​The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962

 

“Who in February 1963 could have predicted, when a 30-year-old American poet named Sylvia Plath committed suicide in London, distraught over the breakup of her marriage to the Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes, that Plath would quickly emerge as one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English; and this in a golden era of poetry distinguished by such figures as Theodore Roethke, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, May Swenson, Adrienne Rich, as well as W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot? ...”

NY Times: Raising Lady Lazarus by Joyce Carol Oates (Audio Sylvia Plath Reads)

Reviving the Journals of Sylvia Plath

New Yorker: The Silent Woman By Janet Malcolm

The Creative Tension Between Vitality and Fatality: Illuminating the Mystery of Sylvia Plath Through Her Striking Never-Before-Revealed Visual Art

[PDF] The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

amazon

 

Collage (Includes images of Eisenhower, Nixon, bomber, etc.) by Sylvia Plath, 1960

2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956, 2019 January: Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story

Wake Up the City

 

A scene from the Toxteth Riots in Liverpool, England, July 8, 1981.

“During racial and social turmoil in England—an unrest that exploded in the ’81 riots—a burgeoning music scene began bubbling over, displacing the white scene of Northern soul with a Black British movement of jazz-funk and creating in the process tiny islands within the Isles where racial unity and Black empowerment could thrive. DJ and music historian Greg Wilson details this layered story that begins as specialists took to fresh U.S. imports like Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, ultimately leading to homegrown U.K. acts like Light of the World and Incognito creating their own spin on the sound. The scene made an impact far afield of London Town, stretching to all corners of the U.K., with its influence lasting well into the late-’80s and early ’90s with the birth of acid jazz and the rebirth of Incognito. With the recent release of Gilles Peterson and Jean-Paul ‘Bluey’ Maunick’s masterstroke, STR4TA’s Aspects, coupled with the importance of social justice concerns in the new decade, the time is now to document this misunderstood and crucial era of England’s homegrown music history. ...”

WaxPoetics (Video)

 

In the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton Riots, residents walk past a burnt-out pub after the second night of unrest, April 13, 1981.

​Bringing Antonio Gramsci Back to Turin

 

Angelo D'Orsi, a well-known biographer of Antonio Gramsci, is running for mayor in Turin.

“Turin is one of the historic fortresses of Italian labor. The industrial city on the edge of the Alps was the center of totemic struggles like the factory occupations of 1919–20, the workers’ first strikes against Fascism in 1943 and the new wave of shopfloor militancy in the 1960s. The city is also deeply connected to the history of the Left: it was the birthplace of Antonio Gramsci’s l’Ordine Nuovo newspaper and was a red heartland throughout postwar history, with a Communist-controlled city hall through much of the 1970s and ’80s. ...”

Jacobin

2013 July: Gramsci Monument, 2018 January: The Fate of the Party, 2020 December: Gramsci in the postcolony

Color field

 

W - Mark Rothko, Untitled Canvas (1964)

"Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favour of an overall consistency of form and process. ... Mark Rothko was one of the painters that Greenberg referred to as a Color Field painter exemplified by Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, although Rothko himself refused to adhere to any label. ...”

Wikipedia

Tate: Colour field painting

Artsy: Color Field Painting

YouTube: Color Field Exhibit, Color Fields at Deutsche Guggenheim

 

W -Helen Frankenthaler, (Bach’s) Sacred Theater (1973)

Jungle Fever - Spike Lee (1991)

 

“Jungle Fever is a 1991 American romantic drama film written, produced and directed by Spike Lee. The film stars Wesley Snipes, Annabella Sciorra, Lee, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Samuel L. Jackson, Lonette McKee, John Turturro, Frank Vincent, Halle Berry (in her film debut), Tim Robbins, and Anthony Quinn, and is Lee's fifth feature-length film. Jungle Fever explores the beginning and end of an extramarital interracial relationship against the urban backdrop of the streets of New York City in the early 1990s. The film received positive reviews, with particular praise for Samuel L. Jackson's performance. ...”

Wikipedia

amazon

YouTube: Jungle Fever Official Trailer #1

2009 January: Spike Lee, 2014 June: Do the Right Thing (1989), 2016 June: Clockers (1995), 2018 December: BlacKkKlansman (2018), May 2020: Spike Lee and the Battlefield of American History

New York, New Music 1980–1986

 

John Lurie and the Lounge Lizards in 1979. Footage of the band is included in a new exhibition tracking the New York music scene from the era.

