Manhattan Egos · Sonny Simmons (1969)

 
“This collection consists of recordings by avant-garde jazz musician Huey ‘Sonny’ Simmons. The first session from 1969 finds Simmons on alto saxophone and English horn paired with trumpeter and future wife Barbara Donald. Their playing style is influenced by the early free-jazz music of saxophonist John Coltrane and trumpeter Donald Ayler. On ‘Seven Dances of Salome,’ Simmons plays English horn, giving the music a Middle Eastern flavor. The second session from 1970 pairs Simmons with jazz violinist Michael White on four numbers. Simmons’ career went into decline in the 1970s, but rebounded in the 1990s. ...”

​The 1916 stunt that made Nathan’s Famous a Coney Island hot dog icon

 
Nathan’s expanded its menu by 1939 

“No summer visit to Coney Island is complete without a stop at Nathan’s Famous, the iconic boardwalk restaurant that offers everything from burgers to frog legs (really) but made its name back in 1916 selling delicious, cheap hot dogs. Yet the five cent frankfurters Polish immigrant Nathan Handwerker began hawking from a stand on the then-unfinished boardwalk wouldn’t have caught on—if not for a clever stunt he came up with to convince the crowds on Surf Avenue to give his hot dogs a try. ...”

​I will walk 500 miles … on an art trail along the Suffolk and Essex coasts

 
“... I’m at Kessingland Ness, a small spit of shingle on the Suffolk coast south of Lowestoft and I’m starting a long-distance walk, a real marathon. The plan is to walk the Suffolk and Essex coasts from Lowestoft to Tilbury, accompanying an arts project called Beach of Dreams that hopes to bring people together around walking, and start some discussion about what’s happening to our coasts. ... I’ve been talking and writing about long-distance walking for a long time, but not actually done much of it. Like many people during the pandemic, I wanted to get out on something significant, but given that challenges such as the Appalachian Trail or GR10 are off the agenda, I was thinking of the British coast, maybe that of Wales or south-west England. Then Ali Pretty, founder and artistic director of arts group Kinetika, suggested I accompany their walk and write a daily account. ...”

Was (Not Was) - What Up Dog? (1988)

 
“I’ve got to be the only twentysomething I know that’s this excited over Pick of the Litter 1980-2010, the new compilation by pop-funk band Was (Not Was). Quirky aficionados may know them for left-field, late-’80s hits like ‘Walk the Dinosaur’ and ‘Spy in the House of Love.’ Others may know them as the band that put producers Don Was and David Was on the map (they would, either separately or together, work on such albums as Cosmic Thing by The B-52’s, Nick of Time by Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan’s odd Under the Red Sky). But no matter how you know them, there’s little to deny their place as one of the funniest, funkiest bands that time almost forgot.The core of Was (Not Was) – David on keyboards, Don on bass and the dual soul vocals of Harry Bowens and Sweet Pea Atkinson – was as smooth, funky and soulful as they come. ...”
 

Colonialism In And Of Board Games

 

“It wasn’t until much later in my life that I started to see these biases and flawed representations pop up in games — having studied anthropology definitely pushed me in that direction and having the chance to discuss games at conventions and on social media really allowed me to start thinking more critically about themes like colonialism. Digging into this a little more, it’s fascinating to consider the way we engage with games and their representation of our world and our history. We can learn as we play — about values, about history, about ourselves. The intersection of these things is particularly relevant when considering games with thematic overtones of colonialism. What are the values we’re experiencing with games that represent this? Whose history are we encountering? ...”

The Holy Grail - Jack Spicer (1962)

The Holy Grail was originally published 50 years ago by White Rabbit Press. It is composed of seven sections, each containing seven poems. Changing narrators, shifting time periods, the author’s use of jokes and lapsus linguae and folk songs, all conspire to create what Spicer called ‘an uncomfortable music.’ His friend Robin Blaser said it was more like a ‘cubist painting where you can’t get through the fucking frame.’ Sit down with the book and listen to the recording of Spicer himself reading it aloud on PennSound. Now, do that over and over until you feel a timeworm in your chest. ...”

Watching my name go by - Graffiti Documentary (1976)

 
“In 1974 Norman Mailer wrote an essay for Esquire called ‘The Faith of Graffiti‘—a gripping and sympathetic investigation on the defacement of public and private property as an urban art movement of complex and fascinating depth. Mailer’s work eventually produced two collaborative pictorial books—The Faith of Graffiti and Watching My Name Go By. The beauty of tagging and graffiti art is almost taken for granted today, especially since artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat legitimized the genre to the art world in both its unlawful execution and its distinctive aesthetic, but Mailer was doing something new by recording the phenomenon as an organic outpouring of artistic expression, and this short 1976 documentary—also named ‘Watching My Name Go By’—is equally open-minded in its portrayal of graffiti artists and their critics. ...”

