Lee "Scratch" Perry

 

“Lee 'Scratch' Perry OD (born Rainford Hugh Perry; 20 March 1936 – 29 August 2021) was a Jamaican record producer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks. ... In 1973, Perry built a studio in his back yard, the Black Ark, to have more control over his productions and continued to produce notable musicians such as Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Byles, Junior Murvin, the Heptones, the Congos, and Max Romeo. He also started the Black Art label, on which many of the productions from the studio appeared. With his own studio at his disposal, Perry's productions became more lavish, as the energetic producer was able to spend as much time as he wanted on the music he produced. Virtually everything Perry recorded in The Black Ark was done using basic recording equipment; through sonic sleight-of-hand, Perry made it sound unique. ...”

Wikipedia

Guardian: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry obituary

NY Times: Lee (Scratch) Perry, Bob Marley Mentor and Reggae Innovator, Dies at 85

Spotify (Audio), amazon (Audio)

YouTube: DuB those crazy Baldheads [HD] Summerjam 2011, Sun Is Shining | Live 2019

YouTube: Lee Scratch Perry at work (Live)

YouTube: Disco Devil - 12" Version, Soul Rebel, Super Ape, Mash Down etc.

YouTube: Megaton Dub 1 (Full Album), Skanking With The Upsetter Rare Dubs 1971-1974, KUNG FU MEETS THE DRAGON  (Full Album) etc.

​MoMA’s Online Courses Let You Study Modern & Contemporary Art and Earn a Certificate

 

“The labels ‘modern art’ and ‘contemporary art’ don’t easily pull apart from one another. In a strictly historical sense, the former refers to art produced in the era we call modernity, beginning in the mid-19th century. And according to its etymology, the latter refers to art produced at the same time as something else: there is art ‘contemporary’ with, say, the Italian Renaissance, but also art ‘contemporary’ with our own lives. You’ll have a much clearer idea of this distinction — and of what people mean when they use the relevant terms today — if you take the Modern and Contemporary Art and Design Specialization, a set of courses from the Museum of Modern Art (aka MoMA) in New York. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

Porch Memories

 

“In the final stanza of his remarkable poem ‘Sunday Morning’ (1923), Wallace Stevens refers to Jerusalem (and more specifically the tomb of Christ) as, possibly, ‘the porch of spirits lingering’. It is such a strange formula that it has endured: the ‘porch of spirits’, the place where they ‘linger’ — this is any portal or threshold linking (and also separating) human beings from whatever gods or angels there might be. A lovely notion. But why did Stevens choose that homely word, and that most quotidian of sites: the porch? A ‘portico’ (whence the word derives) is something grand. But a ‘porch’? It is the postage-stamp façade of a temple (or is it a tomb?) pasted in miniature upon our domestic architecture. In a secular age, as Stevens understood so well, this is where our spirits, whatever they may be, are left to linger. Federica Soletta sits with them awhile in the affecting photo-essay that follows. ...”

The Public Domain Review

​The History of the New York License Plate

 

“There are more than eleven million vehicles registered in New York State, and New York City has about 12% of those (as of August 2021). Until 1901, these vehicles went unregistered, only identified by traits like their make, color and quality. New York Governor Benjamin Odell, Jr. crafted a bill that required vehicle registration and the initials of the vehicle’s owner to be posted on the back of the vehicle. This bill, passed in 1901, would lead to the birth of the license plate. ...”

untapped cities

W - Vehicle registration plates of New York

‘This is our final’: the team who led athletes’ escape from Afghanistan

Khalida Popal, former captain of the Afghanistan women’s team 

“‘We have been working like fingers on one hand, with different roles, and we came together as a big strong punch,’ says the former captain and one of the founders of the Afghanistan women’s national football team, Khalida Popal. She is talking about the small team that pulled off the mission to evacuate 100-200 Afghan athletes and a number of individuals connected to them from the Hamid Karzai international airport in Kabul. Across a two-week period those fingers worked tirelessly around the clock and across numerous time zones, tracking the real-time movements of the Taliban and military personnel on the ground to pull off what seemed completely impossible: to get a group of female football players, many teenagers, and a host of others, including family members, into the airport and on to planes. Who is this motley, but multitalented, crew and how did they manage to get so many out where many more failed? This is their story. …”

Guardian

​What John Sloan painted after “loafing about Madison Square”

 

“Ashcan painter John Sloan is the master of the city scene, infusing seemingly uneventful interactions with dense imagery and narration that presents a deeper story. ‘Recruiting in Union Square,’ from 1909, is a haunting example of this. But it took some lounging around another New York City park for Sloan to get the inspiration to capture the scene. ...”