“During the early 1980s, New York experienced a community-driven musical renaissance. The result was an era of creativity and genre-defying performance that stands as one of the most influential in musical and cultural history. A wide range of music, from punk to pop to hip-hop to salsa to jazz, mixed in a dynamic arts scene that stretched across clubs and bars, theaters, parks, and art spaces. Together, they provided fertile ground for a musical revolution—one that continues to influence pop culture to this day. Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of MTV, New York, New Music: 1980–1986 will highlight diverse musical artists—from Run DMC to the Talking Heads, from Madonna to John Zorn—as a lens to explore the broader music and cultural scene, including the innovative media outlets, venues, record labels, fashion and visual arts centered in New York City in these years. ...”

Museum of the City of New York

NY Times: In the ’80s, Post-Punk Filled New York Clubs. Their Videos Captured It.

​Plan Ahead for the 2023 Annular Solar Eclipse — and a Visit to Dark Sky Parks

 

“This week Canada, Greenland, and Russia viewed a brief ‘ring of fire’ annular solar eclipse, which brought a crescent Sun to the northeast U.S. Occurring at sunrise in North America, the partial solar eclipse was low on the horizon and therefore difficult to see; meanwhile cross-border eclipse-chasing proved all but impossible. Fortunately, we’ll have another shot soon enough.So when is the next such eclipse? On October 14, 2023, an annular solar eclipse will again be visible from the U.S., this time from a roughly 125-mile-wide path of annularity that passes through Oregon, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas before it crosses Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, and Brazil. Everyone in the Americas will see a partial solar eclipse that will last more than 2.5 hours. Remember: Eclipse glasses and solar filters will have to be used everywhere, and throughout the spectacle. ...”

Sky & Telescope

whenisthenexteclipse

W - Solar eclipse of October 14, 2023

October 14, 2023 — Great American Eclipse (Annular Solar Eclipse) (Video)

 

Total Solar Eclipse of April 8, 2024

Chicago '82: A Dip in the Lake (1982)

 

 

“Scattershot performances from the 1982 New Music Festival in Chicago, 1982.  This tape was done as a tribute to John Cage's 70th birthday.  Features cool folks like Glenn Branca ensemble (feat. Thurston Moore & Lee Ranaldo), Charlemagne Palestine, Harold Budd, Meredith Monk, and a long conversation between John Cage and Wim Mertens.  Most, if not all, of this stuff is live, but the liner notes aren't entirely clear. ...”

Rate Your Music

UbuWeb: Chicago 82 (Audio)

A Dip in the Lake—Ten Quick Steps, Sixty-one Waltzes and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity, Peter Gena, 1982

Discogs (Video)

Glenn Branca -  Navy Pier, Chicago (1982)

​A Beautiful, High-Resolution Map of the Internet (2021)

 

“The beginnings of the Internet were uncharted territory, especially before the days of graphic browsers. You had a number, you dialed up to a location. ... There have been maps that overlay the internet’s main landlines onto the map of the earth—this Vox article shows the spidery web growing from the first four locations of ARPANET until the whole world is connected. But that’s not how we think of it. Surely Open Culture is always where you, dear reader, reside, and this writer’s undisclosed location has nothing to do with it. Maybe the internet is really the space that it takes up in our minds, in our lives, and in the amount of internet traffic. ...”

Open Culture

How America Fractured Into Four Parts

 

“Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up. ...”

The Atlantic

Cooking with C. L. R. James - Valerie Stivers

 

“The introduction to Mariners, Castaways and Renegades, a 1953 work on Herman Melville by the activist, critic, and novelist C. L. R. James (1901–1989), is electrifying to the Melville lover. It starts with an indelible line: ‘The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live, which is to this day unsurpassed.’ That’s a huge claim, but readers of Moby-Dick know it to be as true today as it was when James’s book was first published. ...”

The Paris Review

Patti Smith's by Robert Miller Gallery - 1

 

“Patti Smith, represented by Robert Miller Gallery since 1978, began as a visual artist and has been making drawings and taking photographs since the late 1960s. In recent years, her practice has expanded to include installation. She was most recently the subject of Camera Solo, a survey of her photographs organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (2011), which travelled to Detroit Institute of Arts (2012) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (2013). In 2008, Smith was the subject of Patti Smith Land 250 at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporaine, Paris, and Written Portrait - Patti Smith at Artium Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. ...”

