Rosa Luxemburg - Margarethe von Trotta (1986)

 

“In this moving biopic, Rosa Luxemburg emerges as a vibrant, sensual, intellectually brilliant, morally and physically courageous woman, whose legacy proves timeless, writes Tom Lock Griffiths. Rosa Luxemburg (1986), directed by German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, (who’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is probably her best known film in the UK), is a biopic of the Polish-Jewish Marxist who worked tirelessly with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), for peace, internationalism and the revolution. The film focuses on the period 1900-1919 the year of her assassination by the proto-fascist Freikorps, who were brutalised far-right ex-servicemen, many of whom would become the founders of The National Socialist Party. ...”

Rosa Luxemburg, von Trotta's 1986 film, receives digital restoration - review

W - Rosa Luxemburg (film), W - Rosa Luxemburg

Moments that Define A Century – Political Crossroads in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburgt

Margarethe von Trotta on telling the story of Germany through the eyes of women

NY Times: 'ROSA LUXEMBURG,' NEW LIGHT ON EARLY LEFTIST - Vincent Canby (May 1, 1987)

Criterion

YouTube: Rosa Luxemburg - Trailers

2013 December: Hannah Arendt (2013), 2019 September: The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum - Heinrich Böll (1974)

 

Margarethe von Trotta

Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill (1985)

 

“Not to be confused with Sony's 1997 soundtrack release, September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill, which was inspired by this 1985 CD on A&M, and co-produced by visionary Hal Willner, Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill indeed contains the ‘eclectic updates of Kurt Weill's distinctive German theater music’ with help from Sting, Marianne Faithfull, John Zorn, Lou Reed, Carla Bley, Tom Waits, Charlie Haden, and more. This deep and complex work contains a 12-page booklet chock-full of information condensed into tiny, tiny print. Did the onset of compact discs hold this elaborate project back? ...”

allmusic (Audio)

W - Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill    1:07:28

2009 December: Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht, 2011 August: W - Communards’ Wall 1871, 2012 March: The Threepenny Opera - Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, 2012 July: Supply and Demand: Songs by Brecht / Weill & Eisler - Dagmar Krause, 2013 March: Pina Bausch - "The Seven Deadly Sins", 2015 February: The Partnership: Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the Brink, 2016 October: Lotte Lenya Sings Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins & Berlin Theater Songs (1997), 2018 December: Kalifornienträumen: Bertolt Brecht’s Los Angeles Poems and Other Sunstruck Germanic Specters

​Facebook Oversight Board Upholds Social Network’s Ban of Trump

 

Donald J. Trump was barred from Facebook on Jan. 7 after he used the site to foment an insurrection in Washington.

“A Facebook-appointed panel of journalists, activists and lawyers on Wednesday upheld the social network’s ban of former President Donald J. Trump, ending any immediate return by Mr. Trump to mainstream social media and renewing a debate about tech power over online speech.Facebook’s Oversight Board, which acts as a quasi-court over the company’s content decisions, said the social network was right to bar Mr. Trump after the insurrection in Washington in January, saying he ‘created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.’ The panel said the ongoing risk of violence ‘justified’ the move. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Judge Says Barr Misled on How His Justice Dept. Viewed Trump’s Actions

amazon: The Mueller Report (April 30, 2019), The Mueller Report - Large Print Edition (July 2, 2019)

​10 Hours Sci-Fi Futuristic City Ambience.

 

“A City Where Life Never Stops. If you are looking for more sounds to relax, just have a look at my channel! I have other beautiful and quiet dreamworlds that will make you dive away from everyday life with ease. You can use the scene for relaxation, or as a support to sleep easier and deeper. If you have special suggestions for further dreamworlds, please leave a comment! Thank you very much for your support! Don't forget to subscribe to us and leave a Like. Especially in these days of the corona, I want to help people that can not easily travel or go outside or just stay positive in their mind, with our collection from different places all around the world. ...”

YouTube: 10 Hours Sci-Fi Futuristic City Ambience. ASMR Ambience

YouTube: Sci-Fi City Soundscapes & Ambience    32 videos

​The G.O.P. Won It All in Texas. Then It Turned on Itself.

