Deep Art Nature

Basketball Is Nothing Without Net

Anibal Amador has spent the last three years replacing the nets at the courts near his apartment in Manhattan.

“One of the most gratifying sounds in sports is the whoosh of a basketball snapping the netting on a perfect swish. Take away the net and all that’s left is the unsatisfying silence of a ball pushing air molecules around as it sails through the rim. Did it even go through? Sometimes it is hard to tell. That's why Anibal Amador, a 55-year-old former real estate agent from Manhattan, regularly dips into his own pocket to buy brand-new nets for playground rims. The city does not provide nets for the most part, but anyone who has played even one game of Hustle knows that the muted hush of a ball drifting through a netless rim turns even the most perfectly executed shot into an airball. ...”

NY Times

Gloria - John Cassavetes (1980)

“Gloria is a 1980 American neo-noir crime thriller film written and directed by John Cassavetes. It tells the story of a gangster's girlfriend who goes on the run with a young boy who is being hunted by the mob for information he may or may not have. It stars Gena Rowlands, Julie Carmen, Buck Henry, and John Adames. In the South Bronx, Jeri Dawn is heading home with groceries. Inside the lobby of her apartment building, she passes a man whose dress and appearance are out of place. The woman quickly boards the elevator. She is met in her apartment by her husband Jack Dawn, an accountant for a New York City mob family. ...”

Wikipedia

Chapter on The Making of Gloria (1979-1980)

amazon

YouTube: Gloria (1980) ORIGINAL TRAILER

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, 2021 May: A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Requiem for a Dream

Paintings for the Art Fund of the Museum of Artistic Culture in the Museum Bureau of IZO Narkompros collection, Moscow, 1919–20.

“The idea of an avant-garde museum has something of the head-scratching quality of the oxymoron to it—because didn’t the avant-garde turn its back on institutions in hopes of engaging directly with life? (That said, why people consider institutions anathema to life has always been another head-scratcher for me.) In his 1909 Futurist Manifesto, F. T. Marinetti promised to destroy museums and other dusty sites of knowledge (’libraries, academies of every kind’) in order to make space for speed and dynamism. ...”

ARTFORUM

W - Manifesto of Futurism, W - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

[PDF] The Futurist Manifesto - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

First page of the English version Manifesto of Futurism as it appeared in Poesia (magazine)

Before & After Funkadelic’s ‘Maggot Brain’

“On more than three dozen virtuosic, genre-blurring studio albums released from 1970 to 1982, George Clinton and the members of his rollicking Parliament-Funkadelic collective shaped the backbone and shook loose the booty of modern groove. Formed by singers in the orbit of a New Jersey barbershop in 1955, the group started as a Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers-style doo-wop act before leaning into Detroit soul. Ultimately they absorbed the culture of the late ’60s like sponges.The Parliaments transformed from a Motown-aspiring, matching-tie-and-handkerchief vocal group into tripped-out hippies in bell bottoms, headdresses and the occasional American flag diaper. They were turned on by psychedelic rockers like Jimi Hendrix and Cream; they hung out with punks like the MC5 and the Stooges; they enjoyed Black Power, free love and underground comics. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

Christ Stopped at Eboli: Memories of Exile

“Francesco Rosi’s film Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) is based on Carlo Levi’s novelistic memoir of the same name, which became an instant classic of Italian literature when it appeared at the end of World War II, in 1945. In it, Levi recounts the year between 1935 and 1936, during which he was sent by the Fascist government to live in the small southern Italian town of Aliano (called Gagliano in the book and the movie). At the time, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime would send political dissidents into a kind of internal exile, to live in remote towns in southern Italy, where they would be required to sign in with the local police every day. ...”

Criterion

Criterion: Christ Stopped at Eboli

W - Christ Stopped at Eboli (film)

amazon

YouTube: Christ Stopped at Eboli - Trailer

2013 July: Salvatore Giuliano (1962), 2013 July: Hands Over the City (1963)

The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

“After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to do, but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that the story I was writing demanded it. Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldn’t understand the role of caffeine in my life – its invisible yet pervasive power – without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world’s leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of “caffeine withdrawal” included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadn’t begun to understand his own relationship with caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same. ...”