Ephemeral New York

2009 August: John Sloan, 2011  November: American realism, 2012 December: Old New York, 2015 May: Spectator of Life, 2015 October: Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York, 1897-1917, 2015 October: Tenderloin, 2015 October: McSorley's Bar - John Sloan (1912), 2015 December: "Red Kimono on the Roof," 1912, 2016 January: “The Hell Hole,” 1917, 2016 February: Gloucester Days, 2016 March: “Hanging Clothes,” 1920, 2016 May: "Roof, Summer Night," 1906, 2016 October: "Spring Rain," 1912, 2016 October: "The Lafayette" (1927), 2016 December: The Old House at Home by Joseph Mitchell (April 1940), 2020 September: Elevated rails, rooftops, and McSorley’s: How painter John Sloan captured 20th-century Manhattan, 2021 February: A snowstorm on Broadway in the Theater District

Take The Power Back: Black Artist-Owned Labels

 

The Impressions perform on the NBC TV music show Hullabaloo in April 1965

“... After years of working in a profession that regularly ripped off artists for song rights, publishing, licensing and other monies, Cooke was the first major black artist to start his own independent record label. Cooke’s power move wasn’t only bold; it was a revolutionary DIY act. While artist-run record companies would later be called ‘vanity labels,’ for Sam Cooke and those he inspired – including Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, George Clinton and Prince – having a label was less about ego and more about controlling their music. ...”

Red Bull Music Academy (Video)

 

Prince

​Reissue Of The Week: Kling Klang's The Esthetik Of Destruction

 

“... Setting aside issues of legacy and redundancy, the one thing that unites all the disparate writers of manifestos is simply the desire to write a manifesto - that is, to attempt to impose your will on the future and render order, or a reordering, from chaos, tyranny or stagnation. Yet, as time passes, you begin to realise that the intention behind a manifesto is not just to gain future ground but also to recover something that has been lost or stolen, to go back to a path that was mistakenly abandoned. Often this comes as a return to childhood, to regain the curiosity, simplicity, hunger, and liberating possibility that is lost at some point during the 10,000 hours spent gaining expertise and the slow deadening creep that comes with it. The aim is to absorb then subvert; learning enough to know what to unlearn, as Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay of Can did with their former teacher the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, or Arthur Rimbaud did with the rules and forms of French poetry before he dismantled them. ...”

The Quietus (Video/Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

YouTube:  "Heavydale" (full)- awesome synth drone +drums

Russian Ark - Alexander Sokurov (2002)

 

“Russian Ark is a 2002 experimental historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. In Russian Ark, an unnamed narrator wanders through the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, and implies that he died in some horrible accident and is a ghost drifting through the palace. In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various periods in the city's 300-year history. He is accompanied by ‘the European’, who represents the Marquis de Custine, a 19th-century French traveler. The film was recorded entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum on 23 December 2001 using a one-take single 96-minute Steadicam sequence shot. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: FILM IN REVIEW; 'Russian Ark'

senses of cinema

amazon

YouTube: The Russian Ark Trailer, In One Breath | Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark (Making of) 45:12

YouTube: Russian Ark 1:39:28

2009 March: Aleksandr Sokurov

Sturgeon Moon by Nina MacLaughlin

 

“August, the year in its ripeness, when the shadows shift and the trees ache with green. It brings the Sturgeon Moon. Sturgeon, ancient bony-plated creature of lakes, rivers, and seas. A fish without scales, a fish without teeth, a fish that’s been swimming the depths of this earth for more than two hundred million years.A shark-finned rolling pin, dinosaurian, the type of specimen displayed in a case in a museum of natural history, this murk-dweller lives fifty to sixty years and can grow up to twelve feet long. The largest on record was twenty-four feet, the length of more than three queen-size beds head to toe. Though they swim down where it’s dim, they’re also known for flinging their big bodies up out of the water and splashing back down. No one knows why. Joy, I bet. ...”

