​Noctilucent Cloud Show, a Mercurial Nova, and More

 

Resembling a sprawling nebula viewed through a telescope, noctilucent clouds blanket the lower third of the west-northwest sky an hour after sunset on June 27, 2021.

“Since mid-June I've been on a vigil. Every clear night at 9:55 p.m. I drive to a nearby location with an unobstructed view of the northern sky hoping to see noctilucent clouds. Half terrestrial and half celestial, these night-shining clouds form around 80 kilometers up in the mesosphere, far above the feathery cirrus and cauliflower cumulus of a summer's day. Lower clouds literally appear out of thin air when water vapor condenses on specks of dirt, salt, and industrial pollutants. Noctilucent clouds (NLCs) instead use soot shed by incoming meteoroids and, in some cases, sulfur-rich volcanic gases for that purpose. ...”

Sky & Telescope (Video)

W - Noctilucent cloud

How Often Do Air Conditioners Fall Out of NYC Windows and Kill People?

 

Hot town, summer in the city – only the bobbleheads are keeping cool.

“Ah, New York City in the summer! Generally, we really do love it, despite the on-the-way-to-work sweatiness and fish-in-an-old-sweat-sock smells. But with summer comes air conditioners, and with air conditioners come inept installations into apartment windows, and with inept installations come the occasional, every so often, reports that an air conditioner has fallen from the sky and bashed someone in the head. Which would be awful. Truly, truly awful. So, how much should we worry about this, really? We took to the Internet, place of great knowledge, to find out. ...”

Voice

​The Unheralded Music of Detroit’s Strata Records

 

“In the late 1960s, Detroit was a simmering cauldron of frustration and righteous outrage. ... Detroit’s Black community fought back against brutal police repression and struggled under the weight of a sharp economic downturn. Even the optimistic glow of Motown’s ecstatic Black pop romanticism was fading and within three years the company would relocate to Los Angeles. It was against this dynamic and volatile socio-political backdrop that Detroit-born composer and pianist Kenny Cox founded Strata Records in 1969. An emerging pianist with an imaginative playing style and tasteful compositions, Cox had played with the likes of Jackie McLean, Philly Joe Jones, Rahsaan Rolan Kirk, and Wes Montgomery. Cox also gained some notoriety playing with his own group, the Contemporary Jazz Quintet. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

STRATA: A Detroit Movement Defined by John Sinclair

The Archivist: “Motown were a Mafioso in Detroit” – The story of Strata Records with Amir Abdullah (Audio)

Strata

PBS: Detroit Jazz City (Video) 29:31

MixCloud: Hedonist Jazz - Strata Records, Detroit (Audio) 59:45, Spotify: Strata Records

Divine Decks: A Visual History of Tarot: The First Comprehensive Survey of Tarot Gets Published by Taschen

 

“The cards of the tarot, first created for play around 600 years ago and used in recent centuries for occult divination of truths about life, the universe, and everything, should by all rights be nothing more than a historical curiosity today. Yet something about the tarot still compels, even to many of us in the ever more digital, ever more data-driven 21st century. Taschen, publisher of lavish art and photo books, know this: hence, as we featured last year here on Open Culture, products like their box-set reissue of the tarot deck designed by Salvador Dalí. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

amazon

Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol

 

“A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.“

NY Times (Video) 40:32

NY Times: U.S. Capitol Riot - Visual Investigations (Video)

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, 2021 June: Senate Report Details Security Failures in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot

​How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible

 

“... This instruction guided Ra for the rest of his life as a musician and a thinker. By the fifties, the signs of hopelessness were everywhere: racism, the threat of nuclear war, social movements that sought political freedom but not cosmic enlightenment. In response, during the next four decades—until his death, in 1993—Ra released more than a hundred albums of visionary jazz. Some consisted of anarchic, noisy ‘space music.’ Others featured lush, whimsical takes on Gershwin or Disney classics. All were intended as dance music, even if few people knew the steps. Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, to a supportive, religious family. He was named after Black Herman, a magician who claimed to be from the ‘dark jungles of Africa’ and who infused his death-defying escape acts with hoodoo mysticism. ...”

New Yorker

​Why Getty Keeps Some Photographs in the Fridge

 

Pearblossom Hwy., 11–18th April 1986, #2, 1986, David Hockney.

“Photography has undergone a dramatic evolution over the last 200 years. What was once a laborious process requiring metal plates and special chemicals is now just a button you push on a smartphone. Getty’s vast collection of photographs spans the entirety of that history. So, we invited our social media followers to ask the curators in the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs—Paul Martineau, Carolyn Peter, and Karen Hellman—their burning questions about Getty’s vast collection of photographs. Have more questions about art? Join us on Facebook or Instagram to catch the next Q&A with Getty’s curators. ...”