“Early on the morning of Oct. 19, an air-conditioner repairman named David Lopez was driving his small box truck in Houston, Texas, when a black S.U.V. slammed into him from behind and forced him off the road. After the vehicles came to a stop, Lopez heard the S.U.V.’s driver scream for help. He approached the vehicle, whereupon the driver, a man named Mark Aguirre, jumped out and ordered him to the ground at gunpoint. Aguirre had been surveilling Lopez for four days, convinced that he was the mastermind of a scheme to steal the election from President Trump. Aguirre’s investigation, it would emerge, was financed by Steven Hotze, a prolific Republican donor and Houston-area physician who made his fortune via ‘wellness centers’ where he marketed ‘hormone replacement’ therapies for everything from postpartum depression to hyperthyroidism, as well as a vitamin product called My HotzePak Skinny Pak. Hotze, 70, has long been prominent among the religious right for his opposition to gay rights. During the unrest following George Floyd’s death, he left a voice mail message for Gov. Greg Abbott’s chief of staff, urging him to authorize the Texas National Guard to ‘shoot to kill’ rioters. ...”

NY Times (Audio) 52:40

​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. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

W - “The Magnificent Seven” (song)

An Oral History of The Clash’s “The Magnificent Seven” (Video)

​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. ...”

Ephemeral New York

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. ...”

NY Times (Video)

W - Giorgos Giakoumakis

YouTube: Georgios Giakoumakis DESTROYING Great Players

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. ...”

‘A Woman Under the Influence’: Cassavetes’ Intense and Emotionally Exhausting Slice of Life (Video)

Criterion - A Woman Under the Influence: The War at Home

W - A Woman Under the Influence

11 Influential Facts About A Woman Under the Influence

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. ...”

Harpers

NY Times: An Examination of ‘Caliphate’ (Audio) Dec. 18, 2020

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. ...”

LitHub

amazon: Decoding Manhattan: Island of Diagrams, Maps, and Graphics

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.’ ...”

Prepared Guitar (Video)

David Tudor electronics

[PDF] Hear After: Matters of Life and Death in David Tudor’s Electronic Music

 

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. ...”

Guardian (Video)

 

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. ...”

SABR: Walter “Red” Smith

W - Red Smith (sportswriter)

amazon: American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith

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. ...”

Classics Today

Discogs

amazon

YouTube: Jordi Savall  plays Marin Marais La Rêveuse (2014 live), Jordi Savall suona Marin Marais

2020 February: Hespèrion XXI ‎– Orient - 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. ...”

The Paris Review

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 ..."

YouTube: Morphagene as a Stepping Stone of the Creative Process 8:42

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. ...”

Stellarium.org

Stellarium Web

W - Stellarium (software)

How do I use Stellarium? A guide to the basics

How to install and use Stellarium astronomy software

[PDF] STELLARIUM FREE Planetarium Program, HEAVENS ABOVE, NASA, Subscriptions, News, Alerts, etc. 

YouTube: Stellarium for Beginners

Harry Partch – The Bewitched (2021) and U.S. Highball (2021)

“Many contemporary composers have been described as iconoclasts but few really are the rugged individualists they are often portrayed as being. Harry Partch (1901 – 1974) may be one of the rare exceptions. Influenced by his study and interpretation of ancient musical models, Partch decided to firmly break with the European musical tradition. He devised his own tuning system with a microtonal division of the octave into forty three notes and then designed and built a whole series of instruments to utilize his tuning. His music was influenced by ancient music, folk traditions from around the world and the dramatic inflections and gesturing of the human voice. ...”

avant music news (Video/Audio)

Discogs The Bewitched (Video), US Highball (Video)

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. ...”

NY Times: Why We Published The 1619 Project

NY Times: The 1619 Project

NY Times: Podcasts - 1619 (Audio), Apple (Audio)

W - The 1619 Project

Pulitzer Center: The 1619 Project Curriculum

NY Times: On Recent Criticism of The 1619 Project - Jake Silverstein (Oct. 16, 2020)

Cato Institute: The 1619 Project: An Autopsy, Politico: I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me., The Atlantic: The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts

YouTube: Frederick Douglass vs. the 1619 Project

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. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

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… “

pinkbike (Video)

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.’ ...”

NY Times

Metrograph: Sisters with Transistors – Live Premiere with Electronic Music Panel

YouTube: Sisters with Transistors [Official Trailer]

 

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.) ...”

The Paris Review

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. ...”

Guardian - Various: Jazz on Film – The New Wave II review – a rich and enjoyable collection

Bandcamp (Audio)

allmusic (Audio)

Discogs