The G.O.P. Won It All in Texas. Then It Turned on Itself.
How the Clash Embraced New York’s Hip Hop Scene and Released the Dance Track, “The Magnificent Dance” (1981)
“... The slogan stuck and has become something more than marketing hype. Of the slew of British punk bands who made their way to the US in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the Clash had more impact than most others in some unexpected ways. ... Moreover, godfathers of political rap Public Enemy found their catalyst in the Clash, and went on to create a raucous, militant sound that was the punk equivalent in hip hop, full of snarling guitars, strident declarations and sirens. ...”
The “romantic reality” of midcentury Village street scenes
“Can you feel it? Right now, New York has a vitality that went into a dark sleep in early 2020. People are out on the sidewalks performing the rituals of urban living; the city is emerging dynamic and alive. What New Yorkers are feeling this spring is hard to describe—but Alfred Mira captures it perfectly in his paintings. Born in Italy in 1900, Mira made his home in Greenwich Village and supported himself as an artist. His seemingly ordinary street scenes—like this two above of Seventh Avenue South and then a rainy Greenwich Avenue in the 1940s, or below of Washington Square Park in 1930—pulse with New York’s unique excitement and passion. ...”
2015 September: The Greenwich Village vision of artist Alfred Mira, May 2020: The painter who captured the soul of New York
When the Goals Come Out of Nowhere
“Giorgos Giakoumakis had never scored goals. Not in great numbers, anyway. He had played 22 games, spread across three seasons, before he finally managed a single one for his first club, a team of modest ambitions and close horizons called Platanias, based on his home island, Crete. In the early stages of his career, he broke into double figures for a single campaign only once, mustering 11 goals in his final season at Platanias. It appeared, at the time, to be his breakthrough. That summer, he moved to A.E.K. Athens, one of the three powers that dominate the Greek capital. ...”
A Woman Under the Influence - John Cassavetes (1974)
“When Gena Rowlands, his wife, expressed her interest in appearing in a play about the difficulties that contemporary women had to face, John Cassavetes wrote a script so emotionally profound and exhausting Rowlands immediately understood it would be too much for her to perform it eight times a week. Cassavetes turned the play into a screenplay for the big screen, but A Woman Under the Influence was too much for Hollywood studios and producers to swallow. Nobody wants to see a crazy, middle-aged dame, they said. Luckily enough, both for Cassavetes and for all of us in the audience, the filmmaking couple had a lot of friends who fell in love with the powerful script and who were willing to chip in and even become a part of the project. Peter Falk provided half a million dollars of his own money just so he could watch his friend’s impressive vision turn into a movie. ...”
YouTube: A woman under the influence. Gena Rowlands, How we live with mental illness, John Cassavetes / Rowlands and Falk discuss „A Woman Under the Influence”
2008 September: John Cassavetes, 2010 December: Shadows (1959), 2012 February: His Life and Work, 2012 July: A Constant Forge, 2013 June: Minnie and Moskowitz, 2013 July: BAM: Cassavetes - Jul 6—Jul 31, 2013
Sign of the Times - James Harkin (2018)
“In Chapter Five of Caliphate, the now-debunked podcast from the New York Times, a young Canadian named Shehroze Chaudhry explains how he came to stab a man in the heart on behalf of the Islamic State. Back in 2014, Chaudhry, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Huzayfah, allegedly emptied his bank account and traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State, which assigned him to a police unit tasked with enforcing its strict interpretation of sharia law. Over the next six months, he told the Times, he killed two people on behalf of the group. Eventually, he became disillusioned and returned to Canada.The interview was recorded in a Toronto hotel room in November 2016. Asking questions in a mellifluous staccato was Rukmini Callimachi, the paper’s resident expert on the Islamic State. When Caliphate aired in 2018, it was a roaring success, drawing millions of listeners, many of whom had never read a Times article about Syria or Islamist terrorism. ...”
2018 September: Caliphate
Reading the History of Manhattan in Its Diagrams, Maps, and Graphics
“From a booklet of charming Manhattan maps, probably made for readers of The Sun, sections of the city as they looked in the late 19th century. The story of New York’s Downtown-based avant-garde unfolds over a tumultuous century in a tour de force of narrative painting. ... Steven Guarnaccia updates the traditional streetscape with an overhead view of the buildings along 53rd Street that captures a slice of Midtown with a large number of Manhattan’s more recognizable postwar skyscrapers. The axonometric projections are ideal for capturing the large bulk and unusual forms of the buildings, just as the elevations used for the New York Mail and Express project almost a century earlier suited the architecture of that era. ...”
Steven Guarnaccia and Pentagram New York, A Walk on 53rd Street, map for the 53rd Street Association, 1987.
Art Tatum - The Art Of Jazz Piano
“Art Tatum (1909-56) is considered by many to be the greatest soloist in jazz history. The pianist not only could play with blinding speed but he was so harmonically advanced in the 1930s that it would take the jazz world at least 30 years to catch up with him. The documentary begins with Les Paul talking about he thought he was a good piano player but, after he heard an Art Tatum record, he immediately quit playing piano and switched to guitar. There is only a limited amount of film on Tatum and all three clips including ‘Yesterdays’ are included in the documentary. By having informative interviews about Tatum including from Dick Hyman (who is rather remarkable himself as he demonstrates several styles), Hank Jones, Eddie Barefield, Milt Hinton, Maurice Waller (Fats’ son), and Karl Tatum (Art’s son). ...”