Getty

​Lee Scratch Perry & The Upsetters - Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle

 

“Black Board Jungle, often called Blackboard Jungle Dub, is a studio album by The Upsetters. The album, originally released in 1973 under artist name ‘Upsetters 14 Dub’, was pressed in only 300 copies and issued only in Jamaica. According to Pauline Morrison, this was the first ever dub album that came out, although there is a lot of speculation on the subject. Nevertheless, this was the first stereo dub album, as well as the first to include reverb. Later pressings released as Blackboard Jungle Dub have a different track listing. The album was re-issued as a 3x 10" colored vinyl box set as part of Record Store Day in April, 2012. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Lee Scratch Perry & The Upsetters - Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle 1:00:58

Flashback: Good Humor delighted generations with its curbside delivery of ice cream bars — and not even the mob could stop it

 

Al Cooney loads ice cream into his Good Humor truck at the start of the season at the Good Humor offices at 4825 W. Arthington St. on April 1, 1965, in Chicago.

“For Chicagoans of a certain age, the sound of bells on a hot summer evening is a hallowed childhood memory. It called a timeout to schoolyard softball games. Ball players would scramble to line up at one of the Good Humor trucks or three-wheelers, 150 in all, that roamed city and suburban streets in the 1960s. Their ting-a-ling-a-ling may have woken up older folks dozing on front porches, but their arrival solved a dilemma for kids with a few coins to spend on a treat. ...”

Chicago Tribune (Audio)

W - Good Humor

YouTube: Good Humor Ice Cream Trucks - Life in America

 

A group of boys crowds around a Good Humor ice cream truck in the 1940s.

2021 Tour de France

 

“The 2021 Tour de France is the 108th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's three grand tours. Originally planned for the Danish capital of Copenhagen, the start of the 2021 Tour (known as the Grand Départ) was transferred to Brest due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Copenhagen hosting four matches in the UEFA Euro 2020 and that event also being rescheduled to 2021 due to the pandemic. Originally scheduled for 2 to 25 July 2021, the Tour was moved to 26 June to 18 July 2021 to avoid the rescheduled 2020 Summer Olympics. ... In the lead up to the 2021 Tour de France, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Primož Roglič (Team Jumbo–Visma) were seen by many pundits as the top pre-race favourites for the general classification. Their closest rivals were considered to be Ineos Grenadiers trio Geraint Thomas, Richard Carapaz and Richie Porte. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: A Spectator’s Sign Felled Dozens of Tour de France Racers (Video)

Guardian (Video), steephill (Video), Le Tour (Video)

W - List of teams and cyclists in the 2021 Tour de France

2008 July: Tour de France 2008, 2009 July: Tour de France 2009, 2010 July: Tour de France 2010,  2011 July: Tour de France 2011, 2012 July: 2012 Tour de France, 2015 July: 2015 Tour de France, 2015 July: Tour de France 2015: Team Time Trial Win Bolsters American’s Shot at Podium, 2015 July: Tour de France: Chris Froome completes historic British win, 2016 July: 2016 Tour de France, 2017 July: 2017 Tour de France, 2018 May: 2018 Giro d'Italia, 2019 July: 2018 Tour de France, 2019 July: Tour de France 2019

JUNO-60

 

“The Roland Juno-60 is a programmable 6-voice polyphonic analog synthesizer manufactured by Roland Corporation from 1982 to 1984. It followed the Juno-6, an almost identical synthesizer received months earlier. The synthesizers introduced Roland's digitally controlled oscillators, allowing for greatly improved tuning stability. It was widely used in 1980s pop, house, and 1990s techno music. The late 1970s and 1980s saw the introduction of the first digital synthesizers, such as the Fairlight CMI and Synclavier. Roland president Ikutaro Kakehashi recognized that the synthesizer market was moving away from analog synthesis, but Roland had no commercially viable digital technology. ...”

Wikipedia

Juno-60: The Whole Story (Video)

One summer night on a New York tenement roof

 

“Saul Kovner was a Russia-born artist who came to New York City in the 1920s. After attending the National Academy of Design and setting up a studio on Central Park West, he worked for the WPA in the 1930s and 1940s. Kovner captured gentle yet honest scenes in all seasons of urban life, particularly of working class and poor New Yorkers. In 1946, he completed ‘One Summer Night,’ a richly detailed depiction of tenement dwellers seeking refuge from the heat in a pre- air conditioned city. ... Here’s how John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and some wonderful unidentified illustrators captured the ‘fiery furnace’ of a New York heat wave. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Cinema of Cuba

 

Cine Praga in Pinar del Rio, Cuba

“Cinema arrived in Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century. Before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, about 80 full-length films were produced in Cuba. Most of these films were melodramas. Following the revolution, Cuba entered what is considered the ‘Golden age’ of Cuban cinema. … Before the Cuban Revolution of 1959 the total film production was around 80 full-length movies. Some films are worth mentioning, such as La Virgen de la Caridad starring Miguel Santos and Romance del Palmar by Ramón Peón. ...”

Wikipedia

WALKER: How Are Revolutionary Cuban Films Still Revolutionary Today?

Guardian: The reality behind the revolution

Art, revolution and the ‘Golden Age of the Cuban Poster’

Guardian: The island of cinemas: Cuba's faded movie theatres – in pictures

amazon: The Cinema of Cuba: Contemporary Film and the Legacy of Revolution, Cines de Cuba

The Case for a 32-Team Euros

 

Portugal found a way through to the round of 16.