The Paris Review

2021 May: What Color Is the Sky?, 2021 June: Strawberry Moon

New York’s Legendary Literary Hangouts

 

Simone de Beauvoi

“You might think of them as solitary creatures, furiously scribbling or typing alone, but as long as there have been writers in New York City, they have socialized together in an assortment of bars, restaurants, apartments and clubs. The Times began writing about these places in its very first issues. In 1910, it published an article lamenting ‘the passing of the literary haunts of New York,’ noting that many once-famous gathering spots were being razed as the city grew and modernized. ‘Number 19 West 24th is gone,’ the piece began. ‘At least the old 19 is gone,  and … no account has been made of the fact that it at one time housed the Author’s Club, and that its rakish stairs were somewhat worn away by the feet of Matthew Arnold, Whittier, Lowell and Field.’ ...”

NY Times

White Horse Tavern Established in 1880, this West Village bar was a prime literary hotspot in the 1950s.

​Black Film Archive

 

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

“Black Film Archive celebrates the rich, abundant history of Black cinema. We are an evolving archive dedicated to making historically and culturally significant films made from 1915 to 1979 about Black people accessible through a streaming guide with cultural context. ...”

Black Film Archive (Video)

 

Sweet Love, Bitter

End the Imperial Presidency

 

“Suppose President Biden came before Congress to announce that ending the war in Afghanistan was only the beginning. In recent years, the United States has used force on the ground or conducted strikes from the air in at least nine countries: not only Afghanistan, but also Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. These wars go on in part because one person wages them. Congress has abdicated its constitutional duty to determine whether, where and whom America should fight. Mr. Biden inherited this situation, but he need not perpetuate either the ongoing wars or the legal evasions that enable them. ...”

NY Times: Opinion

​FIFA, Deemed a Victim of Its Own Scandal, Will Share $200 Million Payout

 

“Even as top soccer officials were still being arrested as part of a sprawling corruption investigation in 2015, lawyers for the sport’s global governing body and U.S. prosecutors began to embrace an intriguing premise: The soccer organization, FIFA, and its affiliates were not only the hosts of the scheme, the thinking went, they were also its victims. For prosecutors, the notion distinguished between the hijackers and the hijacked: It held individuals accountable for their crimes but spared the organizations and the sport that they had defrauded. ...”

NY Times

W – Gianni Infantino

W – Sepp Blatter

DJ Kool Herc vs. Pete DJ Jones

 

“Back in the good old days of 1977 when gas lines were long and unemployment was high, there were two schools of DJs competing for Black and Latino audiences in New York City: the Pete DJ Jones crowd and the devout followers of DJ Kool Herc. One group played the popular music of the day for party-going adult audiences in clubs in downtown Manhattan. The other played raw funk and breakbeats for a rapidly growing, fanatic—almost cultlike—following of teenagers in rec centers and parks. Both sides had their devotees. One night in the Bronx, the two masters of the separate tribes clashed in a dark and crowded club on Mount Eden and Jerome Avenues called the Executive Playhouse. ...”

Wax Poetics (Video)

​Meditations in an Emergency - Frank O’Hara (1957)

 “... One of O’Hara’s few prose poems, the 1954 'Meditations in an Emergency' presents a headlong rush of conflicting emotions (triggered, it seems, by a recent break-up with a lover), as presented in a series of campy and comic aphorisms, exclamations, and observations. ... It’s a brave conclusion, but as the poem has made all too clear, ecstasy is impossible to maintain. Its downside is a terrible sense of emptiness, anxiety, and restlessness. ... Only art, in this scheme of things, can provide solace. Joan Mitchell’s work testifies to similar highs and lows, and to a comparable restlessness. ...”

Poetry Foundation

W - Meditations in an Emergency

BBC - Frank O’Hara: Poet of the Mad Men era

Mad Men, Frank O'Hara, and Our Moment of Crisis

[PDF] Meditations in an Emergency

amazon

2008 January: Frank O'Hara, 2010 February: USA: Poetry, 2010 October: Stones: Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara,  2011 October: City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara - Brad Gooch, 2012 December: USA: Poetry, Frank O'Hara (1966), 2013 June: A  Visual Footnote to O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”: New World Writing and The Poets of Ghana, 2013 March: Happy Birthday, Frank O’Hara: The Beloved Poet Reads His “Metaphysical Poem”, 2014 June: Remembering Frank O’Hara’s Apartments, 2014 August: Lunch Poems (1964), 2014 November: In Which The Elements of Disbelief Are Very Strong In The Morning, 2014 December: Hymns of St. Bridget & Other Writings, by Bill Berkson and Frank O’Hara, 2013 June: Cedar Tavern, 2016 April: Experiments with the New York School of Poets, 2016 October: Frank O’Hara’s “For Bob Rauschenberg,” on His Birthday