Robert Miller Gallery: Patti Smith

NY Times: Rock Star Patti Smith, Making Paris Swoons

Voice - Patti Smith: Save This Rock and Roll Hero by Robert Christgau (1977)

[PDF] Patti Smith featured in the Janet Hamill Archive

Patti Smith’s Eternal Flame

Open Culture: Patti Smith’s Polaroids of Artifacts from Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Roberto Bolaño & More

NY Times: T - Magazine - Requiem Lass by A.O. Scott (Oct.  2011)

Patti Smith, the Curator of Rock ‘N’ Roll (2011)

LitHub: The Moment When Punk Collided With Poetry

Voice: Patti Smith Exposes Herself by Greil Marcus (1975)

LitHub: Is It Still Punk When the Musician Makes It Big? by Vivien Goldman

 

‘Transgressive, hypnotic, determinedly true to herself and her art’, Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe

LitHub: How Patti Smith Brought Rock ‘n’ Roll to New York Poetry

Voice: A Step-By-Step Walk Through ‘Just Kids’ and Patti Smith’s New York

127 years after his death, letters of love and angst still come to Rimbaud’s grave., Patti Smith Buys Rimbaud’s Replicated Childhood Home in France

Interview: Patti Smith Is Always Going to Be a Worker

The Paris Review - Holy Disobedience: On Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal By Patti Smith, Three Stones for Jean Genet told Patti Smith (Video)

Interview: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe

Vogue: Last Night, Patti Smith Performed a Beautiful Tribute to Her Friend Sam Shepard

The Paris Review - A Responsible Freedom: Patti Smith on ‘Little Women’ By Patti Smith

ARTFORUM: Top Ten - Patti Smith (Oct. 2011)

Before the Internet, there was the 1960s Dial-a-Poem Hotlin

 

Platform at the 68th Street/Lexington subway station. Gerard Malanga took it in 1971.

Interview: Land 250 Polaroid Photographs (Audio)

Hear Patti Smith Read 12 Poems From Seventh Heaven, Her First Collection (1972) (Video)

Open Culture: Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice (Video)

Patti Smith's Lifelong Reading List

Voice: Patti Smith’s Most Notable New York City Gigs (Video)

Patti Smith live dates and events (Video)

Patti Smith’s Journey to Horses: A Timeline (Video)

Red Bull Music Academy - Left of the Dial: The Evolution of Punk, New Wave and Indie on American Radio (Video)

NOWNESS: Wild Leaves (Video)

YouTube: My Blakean Year | LIVE from the NYPL, The Last Hotel, Poem about Arthur Rimbaud, Patti Smith interviewed by Tom Snyder, Patti Smith and Jonathan Lethem in Conversation  54:41

UbuWeb: Sound - Patti Smith (Audio)

 

Patti Smith, Cherub, Fountain, San Severino, 2008, black-and-white photograph

​A metalwork dreamscape at a 1929 Gracie Square co-op

 

“Ever since the far eastern end of 84th Street was rebranded Gracie Square in 1929 (after Archibald Gracie, whose summer home is now the mayor’s residence four blocks north), this one-block stretch alongside Carl Schurz Park has (mostly) been lined with tall, elegant apartment houses. These buildings, off East End Avenue overlooking the East River, radiate a stuffy kind of luxury. But something very imaginative makes 7 Gracie Square stands out from its more staid neighbors. It’s the magnificent metalwork on the front doors and window grilles—featuring a bestiary dreamscape of elephants, gazelles, plants, leaves, and curlicue, wave-like motifs that looks like snails or shells. ...”

Ephemeral New York

​Sheets of sound

 

“Sheets of sound was a term coined in 1958 by Down Beat magazine jazz critic Ira Gitler to describe the new, unique improvisational style of John Coltrane. Gitler first used the term on the liner notes for Soultrane (1958). Coltrane, a saxophonist, employed extremely dense improvisational yet patterned lines consisting of high speed arpeggios and scale patterns played in rapid succession: hundreds of notes running from the lowest to highest registers. The lines are often faster than sixteenth notes, consisting of quintuplets, septuplets, etc., and can sound like glissandos. Coltrane invented this style while playing with Thelonious Monk and developed it further when he returned to Miles Davis' group. Coltrane used the ‘sheets of sound’ lines to liquidise and loosen the strict chords, modes, and harmonies of Hard Bop, whilst still adhering to them (at this stage in his musical development). ...”

Wikipedia

Sheets Of Sound: John Coltrane, Prestige And The Path To Immortality (Video)

Senate Report Details Security Failures in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot

 

U.S. Capitol Police officers hold off rioters loyal to then-President Trump on Jan. 6.

