2009 September: The Maltese Falcon, 2013 July: Raymond Chandler, 2014 November: Finding Marlowe, 2019 August: Raymond Chandler: The Art of Beginning a Crime Story
The Port of Missing Women
50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’
"Just before embarking on the pivotal intercontinental voyage that would inspire much of her peerless 1971 album, 'Blue' — released 50 years ago this week — Joni Mitchell considered her grandmothers. One 'was a frustrated poet and musician, she kicked the kitchen door off of the hinges on the farm,' Mitchell recalled in a 2003 documentary. The other 'wept for the last time in her life at 14 behind some barn because she wanted a piano and said, Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you’ll never have a piano. And I thought maybe I am the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women.' If she stayed put, she might end up kicking the door off the hinges, too. ...”
Open Culture: Hear Demos & Outtakes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniversary of the Classic Album (Video)
vimeo: Blue (1971) 38:07
2015 July: Blue (1970), 2015 Novemer: 40 Years On: Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Revisited, 2016 August: On For the Roses (1972), 2016 November: Court and Spark (1974), 2017 February: Hejira (1976), 2017 August: Miles of Aisles (1974), 2017 October: Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius, 2018 March: Joni Mitchell: We look back over her extraordinary 50 year career, 2018 November: Free Man In Paris (1974), 2019 April: Mingus (1979), 2019 July: The Guide to Getting Into Joni Mitchell, the Blueprint for Human Experience
Strawberry Moon - Nina MacLaughlin
Watercolor illustration from Aurora consurgens, a fifteenth-century alchemical text.
“Summer now, and the petals are wet in the morning. The moon was born four and a half billion years ago. It’s been goddess, god, sister, bridge, vessel, mother, lover, other. ‘Civilisations still fight / Over your gender,’ writes Priya Sarukkai Chabria. Dew is one of its daughters—or so the Spartan lyric poet Alcman had it in the mid-seventh-century B.C.: ‘Dew, a child of moon and air / causes the deergrass to grow.’ Cyrano de Bergerac, twenty-three hundred years later, imagined a dew-fueled way of getting to the moon. ‘I planted myself in the middle of a great many Glasses full of Dew, tied fast above me,’ he writes in his satirical A Voyage to the Moon, published in 1657. If dew rises to the sky, evaporating into the atmosphere, he reasons, enough ought to take him, too. ...”
The Most Detailed Map of New York City Mayoral Primary Results
“New York City voters cast their ballots for mayor on Tuesday, and it became clear that the competitive Democratic race would be decided by the city’s new ranked-choice system. It is likely to be weeks before a winner is known. The map below shows the latest unofficial results for the first round of votes, which do not include absentee ballots. ...”
Ethiopian Soul And Groove - Ethiopian Urban Modern Music Vol. 1
“... Urban Ethiopian music stands out within the African continent thanks to its creativity and originality. Whatever the shade — pop, blues, jazz or soul — it comes from a fusion of local musical traditions mixed with an echo of Western music. It bewitched Ethiopia during the ‘Swinging Addis’ decade before recently winning the favors of a well-informed audience all over the world. This first vinyl volume of Ethiopian Urban Modern Music presents some of the Ethiopian ‘groove jewels’ drawn from the essential series. ...”
Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986
2011 October: Gordon Matta-Clark, 2018 January: Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark and Le Corbusier, 2019 October: The Life and Times of Alvin Baltrop, 2019 October: How Gordon Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to 70s New York
Environmental Industrial Music - Italian Marco Mascia
“Industrial music is generally all klang, and it is truly industrial more by association than by audio hallmarks. The sounds are sourced from what might very well be an active factory floor, but the dance floor is where they are intended to reside, and where they are most at home. Another kind of industrial music is more akin to environmental industrial music: the sound of an inactive factory floor, when the motors are humming but activity is on pause. Such is ‘Grave doubts – Decisioni difficili’ by the Italian musician Marco Mascia, who lives in Cagliari. ...”
Leave This Wondrous Island to the Birds
Whimbrel returning to Deveaux Bank for their night roost.
“About 20 miles south of Charleston, S.C., at the mouth of the North Edisto River, a small, horseshoe-shaped sandbar rises above the water. The claim of land is tenuous on Deveaux Bank, about a half-mile offshore. At high tide, it’s three-quarters submerged. Deveaux’s sand is continually shifting as swirling currents build it up and wash it away. In some years, the island disappears altogether. This ephemeral spit of sand, about 250 acres, is a gathering place for tens of thousands of birds. It has been home to the largest population of brown pelicans on the East Coast and to large populations of terns. There are skimmers, gulls, oystercatchers, red knots and more. Of the 57 coastal water bird species that South Carolina has identified as of ‘greatest conservation need,’ virtually all are found on Deveaux. ...”
W - Deveaux Bank, South Carolina
2008 September: Birds, 2008 June: Bird Songs, 2017 April: Of a Feather, 2017 June: Bird Sounds, 2017 July: Beautifully Designed Tiny Houses… For Birds, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 March: She Invented a Board Game With Scientific Integrity. It’s Taking Off., 2019 June: Where Birds Meet Art … After Dark, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 October: A Quest to Protect the World’s Last Silent Places, 2020 June: Making a Garden That Welcomes the Birds, 2020 July: New Bird Song That ‘Went Viral’ Across This Species of Sparrow Was Tracked by Scientists For the First Time, 2020 August: How to Use Binoculars - Jason Ward, 2020 October: Get the Birds To Come To You, 2020 June: BirdNET, 2021 April: Birds by the Billions: A Guide to Spring’s Avian Parade
Supreme Court Backs Payments to Student-Athletes in N.C.A.A. Case
“The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday that the N.C.A.A. could not bar relatively modest payments to student-athletes, a decision that underscored the growing challenges to a college sports system that generates huge sums for schools but provides little or no compensation to the players.The decision concerned only payments and other benefits related to education. But its logic suggested that the court may be open to a head-on challenge to the ban by the National Collegiate Athletic Association on paying athletes for their participation in sports that bring billions of dollars in revenue to American colleges and universities.In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh seemed to invite such a challenge. ...”