 

The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented

 

“Espresso is neither bean nor roast. It is a method of pressurized coffee brewing that ensures speedy delivery, and it has birthed a whole culture. Americans may be accustomed to camping out in cafes with their laptops for hours, but Italian coffee bars are fast-paced environments where customers buzz in for a quick pick me up, then right back out, no seat required. It’s the sort of efficiency the Father of the Modern Advertising Poster, Leonetto Cappiello, alluded to in his famous 1922 image for the Victoria Arduino machine (below). Let 21st-century coffee aficionados cultivate their Zenlike patience with slow pourovers. A hundred years ago, the goal was a quality product that the successful businessperson could enjoy without breaking stride. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2010 September: Espresso, 2013 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, 2021 July:  The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

Jean Cocteau - Orphic Trilogy

 

“Decadent, subversive, and bristling with artistic invention, the myth-born cinema of Jean Cocteau disturbs as much as it charms. Cocteau was the most versatile of artists in prewar Paris. Poet, novelist, playwrite, painter, celebrity, and maker of cinema—his many talents converged in bold, dreamlike films that continue to enthrall audiences around the world. In The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, and Testament of Orpheus, Cocteau utilizes the Orphic myth to explore the complex relationships between the artist and his creations, reality and the imagination. ...”

Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy at Norton Simon

W - The Blood of a Poet (1930), W - Orpheus (1950), W - Testament of Orpheus (1960)

The Blood of a Poet By Jean Cocteau, Orpheus By Jean Cocteau, Testament of Orpheus By Jean Cocteau (Essays)

Open Culture: Jean Cocteau’s Avante-Garde Film From 1930, The Blood of a Poet (Video)

YouTube: New trailer for Orphée, Le testament d'Orphée - Un peintre fait toujours son autoportrait, Le Testament d'Orphée (1959), Jean Cocteau

2009 March: Jean Cocteau, 2016 February: In Which Jean Cocteau Gives Elan To This Milieu, 2021 January: Flair Magazine: The Short-Lived, Highly-Influential Magazine That Still Inspires Designers Today (1950)

 

Testament of Orpheus (1960) - Jean Cocteau

​Twenty Years After 9/11, Are We Any Smarter?

 

“On a warm June evening in downtown Manhattan, tourists hoping to visit the National September 11 Memorial & Museum are disappointed. The spot is closed after 5 p.m., a security guard repeats patiently to visitors. From behind a rope, the tourists look at the spaces where the Twin Towers used to be. The names of the 2,977 people killed by Al Qaeda in September 2001 are etched into bronze parapets surrounding two pools. Water flows down 30 feet in clear streams over the walls into the pools. During the day, if you are close enough to the water, the endless noise of the city is drowned out. But on nights like this one, New York’s cacophony makes itself heard here. If you close your eyes, it doesn’t sound very different than it did before the terrorists devastated the buildings. This September marks the twentieth anniversary of the attacks. ...”

New Republic (Audio)

A U.S. Marine was trapped in a building in Fallujah, Iraq, during fighting in November 2004.

​Vintage store signs from the 1970s live on in Astoria

 “Astoria is known for its low-key neighborhood vibe, Greek food, beer gardens….and some very atmospheric vintage store signs on the main drag of 31st Street that look time-capsuled from the 1960s and 1970s. It’s hard to beat this charming, no-frills sign from Rose and Joe’s, a traditional Italian bakery (and pizza place). The bakery has been at this address since the 1970s; previously it operated on the corner of 31st Street and Ditmars, per queensscene.com. ... La Guli Pastry Shop is another stunner: the classy cursive lettering, slightly torn fabric awning, the curves in the display windows. ...”

Ephemeral New York

LKJ in Dub - Linton Kwesi Johnson (1980)

 

“LKJ in Dub is an album by the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, released in 1980 on Island Records. It was produced by Dennis Bovell (credited as Blackbeard). It contains dub versions of tracks from the two previous LKJ albums, Forces of Victory and Bass Culture. Critical reception Trouser Press called the album ‘an interesting and successful example of dub technique.’ The New York Times compared the album to Bovell's recent I Wah Dub, calling LKJ in Dub ‘a less gimmicky, more emotionally satisfying piece of work.’ The Boston Globe wrote that ‘there are some nice grooves here, but with no voice to sing, no soloing instruments, not even a stray Frippertronic to hang onto, it's hard to recommend this album.’ ...”