“Top federal intelligence agencies failed to adequately warn law enforcement officials before the Jan. 6 riot that pro-Trump extremists were threatening violence, including plans to ‘storm the Capitol,’ infiltrate its tunnel system and ‘bring guns,’ according to a new report by two Senate committees that outlines large-scale failures that contributed to the deadly assault.An F.B.I. memo on Jan. 5 warning of people traveling to Washington for ‘war’ at the Capitol never made its way to top law enforcement officials. The Capitol Police failed to widely circulate information its own intelligence unit had collected as early as mid-December about the threat of violence on Jan. 6, including a report that said right-wing extremist groups and supporters of President Donald J. Trump had been posting online and in far-right chat groups about gathering at the Capitol, armed with weapons, to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss. ...”

NY Times

LA Times: Senate report details sweeping security failures around Jan. 6 insurrection

NY Times: Opinion | My Fellow Republicans, Stop Fearing This Dangerous and Diminished Man

NY Times: Opinion | Are We Destined for a Trump Coup in 2024?

NY Times: Opinion | How Far Are Republicans Willing to Go? They’re Already Gone.

2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election, 2021 February: First They Guarded Roger Stone. Then They Joined the Capitol Attack., 2021 February: A Small Group of Militants’ Outsize Role in the Capitol Attack , 2021 March: Police Shrugged Off the Proud Boys, Until They Attacked the Capitol, 2021 March 21: ‘We’ve Lost the Line!’: Radio Traffic Reveals Police Under Siege at Capitol, 2021 April: Capitol Police Told to Hold Back on Riot Response on Jan. 6, Report Finds, 2021 May:  Trump Is Marching Down the Road to Political Violence

​Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

 

“I think I speak for many of us when I say that coffee fuels our greatest intellectual efforts. And even as we get the jitters and leave brown rings on our desks, we can take comfort in the fact that so it also went with some of the most notable philosophers in the history of the discipline. ... In the 19th century, Søren Kierkegaard would also get into a coffee ritual. He ‘had his own quite peculiar way of having coffee,’ writes biographer Joakim Garff. ‘Delightedly he seized hold of the bag containing the sugar and poured sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim. Next came the incredibly strong, black coffee, which slowly dissolved the white pyramid.’ I always drink it black myself, but who among us dares think ourselves too good for the teeth-aching preferred by the author of Fear and Trembling? ...”

Open Culture

The fuel of philosophers

YouTube: The Strange Coffee Habits of Famous Philosophers (Voltaire, Kant, Kierkegaard)

2010 September: Espresso, April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup

2011 July: Søren Kierkegaard, 2013 April: Repetition (1843), 2013 December: The Quotable Kierkegaard, 2014 October: Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard (1843), 2014 December: The Dark Knight of Faith - Existential Comics, 2015 July: I still love Kierkegaard, 2015 October: The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 2016 October: Cruel intentions, 2017 July: Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, 2018 January: Either/Or (1843), 2018 November: The Seducer’s Diary (1843), 2020 July:  Søren Kierkegaard’s Struggle with Himself, 2020 November: W. H. Auden - The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952), 2020 December: Inhuman communication: Søren Kierkegaard versus the internet

International thief thief

 

Queen Mother Pendant Mask, Iyoba, 16th century, Metropolitan Museum

“In 1909, Sir Ralph Denham Rayment Moor, British Consul General of the British Southern Nigerian Protectorate, took his life by ingesting cyanide. Eleven years earlier, following Britain’s ‘punitive’ attack on Benin City’s Royal Court, Moor helped transfer loot taken from Benin City into Queen Victoria’s private collection and to the British Foreign Office. Pilfered materials taken by Moor and many others include the now famous brass reliefs depicting the history of the Benin Kingdom—known collectively as the Benin Bronzes. This is in addition to commemorative brass heads and tableaux; carved ivory tusks; decorative and bodily ornaments; healing, divining, and ceremonial objects; and helmets, altars, spoons, mirrors, and much else. ...”

