Strat-O-Matic Baseball
Dazzling Doubles for Compromised Skies
“The sky is broken. For weeks now, Western and Canadian wildfires have released a pall of smoke that blankets both countries. July 8th was the last smoke-free night at my observing site in northeastern Minnesota. Daytime skies are generally pale blue, with nights starved of stars. Often, the limiting magnitude is 2 or 3. For many, smoke from wildfires has transformed summer nights, blotting out stars and familiar deep-sky sights. But through it all, double stars keep on shining. Because of constant smoke I've had to change up my observing from comets and deep-sky to brighter fare. Among the astronomical objects least affected by wildfires and haze are double stars. ...”
Grupo de Orfeu
W - José de Almada Negreiros, An artist to discover: José de Almada Negreiros, José de Almada Negreiros
[PDF] World War I and the Arts: The “Geração de O r p h e u ” and the Emergence of a Cosmopolitan Avant-Garde
2008 March: Fernando Pessoa, 2012 October: The Book of Disquiet, 2012 November: Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, 2014 May: Aspects by Fernando Pessoa, 2016 March: Passoa's Trunk - 13+ ways of looking at a poem, 2017 September: Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act, 2020 February: Strange Music Of Silence: Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet
‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins.
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: ‘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, 2021 July: Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol
Sylvia Plath’s Tarot Cards
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, 2021 June: The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962
Manhattan Egos · Sonny Simmons (1969)
The 1916 stunt that made Nathan’s Famous a Coney Island hot dog icon
“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. ...”
2009 April: Coney Island, 2010 July: Nathan's Famous, 2011 March: "An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders", Owen Smith, 2013 August: Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze, 2013 October: Last Days of Summer at Coney Island, 2014 July: Coney Island - Directors: Steve Siegel and Phil Buehler (1973), 2015 May: The Case for Riding the Subway to the Last Stop, 2016 December: Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, 2017 August: Here's What Coney Island Looks Like In The Empty Pre-Dawn Hours, 2019 August: Pierless
I will walk 500 miles … on an art trail along the Suffolk and Essex coasts
Was (Not Was) - What Up Dog? (1988)
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)
2007 November: Jack Spicer, 2010 February: mad cartographer (PoemTalk #28), 2010 April: Manroot and Acts, 2011 January: 5 Poems by Jack Spicer, 2012 July: The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, 2015 January: 'Absolutely temporary': Spicer, Burgess, and the ephemerality of coterie, 2015 March: San Francisco Renaissance
Watching my name go by - Graffiti Documentary (1976)
The True Value of Gold
The Mournfulness of Cities
“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. ...”
2008 July: Edward Hopper, 2010 October: Finding Nighthawks, 2010 December: Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, 2012 Wednesday: Through Edward Hopper's eyes: in search of an artist's seaside inspiration, 2013 July: Hopper Drawing, 2014 May: INTERVIEW: “An Interview with Edward Hopper, June 17, 1959″., 2014 September: How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks, 2015 February: Edward Hopper's New York: A Walking Tour, 2015 September: Edward Hopper life and works, 2016 May: "Night Windows," 1928, 2016 July: Sunday (1926), 2016 September: Drug Store (1927), 2018 January: Seven A.M. (1948), 2018 February: Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun, 2019 August: Pennsylvania Coal Town (1947), 2020 January: Queensborough Bridge, 1913
The John Wright Trio – South Side Soul (1960)
The Trauma of the Civil War Lives On in Faulkner’s Fiction
Charlotte Corday
“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). ...”
2014 February: French Revolution Digital Archive, 2015 July: A Guide to the French Revolution, 2016 April: Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France, 2017 March: Paris Commune 1871, 2018 February: Flash Mob: Revolution, Lightning, and the People’s Will, 2020 February: The French Rural Revolution 1789-1793, 2021 June: Sans-culottes
Jazzman Records reissues Ron Everett’s 1977 obscure soul jazz holy grail ‘Glitter of The City’
Fela Kuti and Afrika '70 -"I Go Shout Plenty"/"Why Black Man Dey Suffer"
The Louvre’s Art Sleuth Is on the Hunt for Looted Paintings
“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)
"... 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. ...”
2009 May: Cut-up technique - 1, 2010 March: Cut-up technique, 2010 December: The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag, 2014 February: William Burroughs at 100, 2014 September: The Ticket That Exploded, 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2015 June: The Electronic Revolution (1971), 2015 August: Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914 – 2014, 2015 December: Destroy All Rational Thought, 2016 January: Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs, 2016 June: Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1981), 2016 September: # 1 – A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 2016 December: #6 – Call Me Burroughs LP, 2017 January: A Visit to William S. Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Summer, 1958, 2017 December: The Nova Trilogy (The Cut-up Trilogy), 2018 September: Material - The Road to the Western Lands (1998), 2019 March: Insect Trust Gazette (1964 / 1968), 2020 June: Broadsides - William S. Burroughs Collecting
Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited
“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. ...”
Joni Mitchell - The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Demos
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, 2021 June: 50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’
Basketball Is Nothing Without Net
“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. ...”