Jazz on the Tube (Video) 51:47
2018 September: Art Tatum & Ben Webster - The Album (1956)
Conversation with David Tudor
David Tudor at the performance table, Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
“David Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music. Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. ... The composer with whom Tudor is particularly associated is John Cage; he gave the premiere of Cage's Music of Changes, Concert For Piano and Orchestra and the notorious 4' 33". Cage said that many of his pieces were written either specifically for Tudor to perform or with him in mind, once stating ‘what you had to do was to make a situation that would interest him. That was the role he played.’ ...”
Wesleyan University Electronic Music Studio – Gordon Mumma built a lot of electronics for Tudor – this Cybersonics Output Splitter provides four individual amplifiers and outputs for one in signal.
2017 March: The Art Of David Tudor 1963–1992
We are witnessing a crime against humanity - Arundhati Roy
“During a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even further. From a public podium, he accused the state government – which was led by an opposition party – of pandering to the Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards (kabristans) than on Hindu cremation grounds (shamshans). With his customary braying sneer, in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid-sentence before it falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd. ‘If a kabristan is built in a village, a shamshan should also be constructed there,’ he said. ...”
Burning funeral pyres of those who died from the coronavirus during a mass cremation in New Delhi.
2008 May: Arundhati Roy, 2010 April: "Walking With The Comrades", 2015 November: Politics by Other Means, 2018 July: What is the Morally Appropriate Language in Which to Think and Write?, 2018 August: Arundhati Roy: Brilliant, troubled and troubling
Red Smith
“Red Smith, a small, shy man with a commonplace name, was an uncommonly stylish writer. ... ‘He was not just a great sports writer,’ fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson wrote, ‘he was a great American writer in the class of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.’ ... For years he wrote 800 to 900 words a day, six days a week. ‘There’s nothing to writing,’ he said. ’All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.’ ... No twirlers, twin killings, or circuit clouts marred Smith’s columns. Leaving behind the overwrought clichés of the genre, he wrote plain and graceful English decorated with humor wherever he could find it. He thought sports was entertainment, and he strove to entertain. ...”
Marin Marais: Pieces for Viol from the Five Books - Jordi Savall (2006)
“More than any other musician of our time Jordi Savall has championed Marin Marais in the concert hall and recording studio–and he even was largely responsible for the highly acclaimed French movie Tous Les matins du monde, a veritable cinematic biography devoted to the composer. Nearly 30 years ago, for Astrée, Savall made his first recording of the Suite in B minor from Marais’ second book of Pieces de Viole (now reissued mid-price as Naive Astrée 9978), part of an eventual series of five LPs (all later reincarnated as somewhat short CDs) that featured selections from all of Marais’ influential five books. ...”
2020 February: Hesp̬rion XXI РOrient - Occident (2006)
A Kind of Packaged Aging Process - Jan Morris
Passengers boarding an ocean liner, 1925.
“It was for convalescent reasons that I lately undertook a resolutely up-market Mediterranean cruise, with a Greek classical bias, and since I thought of such a cruise generically as being a kind of packaged aging process, at first I decided for literary purposes to rename our ship the Geriatrica. Later I changed my mind.It was perfectly true, though, as I had foreseen, that we formed a venerable passenger list, and sunset intimations were soon apparent. ... Of course the passage of time had to be a preoccupation on board such a ship as ours. ...”
2020 November: Venice (1960)
The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained
“Over the half-millennium since Hieronymus Bosch painted it, The Garden of Earthly Delights has produced an ever-widening array of interpretations. Is it ‘a painting about sexual freedom’? A ‘medieval acid trip’? An ‘erotic fantasy’? A ‘heretical attack on the church’? The work of ‘a member of an obscure free-love cult’? James Payne, the London curator behind the Youtube channel Great Art Explained, rejects all these views. In the opening of the in-depth video analysis above, he describes Bosch’s well-known and much-scrutinized late-15th or early-16th century triptych as, ‘pure and simply, hardcore Christianity.’ ...”
Open Culture (Video) 50:57
2016 February: The Garden of Earthly Delights - Hieronymus Bosch (1490 - 1510), 2016 September: Hieronymus Bosch’s Lost Masterpiece, 2018 September: The Hieronymus Bosch Demon Bird Was Spotted Riding the New York City Subway the Other Day…
Morphagene as a Stepping Stone of the Creative Process - Hélène Vogelsinger
“In this video, Hélène Vogelsinger uses the Morphagene in combination with her voice to create the foundation of a whole piece. She starts with a simple rhythmic and tonal vocal pattern, that then evolves into deep and grainy textures. From the Earth to the entire Universe. To hear more of Hélène's work, click on the links below: YouTube, Bandcamp, Instagram ..."
Stellarium
“Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. ...”
Harry Partch – The Bewitched (2021) and U.S. Highball (2021)
2012 February: Harry Partch
The 1619 Project
“1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619? That was when a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin. Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. ...”
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. ...”
2011 January: Peak Oil and a Changing Climate, 2015 May: The Limits of Discourse As Demonstrated by Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky, 2015 October: Electing the President of an Empire, 2015 December: Noam Chomsky on Paris attacks, 2016 December: Chomsky: Humanity Faces Real and Imminent Threats to Our Survival, 2017 April: Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power (2016), 2017 July: Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism Is Destroying Our Democracy, 2020 May: Requiem for the American Dream (2017)
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. ...”
“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
2020 April: Twin Peaks: Go Down the Rabbit Hole.
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. ...”
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