Guardian

A coffee house in 17th-century London.

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, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

Breaking down England’s penalty heartbreak: At 10.49pm, Maguire slashes penalty home. At 10.54pm, everything changes

“It’s brutal sometimes, football. One by one, the players went to Bukayo Saka. They told him it would be OK, that they were proud of him, and that he should be proud of himself, too. They told him there was no blame and, even as they were saying it, they must have known their words made little difference. Maybe, in time, Saka will come to understand that, yes, he ought to be proud he played with such distinction during Euro 2020 that he was trusted, at the age of 19, to be part of the penalty shootout which decided the final between England and Italy. For now, though, what can anyone say to console a player who has suffered this kind of professional trauma? ....”

The Athletic

NY Times: How Italy Beat England to Win Euro 2020 (Video)

Leaving Euro 2020 - Brian Phillips

BBC: 'Out of despair, Italy have brought joy to a nation'

NY Times: After Defeat, England’s Black Soccer Players Face a Racist Outburst

Marcus Rashford mural vandalised after England lose Euro 2020 final

Guardian: England battle for survival instead of control as deep-lying issue resurfaces - Jonathan Wilson

Wikipedia: UEFA Euro 2020 Final

NY Times: In the Big Euro 2020 Game, I Knew the England I Was Rooting For

A photographer's journey across California's iconic Route 66

The Globetrotter Lodge in Holbrook, Ariz.

“Route 66, also known as the Will Rogers Highway, is arguably the most famous original road in the entirety of the United States. Having been established all the way back in 1926, it ran from Santa Monica, California, to Chicago, Illinois. As time rolled on, the route was bypassed by the Interstate road system and was officially removed from the US highway system in 1985. Since then, however, the journey has taken on a whole new meaning.As a historic reminiscence, its remnants are now labelled as a scenic byway with ‘Historic Route 66’ signs. Many roadside reminiscences and curiosities are left reminding the traveller of the exciting past when the country was developed for long-distance car travels. ...”

FAR OUT

NY Times: A Nostalgic (if Isolating) Road Trip Along Route 66

amazon: 66 on 66: A Photographer's Journey

Little remains of the Tonto Drive-In Theater in Winslow, Ariz.

Lionel Messi and Argentina Beat Brazil in Copa América Final

The Copa América victory was Lionel Messi’s first major title with Argentina’s senior team, and the team’s first since 1993.

“Lionel Messi finally ticked the last empty box in his glittering soccer career on Saturday night, leading Argentina past host Brazil, 1-0, in the final of the Copa América in Rio de Janeiro.The trophy was Messi’s first with Argentina after a string of painful, agonizing, maddening failures, including perhaps the most demoralizing defeat of his career — against Germany in the World Cup final — inside the same stadium, Rio’s hulking Maracanã, in 2014.When the whistle blew to end the final, Messi — his relief palpable — dropped to his knees and was immediately surrounded by his teammates. Moments later, they were lifting him above their shoulders and tossing him in the air. ...”

NY Times (Video)

YouTube: Celebrations in Buenos Aires as Argentina claim Copa America title, Buenos Aires erupts as Argentina beat Brazil in Copa América final

ESPN: Copa America final preview: Will Neymar, Brazil beat Messi's Argentina?

NY Times: Lionel Messi Tries to Slay His Ghosts (July 9)

Head to Head: Comparing Tite and Scaloni's numbers ahead of the final (Video)

Eileen in Wonderland

Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape, 1942, collage on paper

“In an undated note bequeathed to the Tate Archive in 1992, Eileen Agar (1899–1991) writes of her admiration for the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: ‘Lewis Carroll is a mysterious master of time and imagination, the Herald of Sur-Realism and freedom, a prophet of the Future and an uprooter of the Past, with a literary and visual sense of the Present.’ The same could be said of Agar, whose long career as an artist spanned most of the twentieth century and intersected with some of the prevailing movements of the time, including Cubism and surrealism. Her timeless work—including the oil painting Alice with Lewis Carroll—will be on view through August 29 at the Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy,’ the largest exhibition yet of the sui generis artist’s oeuvre. A selection of images from the show appears below. ...”