​The True Value of Gold

 
“Daniel Alves has seen it all, done it all. He has won league titles in three countries, picked up nine cups, conquered Europe with his club and South America with his country. He has 41 major honors to his name, officially making him the most decorated player in history. But still, when André Jardine asked him to take on one last job, his eyes lit up. Jardine, the manager of Brazil’s Olympic men’s soccer team, had framed his pitch smartly. ....”

​The Mournfulness of Cities

Edward Hopper, Hotel Window (1955)

“I am puzzled by the mournfulness of cities. I suppose I mean American cities mostly—dense and vertical and relatively sudden. All piled up in fullest possible distinction from surroundings, from our flat and grassy origins, the migratory blur from which the self, itself, would seem to have emerged into the emptiness, the kindergarten-landscape gap between the earth and sky. I’m puzzled, especially, by what seems to me the ease of it, the automatic, fundamental, even corny quality of mournfulness in cities, so built into us, so preadapted for somehow, that even camped out there on the savannah, long before we dreamed of cities, I imagine we should probably have had a premonition, dreamed the sound of lonely saxophones on fire escapes. What’s mourned is hard to say. Not that the mourner needs to know. It seems so basic. One refers to certain Edward Hopper paintings—people gazing out of windows right at sunset or late at night. They’ve no idea. ...”

The John Wright Trio ‎– South Side Soul (1960)

 
The life of John Wright, the Chicago jazz pianist they call “South Side Soul" - “Chicago jazz pianist John Wright earned his reputation with a string of LPs for the Prestige label in the early 60s—his 1960 debut made such an impression that its title, South Side Soul, remains his nickname to this day. His discography has been sparse since then, but he's never stopped playing for long, and he's just had an especially eventful week. On Friday, August 29, Wright spoke at the ceremony to formally designate the 3800 block of South Prairie ‘Dinah Washington Way,’ reminiscing about his interactions with the great singer in the 1950s. ...”

The Trauma of the Civil War Lives On in Faulkner’s Fiction

 
“In July, at his memorial service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the Honorable John Lewis was eulogized by three presidents. The sitting president was not among them. His absence was yet another assertion of the anti-Black hostility and xenophobia fouling the polity with renewed vigor. We lament the current social climate as though it were anomalous, an outbreak of pestilence, when in reality these iniquities reverberate through our American centuries. We need a prophet — a voice to call up the nation’s oldest stories, a reckoning with what was so that we might understand what is. In The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, part literary biography, part Civil War history, Michael Gorra presents a cogent case for Faulkner as one such prophet. ...”
2011 September: Southern Gothic, 2014 February: William Faulkner, 2015 October: William Faulkner Draws Maps of Yoknapatawpha County, the Fictional Home of His Great Novels, 2015 November: Interviews William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12, 2016 April: Absalom, Absalom!! (1936), 2016 May: The Sound and the Fury (1929), 2016 October: The Snopes Trilogy (1940, 1957, 1959), 2016 December: Light in August (1932), 2017 February: As I Lay Dying (1930), 2017 June: The Wild Palms (1939), 2017 August: Sanctuary (1931). 2017 September: The Unvanquished (1938), 2017 October: 20 Pieces of Writing Advice from William Faulkner, 2017 November: Yoknapatawpha County, 2018 February: Go Down, Moses (1942), 2018 June: Flags in the Dust (1973), 2019 May: Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950), 2019 October: Sartoris (1929), 2020 August: Down Through the Faulkner Bloodline, Pride and Racial Guilt Commingled

Charlotte Corday

 
Charlotte Corday (c. 1860), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes

Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d'Armont (27 July 1768 – 17 July 1793), known as Charlotte Corday, was a figure of the French Revolution. In 1793, she was executed by guillotine for the assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was in part responsible for the more radical course the Revolution had taken through his role as a politician and journalist. Marat had played a substantial role in the political purge of the Girondins, with whom Corday sympathized. His murder was depicted in the painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David, which shows Marat's dead body after Corday had stabbed him in his medicinal bath. In 1847, writer Alphonse de Lamartine gave Corday the posthumous nickname l'ange de l'assassinat (the Angel of Assassination). ...”