Africa is a Country

Restitution, Repatriation, and Decolonization: What’s Next For “Brutish Museums”?

amazon: The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution by Dan Hicks

​Liner Notes for Marcus Fischer’s Monocoastal

 

“The Portland, Oregon–based musician Marcus Fischer invited me to write liner notes for his album Monocoastal on the 10th anniversary of its release by the 12k Records label, run by Taylor Deupree. The reissue, on glorious vinyl for the first time, with a cover image by Gregory Euclide, will be released later this month, on June 18. 1. This Second Hum. There is music that one might hum, and there is another musical hum entirely. The latter is music as hum, music that approaches the quality, the substance, of hum itself — music that both envisions and enacts a deeper hum, something that the listener is not merely entranced by but ensconced within. ...”

disquiet (Audio)

12k (Video)

marcus fischer - sound + art from portland, oregon (Video)

Discogs (Video)

Soundcloud (Audio)

YouTube: Marcus Fischer studio performance & live rig rundown // ambient tape loops with guitar and Eurorack, Marcus Fischer |  Whitney Museum | Live Performance Full

​What Happened During the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, One of the Worst Episodes of Racial Violence in U.S. History

 

“In February 1915, Thomas Dixon, author of popular novel The Clansman, and D.W. Griffith, the director who adapted the book into the film Birth of a Nation, lobbied then-president Woodrow Wilson for a screening at the White House. The two were sure their story would get a warm reception from the ‘well documented racist’ and onetime scholar who produced a five-volume History of the American People, in which he portrayed the South as ‘overrun by ex-slaves who were undeserving of freedom,’ as Boston University journalism professor Dick Lehr remarks. ... The moment was pivotal for the birth of the Civil Rights movement, he argues in a recent book. Following the country’s entry into World War I, it also lit the fires of what novelist, composer and executive director of the NAACP James Weldon Johnson called ‘Red Summer’… a summer of lynchings, lootings, burnings, shootings and other violence. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

NY Times: What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed

NY Times: 100 Years After the Tulsa Massacre, What Does Justice Look Like? (Audio)

W - Tulsa race massacre

LOC - Tulsa Race Massacre: Newspaper Complicity and Coverages

Freddie McKay / Augustus Pablo - I'm A Freeman (1973)

 

“... Never contracted to one label or producer Freddie recorded sparingly over the next few years. His second album, 'Lonely Man', released on Dynamic in 1974 and produced by Warwick Lynn and Neville Hinds featured a further version of 'I'm A Free Man'. Essential seven inch records such as the captivating 'Rock A Bye Woman', first released on Rad Bryan's Hot Rod label, helped to establish his legendary status. Versioned by Horace Andy and Jah Bull as 'Ital Vital' this ever popular record is regularly played out by discerning selectors. Another version of 'I'm A Free Man' for youth producer Leonald 'Santic' Chin (Leonald Chin), and complete with mournful melodica, proved massively popular and provided the rhythm track for one of Augustus Pablo's most memorable early outings 'Hap Ki Do'. Freddie's chilling version to Dennis Brown's monumental 'At The Foot Of The Mountain', produced by Eddie Wong, entitled Won't Get Away' was yet another certified classic from this period. ...”

Reggae Collector

W - Freddie McKay

Bandcamp: Freddie McKay/Santic/ Pablo (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: I'm A Freeman, SoundCloud: McKay/Augustus Pablo "I'm A Freeman"/"Hapkido" (Monica's)

​15 Essential Italian Neorealism Films You Need To Watch

 

Obsession (1943)

“In Italy, fascism and cinema had always been in a strange relationship. After millions of deaths, years of war and violence; fascism left only two positive things behind: Venice Film Festival and Cinecitta. Fascism, as a consequence of WWII, left thousands of people homeless in Italy; and of course, filmmakers studioless. Great Italian Studio Cinecitta, established by Benito Mussolini in 1937, was damaged significantly during the battles and bombings. This led the filmmakers to go into streets, to experience live action. ... From humanism to communism, from liberal to socialist, this new generation searched for new ways to tell stories of post-war Italy (even, Europe), to formulate a story by keeping the budget low and to hold Zeitgeist in palms of their hands. ...”

Taste of Cinema

 

Bitter Rice (1949)

​The Impressionist Art of Seeing and Being Seen

 

Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight - Berthe Morisot (1875)

“The still of the seaside, away from the noise and gossip of the city. Lapping waves, gentle breeze. It's a bit overcast, but why complain? We’re on vacation. Impressionist paintings, after decades of auction records and print-on-demand posters, have become the most reliable crowd-pleasers of European art. Pretty light. Happy haystacks. Believe me: In 1875, they were hardly so soothing. They were views of a society rocketing through modernization, and losing its bearings as it accelerated. ...”

NY Times

Impossible Owls: Essays from the Ends of the World - Brian Phillips

 

“In his highly anticipated debut essay collection, Impossible Owls, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he's one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels. The eight essays assembled here--five from Phillips's Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces--go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world's most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities (though they do that, too). ...”

goodreads

amazon