The Paris Review

W - Eileen Agar

Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy (Audio)

Tate: Note on Lewis Carroll, describing him as ‘a prophet of surrealism’

Photograph of Agar wearing Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse, 1936

Mapping the Field

Fuller

“Yet another semester online, yet another group of 22 amazingly dedicated, creative, intellectually generous, mutually supportive students representing ten or so programs from across The New School! Rather than working around our geographically distributed, mediated condition, we sought to center it — to map and reflect on the social and technical and ecological networks that connect us. ... Our fabulous teaching assistant, Emily Bowe, led us through some fantastic mapping labs, and three thematic student groups designed a few of our sessions, complete with thoughtfully conceived mapping exercises. This was a difficult year. ...”

Mapping the Field: Our Final Projects

Mapping the Field

Ashley’s “Exploring Foodways + Infrastructures of East New York”

Inside Laraaji’s Beautiful Meditation Music

“This month, Numero Group reissued Vision Songs Vol. 1, a collection of 11 pieces culled from a self-released 1984 meditation tape by New Age music legend Laraaji. These ‘celestial sounds,’ as Laraaji calls them, were originally released as a short run of 60-minute cassettes designed to guide and soundtrack transcendental meditation. Constructed in the artist’s Manhattan studio, Laraaji used an MT-70 Casio synthesizer, drum machine, and his long-standing signature instrument, the zither, to create works of longform electronic ambience. Vision Songs Vol. 1 was one of over 20 Laraaji releases that, in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, were almost exclusively available in a constellation of New Age book shops in cities along the East Coast of the United States. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Laraaji: A Life in Music and Meditation (Video)

2021 February: The Eternal Life Aquatic with Laraaji

From Ritual to Romance - Jessie L Weston (1920)

“From Ritual to Romance, published in 1920, is perhaps most well known today for being the first work T S Eliot lists in his ‘Notes on The Waste Land’, where he says that Weston’s book suggested ‘Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism’ of his poem. Eliot, of course, later said these notes were a publisher’s requirement to bulk out the book publication of The Waste Land, which has led some to dismiss them entirely, or to see them as one more layer of obfuscation around the poem, and Eliot himself later said he regretted sending so many readers ‘on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail’. But From Ritual to Romance, which aims to trace a link between medieval Holy Grail romances and the earliest fertility rituals, certainly had its influence on what the poem says and how it says it. ...”

Mewsings

W - From Ritual to Romance, W - Jessie Weston

Voice: Joseph Campbell, Myth Master (1988)

W - Holy Grail

From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston [1920]

10 of the best Latin American novels – that will take you there

Plaza Fernández de Madrid (The Cartagena pictured in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera

"A sense of place often has a political edge in Latin American writing. Even magic realism – which takes fantastic liberties with the contours of cities and pueblos, jungles and rivers – is rooted in the living, breathing, dying and warring world of its characters. Over five centuries, Hispanic authors have loaned from and contested European ideas about their world, adapting imported traditions (from naturalism to crime fiction to stream-of-consciousness) and reworking them to bring to life the vibrancy and vicissitudes of their youthful continent. The best novels are as alluring and stimulating as the most atmospheric places. To choose just 10 was only possible by imagining I was packing for a long road trip with limited baggage. I would take these, a comfortable hammock and a sturdy pillow. ...”

Guardian

Guardian: Fiction and hyper-reality

Guardian: The undefeated

Pelourinho, the historic centre of Salvador. Captains of the Sands by Jorge Amado

The Sharp Game

(after Marcel Duchamp)

“I was down on my knees before the chess set. Not out of deference, though I did feel a bit of that. I knelt because Irving Finkel, a board game expert and a curator at the British Museum, which displayed these chess pieces among its extensive collection, suggested that patrons view it that way. ‘When you look at them, kneel down or crouch in such a way that you can look through the glass straight into their faces and look them in the eye. You will see human beings across the passage of time. They have a remarkable quality. They speak to you.’ These were the Lewis Chessmen, and they composed perhaps the most important chess set in the world. They’re a centerpiece of the British Museum. ...”