 
Charlotte Corday being conducted to her execution, by Arturo Michelena (1889); the warden carries the red blouse worn by Corday and the painter Hauer stands at the right.

​Jazzman Records reissues Ron Everett’s 1977 obscure soul jazz holy grail ‘Glitter of The City’

 
“One can make the argument, that the term ‘Holy Grail’ is sometimes used a bit too loosely, however that certainly isn’t the case when applied to Ron Everett’s 1977 obscure soul jazz masterpiece Glitter Of The City. Originally self-released in 1977 on a shoestring budget, UK’s Jazzman Records has recently reissued the essential recording as a part of it’s ongoing superb Jazzman Holy Grail series. Originally recorded as a seven-track album and circulated in small quantities among the Philadelphia region, this incredible recording spans a lot of territory, from soulful jazz grooves and blues, to spiritual jazz and Latin rhythms. ...”

Fela Kuti and Afrika '70 -"I Go Shout Plenty"/"Why Black Man Dey Suffer"

 
“...  ‘I Go Shout Plenty’ was recorded in late 1976 or January 1977, but was not released until 1986, as the title track of an album which also included ‘Why Black Man Dey Suffer.’ The release was delayed for so long because the master tape was among the unissued recordings caught up in the aftermath of the Nigerian army’s destruction of Kalakuta Republic in February 1977. Decca Afrodisia, fearful of regime reprisals if it offered support to Fela, halted the release of any Afrika 70 record it thought the regime might deem “seditious.” In the lyric, Fela asserts his right to raise his voice in opposition to the Nigerian authorities. ‘I Go Shout Plenty’ is a typically fiery, mid-period Afrika 70 track. ...”

The Louvre’s Art Sleuth Is on the Hunt for Looted Paintings

 
Emmanuelle Polack at the center in the Louvre which houses important materials for her research.

“PARIS — In a frenzied, four-day auction in the grand hall of the Savoy Hotel in Nice in June 1942, buyers bid on paintings, sculptures and drawings from ‘the cabinet of a Parisian art lover.’ Among the 445 pieces for sale were works by Degas, Delacroix, Renoir and Rodin. The administrator monitoring the sale, appointed by the French collaborationist Vichy regime, and René Huyghe, a paintings curator at the Louvre, knew the real identity of the art lover: Armand Isaac Dorville, a successful Parisian lawyer. They also knew that he was Jewish. ... The full history of the Dorville auction might have remained secret had it not been for Emmanuelle Polack, a 56-year-old art historian and archival sleuth. The key to her success in discovering the provenance of works that suspiciously changed hands during the Nazi Occupation was to follow the money. ...”

William S. Burroughs - A Word Is a Word Is a Collage (1965)

 
Experimental Artworks - Kunsthalle Vienna

"... Voice dry as the voice of T.S. Eliot droning from a recording, accent still American after years away from America. Appearance as anonymous as a bank clerk’s, forgettable as a bank robber. Writer of books compared with Kafka, Joyce, and dirty postcards. His bruised readers nurse a sense of outrage and assault after trips through the Burroughs landscape, a desert of screams. All the time he talks he moves around the room, or groping for cigarettes, or gesturing with nervous hands. He lines the cigarette pack up with invisible parallels, rearranges the ash pattern in the ash tray. His work is sentences from newspapers, conversations, other authors, the title of something he is reading, things he hears, what is happening around him; it all makes a sort of collage. ...”

 
Collage #6 - Tangiers, top; possibly Ahmed Yacoubi (?), bottom.  Silver gelatin print and scotch tape.

​Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited

 
The Fortress of Königstein from the North, 1756–8 

“Sharply silhouetted against a pale evening sky is the Saxon fortress of Königstein.  Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780) painted this historic site – a stronghold located approximately 25 miles south-east of Dresden, in the picturesque Elbe valley –not just once, but five times. In this exhibition we reunite these five monumental views, which includes our recently acquired view from the north, for the first time in more than 250 years. ...”

Courtyard with the Brunnenhaus, 1756–8

Joni Mitchell - The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Demos

 
“This is a repost, if you downloaded originally from here this is the same version. If you have downloaded this from elsewhere, check you have this upgraded version as it is superior quality compared to previous editions. These unreleased demos and working versions appeared in a radically different finished form on the Hissing Of Summer Lawns released in November 1975. On the album Joni had continued her change in musical direction begun on Court And Spark (1974), away from her folk stylings towards jazz and what we would now label world music. ...”

​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. ...”

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. ...”

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. ...”

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. ...”

​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. ...”

​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. ...”
 
A coffee house in 17th-century London.