report offers the most devastating account to date of the lapses and miscalculations around the most violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

“The Capitol Police had clearer advance warnings about the Jan. 6 attack than were previously known, including the potential for violence in which ‘Congress itself is the target.’ But officers were instructed by their leaders not to use their most aggressive tactics to hold off the mob, according to a scathing new report by the agency’s internal investigator. In a 104-page document, the inspector general, Michael A. Bolton, criticized the way the Capitol Police prepared for and responded to the mob violence on Jan. 6. The report was reviewed by The New York Times and will be the subject of a Capitol Hill hearing on Thursday. Mr. Bolton found that the agency’s leaders failed to adequately prepare despite explicit warnings that pro-Trump extremists posed a threat to law enforcement and civilians and that the police used defective protective equipment. ...”

 
The 104-page report is one of the most searing portraits yet of the lapses and miscalculations around the most violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

Burn! - Gillo Pontecorvo (1969)

 
Burn! (Italian: Queimada) is a 1969 Italian war drama film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and starring Marlon Brando, Evaristo Márquez and Renato Salvatori. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone. The fictional story focuses on the creation of a tropical republic in the Caribbean, and the events that follow it. Brando plays an agent of the British government, named after the American filibuster William Walker, who manipulates a slave revolt to serve the interests of the sugar trade. The screenwriters also drew on the experiences of intelligence agent Edward Lansdale, who served the United States government in the Philippines and Indochina in the 1950s through 60s....”

Barney Wilen - La Note Bleue (1987)

 
“... Barney Wilen remains steadfastly among my favourite tenor players. Lyrical, musical, romantic, swinging, entirely unlike the hard biting aggression of New York, or the huge breathy tone of the tenor founding fathers. He remains a distinctive voice that over decades continues to delight. I can put on ‘Jazz sur Scene’ and I cross The Channel to the Left Bank and fifty years in just the first few notes, and he has never lost that voice, because it is authentically his own..His first major appearance in the late Fifties, not even out of his teens, were the European tours of Art Blakey and Miles Davis. This record reprises many songs of that era, with compositions of Monk, Duke Jordan and Bennie Golson mixed with his own. For twenty years Wilen took his saxophone into rock and world music. We find him here back in his roots in long-term collaboration with Alain Jean-Marie, both delicate and swinging in the manner of McCoy Tyner, and Philippe Petit,  shades of Jim Hall and Kenny Burrell. He doesn’t grandstand, but gives space to other members of the ensemble as equals. ...”

Jack Delano's Color Photos of Chicago's Rail Yards in the 1940s

 
A view of part of the South Water Street freight depot of the Illinois Central Railroad and buildings in downtown Chicago on May 1, 1943

“Jack Delano was one of the photographers who worked in Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration photography program in the early 1940s, traveling the American countryside, photographing people and places with the stated goal of ‘introducing America to Americans.’ In 1942 and ’43, Delano spent time in the rail yards of Chicago, documenting the busy freight hub and the countless workers who kept the trains running 24 hours a day. Some of his most striking images were made on Kodachrome color transparencies, wonderfully preserved in the Library of Congress today. Collected below, a handful of images from Chicago as it was some 75 years ago. ...”

Marcus Glitteris on Curating “Home Grown” at Village Works with: Optimo NYC, Marina Reiter, BC1, Nora Timbila, A. Candela & More

 
“Lower East Side native Marcus Glitteris is not only an intriguing self-taught artist but a passionate curator, as well.  Largely influenced by New York City’s Downtown club scene, he teems with the energy that permeated it. Earlier this week, I stopped by Home Grown, an exhibit he curated at Village Works in the East Village, and posed a few questions to him. Can you tell us something about your vision in curating this exhibit? Its main focus is to showcase the varied works of a wide range of artists who live or have lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side or East Village. And what about this wonderful space? Village Works is the name of this new gallery. Designated specifically as a space to showcase NYC artists, it sells rare art books, as well as art. My friend, Joe Sheridan, is the creative director here. We know each other from the night life scene, but since, Joe has since ventured into the the artist community and invited me to curate here. This space used to be an architectural firm. ...”

​Dubcast Vol.14 (Blind Prophet Returns)

 
“Dub-Stuy’s Dubcast returns! To celebrate the release of his first full length EP ‘Clash’, Portland producer Blind Prophet brings us a fresh mix of roots favorites and exclusive dubs, combining sound system heat with bass music from around the globe. ...”

Lost Generation

 
“The Lost Generation was the social generational cohort that came of age during World War I. ‘Lost’ in this context refers to the ‘disoriented, wandering, directionless’ spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early postwar period. The term is also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: ‘You are all a lost generation’. ... One of the themes that commonly appears in the authors' works is decadence and the frivolous lifestyle of the wealthy. Both Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald touched on this theme throughout the novels The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby. Another theme commonly found in the works of these authors was the death of the American dream, which is exhibited throughout many of their novels. ... Notable figures of the Lost Generation include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys and Sylvia Beach. ...”
 

The ideology hiding in SimCity’s black box

 
City simulators like SimCity are serious games — the kind that gets coverage well beyond the video game press. The kind of game that appears in school curriculums. The kind of game your non-gaming uncle has probably spent hundreds of hours in. On the surface, they appear to be exactly what they say: a simulation of a city. But any simulation is only as good as the model it’s built on, and the model underpinning SimCity has quite the history. In the video above, I unboxed the secret ideology hiding in the formula that built SimCity, and how that’s reflected in one of the most popular gaming series of all time. ...”

2010 April: SimCity

A Walking Tour In Southern France - Literature by Ezra Pound

 
“Rummaging through his papers in 1958, Ezra Pound came across a cache of notebooks dating back to the summer of 1912, when as a young man he had walked the troubadour landscape of southern France. Pound had been fascinated with the poetry of medieval Provence since his college days. His experiments with the complex lyric forms of Amaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and others were included in his earliest books of poems; his scholarly pursuits in the field found their way into The Spirit of Romance (1910); and the troubadour mystique was to become a resonant motif of the Cantos. In the course of transcribing and emending the text of ‘Walking Tour 1912,’ editor Richard Sieburth retraced Pound’s footsteps along the roads to the troubadour castles. ...”

2020 April: The Cantos

David Johansen - David Johansen (1978)

David Johansen's self-titled solo debut bears a closer resemblance to his work with the New York Dolls than any of his subsequent recordings, but the former Dolls singer cleverly crafted an album that played to his former band's strengths while establishing an identity of his own and delivering a set of tight but powerful hard rock. ... Johansen's songs are more straightforward and less campy than his Dolls tunes; while ‘Funky But Chic’ would have done his old glam buddies proud (’Mama says I look fruity, but in jeans I feel rotten’), the celebration of the fair sex in ‘Girls’ and ‘I'm a Lover’ cuts his former sexual ambiguity to the quick, and the tough rock & roll good times of ‘Cool Metro’ and the girl-trouble commiseration of ‘Pain In My Heart’ show Johansen could move into more conventional lyrical territory without losing his swagger or street smarts along the way. And while the Dolls didn't leave Johansen much room for slow songs where he could wear his heart on his sleeve, ‘Donna’ and ‘Frenchette’ allow him to do just that, and remarkably well. ...”