Mystical Discipline: Anthony Braxton Interviewed
“The lazy cliche about Anthony Braxton is that he's a joyless intellectual, approaching music like a chess master when he should be kicking out the jams. The composer and saxophonist, who recently turned 76, has been combatting such reductive thinking for much of his career. ... There's no doubting the seriousness with which Braxton approaches his art – this is a major composer, who with his Tri-Axium writings, has developed a musico-philosophical system of cosmic complexity – but the sense of adventure and fun he brings to these enterprises is undeniable. Braxton describes himself as "a professional student of music" and his enthusiasm for new ideas and possibilities is inspiring. Never one to follow prescribed notions about music, Braxton has embraced everything from John Coltrane to Arnold Schoenberg, Charlie Parker to Karlheinz Stockhausen, Diana Ross to Wolf Eyes. ...”
2020 February: Anthony Braxton: Ghost Trance Music
An eccentric loner paints New York at dusk and in moonlight
New York Street at Dusk
“Louis Michel Eilshemius had the right background to become an establishment painter. Born to a wealthy family in New Jersey in 1864, he was educated in Europe and then Cornell University. After persuading his father to let him enroll in the Art Students League and pursue painting, he returned to live at his family’s Manhattan brownstone at 118 East 57th Street.His early work earned notoriety and was selected for exhibition at the National Academy of Design in the 1880s. ‘Eilshemius’s early artistic style was rooted in lessons he gleaned from his studies abroad, specifically the landscape aesthetics of the Barbizon School and French impressionism,’ states the National Gallery of Art. ...”
A House of One’s Own - Janet Malcolm
“The legend of Bloomsbury—the tale of how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen emerged from a grim, patriarchal Victorian background to become the pivotal figures in a luminous group of advanced and free-spirited writers and artists—takes its plot from the myth of modernism. Legend and myth alike trace a movement from darkness to light, turgid ugliness to plain beauty, tired realism to vital abstraction, social backwardness to social progress. Virginia Woolf chronicled her own and her sister’s coming of age in the early years of this century much as Nikolaus Pevsner celebrated the liberating simplifications of modern design in his once influential but now perhaps somewhat outdated classic Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936). ...”
2019 April: Bloomsbury Group, 2020 August: How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters, 2021 January: Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution
History As End - Matthew Karp
"Anti-Slavery Picnic at Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts" by Susan Torrey Merritt, circa 1845.
“Last spring, 155 years after the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital surrendered again. In April 1865, the capitulation was swift and almost outlandishly theatrical: after learning that Robert E. Lee’s army had withdrawn from nearby Petersburg, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and his military guard escaped south under cover of darkness, setting half the city on fire as they fled. Early the next morning, the first Union troops arrived. As Richmond’s black residents celebrated in the streets—joined by more than a few poor whites—the black soldiers at the head of the Union column worked to put out the flames. The embers of a regime dedicated to preserving African slavery were extinguished by hundreds of former slaves. The occupying forces then marched to Davis’s executive mansion and commandeered it as their headquarters. ...”
At Euro 2020, a Reminder That Good Can Be Great
Italy: unbeaten, but not unbeatable.
“Let’s start with a little intellectual exercise. A purely hypothetical, entirely subjective, ultimately inconclusive one, admittedly, but still: Now that each of the presumed contenders to win the European Championship has shown at least some of its hand, how competitive would any of them be if they were to be parachuted, as they are, into the Champions League? Instinctively, it feels as if France, at least, would do pretty well. A front line of Antoine Griezmann, Karim Benzema and Kylian Mbappé bears comparison to any attacking trident in the club game. ...”
Pieter Pourbus: An Allegory of True Love, c1547
“A rehang at the exquisite Wallace Collection means this eccentric Renaissance work is now displayed near Fragonard’s saucy frolic The Swing. The comparison is instructive. Both are provocative and funny. This painting’s moralising title and the symbolism attributed to it – contrasting, we are told, wise chaste love with carnal sin – have almost nothing to do with the experience of looking at it. Either Renaissance courtiers were incredibly hypocritical, enjoying this scene of an unbuttoned picnic while pretending to tut, or they were in on a game in which the real meat was, and is, a Rabelaisian delight in the sensual.“
Terry Riley / Don Cherry РK̦ln РFebruary 23, 1975
December 2007: Terry Riley, March 2010: In C, December 2010: Terry Riley & Gyan Riley, April 2011: Terry Riley - Shri Camel: Morning Corona, Terry Riley rare footage, live in the 70s, 2014 March: Kronos Quartet Plays Terry Riley: Salome Dances for Peace (1989), 2014 June: Solo piano works, Moscow Conservatory. April 18th, 2000, A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), 2017 August: “A Particular Glow” – On Loving Terry Riley, 2017 September: Terry Riley On Tape Loops, 2019 March: Assassin Reverie (2005)
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? ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
A Dip in the Lake—Ten Quick Steps, Sixty-one Waltzes and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity, Peter Gena, 1982
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
‘Transgressive, hypnotic, determinedly true to herself and her art’, Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe
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
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)
Platform at the 68th Street/Lexington subway station. Gerard Malanga took it in 1971.
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. ...”
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