The Ringer

2008 October: World Chess Championship 1972, 2009 January: Sicilian Defence, 2009 February: Mikhail Tal, 2009 February: Garry Kasparov, 2009 April: Vasily Smyslov, 2009 August: Chess960, 2009 November: Bent Larsen,2011 November: The Lewis Chessmen, 2012 July: 40 Years Ago Today: Chess Rivals Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky Meet in the ‘Match of the Century’, 2015 September: The Subtext Buried In Seven Great Movie Chess Scenes, 2018 December: The Last Chess Shop in New York City, 2019 May: Deep Blue, 2021 May: Chess in the arts

Mulatu Astatke & The Black Jesus Experience – To Know Without Knowing (2019)

“... The Black Jesus Experience are a truly cosmopolitan group of musicians based in Melbourne: a city that can lay claim to being one of the most vibrant in the world, and certainly the Antipodes, for contemporary jazz. The group’s primary musical influence is Ethio-Jazz, so Mulatu Astatke is their ideal collaborator, but the music has a more extensive range of influences that includes hip-hop and funk. The lead saxophonist and co-founder of the eight-piece band is Peter Harper who was introduced to Ethiopian music by his father, a music teacher for the Ethiopian Navy band in the 1960s. ...”

London Jazz News

Bandcamp (Audio)

W - Black Jesus Experience

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: To Know Without Knowing 58:39

2016 January: New York–Addis–London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965–1975, 2017 March: Mulatu Astatke - Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974, 2018 March: Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics - Inspiration Information (2009)

Brian Eno - Reflection (2016)

“Reflection is the twenty-sixth studio album by English musician Brian Eno, released on 1 January 2017 on Warp Records. It is a piece of generative ambient music produced by Eno, which plays indefinitely via an app, modulating its output at different times of the day. A pre-recorded version of the album is available on CD and vinyl, which runs for 54 minutes. Digital streaming versions of the album update on a seasonal basis. ... Reflection was released as part of Eno's series of ambient albums. Its structure is similar to that of Thursday Afternoon (1985), an earlier album of his that consists of a single track that runs for 60 minutes in length. ...”

Wikipedia

Pitchfork

amazon

YouTube: Reflection 54:00

Memory of Fire: Genesis - Eduardo Galeano (1985)

“In the South-American jungle, as history opens, jaguars teach men to build fires and hunt with bows. Columbus wades ashore in the Bahamas, asking the natives (in Hebrew, Chaldean and Arabic) if they can lead him to the Great Khan. The Virgin Mary appears at Guadelupe, Mex., olive-skinned and speaking in Nahuatl. ‘I am not a historian,’ Eduardo Galeano explains of the scenes he sketches. ‘I am a writer who would like to contribute to the rescue of the kidnapped memory of all America, but above all of Latin America.’ Galeano is overly modest. He may not be a trained historian, but Memory of Fire: Genesis is a book as fascinating as the history it relates. Memory of Fire: Genesis is composed of 308 vignettes--scenes from the history of the Americas. ...”

LA Times

NY Times: DRAMAS THAT SCORCH

amazon

2015 April: Eduardo Galeano (3 September 1940 – 13 April 2015), 2017 August: Soccer in Sun and Shadow (1993), 2018 August: The Pan American, 2019 April: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1971)

Cézanne Drawing - Paul Cézanne

Still Life with Cut Watermelon (1900), pencil and watercolor on paper

“Best known as a painter, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) produced some of his most radically original works on paper. Cézanne Drawing brings together more than 250 rarely shown works in pencil and kaleidoscopic watercolor from across the artist’s career, along with key paintings, that together reveal how drawing shaped Cézanne’s transformative modern vision. Drawing almost daily on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, Cézanne made his process visible, from searching lines that repeat and transform to layered washes of watercolor that explore translucency and luminosity. ...”

MoMA (Video)

NY Times: The Cézanne We’ve Forgotten How to See

amazon: Cézanne: Drawing

2011 August: Paul Cézanne, 2014 November: Cézanne: Landscape into Art, 2015 March: Madame Cézanne, 2017 June: Portraits by Cézanne, 2017 November: Inside Paul Cézanne’s Studio, 2018 April: The Lurchingly Uneven Portraits of Paul Cézanne

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