“Thomas Vermaelen’s header hit the ground first and then rose before colliding with the post near the corner where it meets the crossbar. As the ball spun out, sideways toward the middle of the goal, Lukas Hradecky, the Finland goalkeeper, was still turning around. It was all happening in the blink of an eye. Instinctively, Hradecky reached out a hand to try to swat the ball away. In that instant, on his fingertips, a substantial portion of Euro 2020 hung. Had Hradecky been able to claw the ball away from his goal, away from danger, Finland might have been able to hang on, to keep a vaguely interested Belgium at bay, to qualify for the knockout stages of the first major tournament it has ever reached. Denmark, playing simultaneously in Copenhagen, might have been sent home. …”

NY Times

Radio Territories

 

“Radio Territories is an ambitious collection of essays, writings, and audio files—probing histories, cultures, geographies, economies, communities, logics, ontologies, technologies, aesthetics, and politics—that examines  the performative potential of radio to create, erase, dislodge, and remake spaces. Yet its ambition is steadfastly grounded: each contributor is firmly located in concrete practices, i.e., sonic territories. The contributors are a mix of sound artists, journalists, theorists, and teachers. The contributions range from multimodal essays to performance scripts to radio/sound artists examining implications of their practices to historical examinations of key moments of radio culture. Through all of this seemingly discordant work, the theme of radio art as public praxis emerges as a zero-point of orientation, highlighting both performance and place, and delivering on the promise of the title. ...”

Liminalities (Audio)

Continuo

[PDF] Radio Territories

Discogs

​The Port of Missing Women

“For some time, I’ve imagined writing a novel titled The Port of Missing Women, a term I came across while doing research for my biography of Raymond Chandler, The Long Embrace. It refers to the many young women in Los Angeles who were suddenly going missing—and often turning up murdered in grisly ways. Coincidentally or not, many of these murders occurred in the years right after World War II, when a large number of servicemen were returning from overseas through the port of Los Angeles and finding, no doubt, that in many cases the women they had left behind were not the same as those they encountered when they returned. The war years had given women new freedoms in the way they acted and dressed and socialized, in part through jobs outside the home in the defense industry and other sectors of the labor force. ...”

Alta

2009 September: The Maltese Falcon, 2013 July: Raymond Chandler, 2014 November: Finding Marlowe, 2019 August: Raymond Chandler: The Art of Beginning a Crime Story

​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. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

Open Culture: Hear Demos & Outtakes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniversary of the Classic Album (Video)

W - Blue

Discogs (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 Paris Review

​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. ...”

NY Times

NY Times - N.Y.C. Mayoral Race: Ranked-Choice Could Give Wiley and Garcia a Win, But It Is an Uphill Battle (Video)

​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. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

ITINERARIES OF MODERN ETHIOPIAN INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

Discogs (Video)

​Around Day’s End: Downtown New York, 1970–1986

 “Anticipating the completion of David Hammons’s Day’s End, a major public artwork located in Hudson River Park, the Whitney will present a selection of works from the Museum’s collection that explore downtown New York as site, history, and memory. Central to this presentation is Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End, the innovative project that inspired Hammons’s sculpture. In 1975, Matta-Clark cut several massive openings into the dilapidated building that existed on Pier 52 where Gansevoort Street meets the Hudson River. He described it as a ‘temple to sun and water.’ ...”

Whitney (Video)

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. ...”

disquiet (Audio)

Soundcloud (Audio)

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. ...”  

NY Times

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. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Ruling Dings N.C.A.A., but It Keeps Rule-Making Power

NY Times: How Blowing Up College Sports Became a Rallying Cry for Some in Washington (March 30, 2021)

​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. ...”

The Quietus (Video/Audio)

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. ...”

Ephemeral New York

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). ...”

New Yorker

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. ...”

Harpers

Booked: When Slaveholders Controlled the Government, with Matthew Karp

Jacobin: How the Antislavery Movement Ignited a Political Revolution

amazon: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy

​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. ...”

NY Times

​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.“

Wallace Collection

Wikipedia

​Terry Riley / Don Cherry ‎– Köln – February 23, 1975

“Another incredible treasure from the vaults of Cologne radio, recorded in February 22/23rd, 1975. Unreleased sessions, carefully remastered, in this duo improvisation Riley's organ intersections just define the geometry of the hyper-dimensional space where Don Cherry's outwordly trumpet lives. Mantric and evocative, we could go on and on listening to the very same track all day long, it could last forever... In 1975, pioneering minimalist composer Terry Riley and jazz trumpet cosmonaut Don Cherry joined forces for a magnetic performance in Köln, Germany. But they also recorded these incredible radio sessions: Riley’s swirling synth, droning and clairvoyant and prescient in its clarity, parades along with a triumphant Cherry, leaving behind trails of mystery and a sense of beauty in a larger, more universal form. ...”

Sound Ohm

YouTube: Terry Riley & Don Cherry – Köln, Germany, February 1975 (Live Recording) 1:05:53

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)