Wikipedia

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: LKJ in Dub Vol.1 30:26

Unmuzzled OX - Michael Andre

 

“When the first plane hit the World Trade Center I was a few blocks away, xeroxing John Cage’s various contributions to Unmuzzled OX. The xerox joint shook. ... Cage is complicated and I had to concentrate. I didn’t give the first explosion another thought until the second plane hit. I had an 11:00 a.m. appointment with Colette that morning. Her art had illustrated the last issue of Unmuzzled OX, an opera libretto by Carlos Goldoni translated by W. H. Auden. We were going to sign and number an edition of 100. ...”

From a Secret Location

W - Unmuzzled OX

W - Michael Andre

​Wonder & Waveform: Hannah Peel's Favourite Albums

 

“It perhaps speaks to the nature of the times that Hannah Peel’s newest album had a somewhat different gestation to much of the work that has made up the many highs of her pleasingly non-conformist career. Film scores, super-groups, brass bands, working with bona fide musical national treasures – even the potential disaster of picking up with yours truly for our Chalkhill Blue collaboration. But Fir Wave comes out of a more singular enterprise, starting life as a project based on the re-interpretation of the library music label KPM’s 1972 album KPM 1000 series: Electrosonic, which featured one of Peel’s heroes in Delia Derbyshire. ...”

The Quietus (Video)

Hannah Peel: "Delia Derbyshire would be completely in awe of all the synthesizers and recording technology we have now” (Video)

W - Hannah Peel

Bandcamp (Audio)

Soundcloud (Audio)

YouTube: Emergence In Nature (Official Video)

J.M.W. Turner - Sun Rising Through Vapour, Before 1807

 

“It’s the dawning of a new day and the sun is just breaking through a veil of sea mist. You can look at it without hurting your eyes – of course you can, it’s a painting, but in some of Turner’s works that searing dot really does seem to burn your retina. Here, the world is gentle, the sea so still it holds reflections of boats and light. But this is most of all a painting of people. They gather and go about their morning business in one of his most down to earth scenes, a joyous memory of the seaside as a working world.“

National Gallery

November 2007: J. M. W. Turner, 2009 April: Turner & Italy, 2011 June: J. M. W. Turner - 1, 2014 June: In Which We Find His Theory Of Color Implausible, 2014 September: The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free, 2015 May: Mr. Turner (2014), 2018 November: The Slave Ship (1840), 2018 December: Turner and Constable: The Inhabited Landscape, 2020 September: The Fighting Temeraire  (1838)

Oranges - Jordan Kisner

 

“When I undertook this column, I had the notion that I would be writing about, I don’t know, heredity. Like: I went to a healing circle in south Brooklyn. After a few days of being asked to think about the particular ways we might need to be healed, as well as the particular ways we might offer healing to other people, we were taken into a small, dark room in groups of four or five and told to sit on stools and close our eyes. The two women leading the healing circle told us they would be drawing initiatory symbols in the air over our heads and invoking various energies on our behalf. They instructed us to keep our eyes closed and to anticipate that we might receive a vision of a spirit that would guide us in this healing journey. ...”

The Paris Review, The Paris Review: Category Archives

Jordan Kisner - Thin Places

Jordan Kisner on Obsession Versus Possession in Thin Places

NY Times - Blurred Lines: An Essayist’s Dispatches on Slippery States of Being

amazon

Jordan Kisner’s “Thin Places: Essays From in Between” touches on religion and atheism, race, class, assimilation and cultural appropriation.

​10 Tracks and Alliances

 

“When Sounds of Sisso was released in June 2017, the global electronic music scene briefly stopped in its tracks. The compilation shed light on a previously little-known music genre from Tanzania, singeli, which is characterized by wild rhythmic salvoes, hysteric melodies, the grotesque use of sound effects, and raw lyric fragments in Swahili – and all this happens at breakneck tempos. The compilation can be found in the release catalogue of the Ugandan collective Nyege Nyege, founded by the expatriates Arlen Dilsizian and Derek Debru, and the same is true for Sounds of Pamoja, its unofficial sequel recently announced to be released in the fall. ...”

Various Artists (Video/Audio)

The Foghorn’s Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast - Jennifer Lucy Allan

 

“It seems appropriate that the daughter of the man who is said to have invented the foghorn was christened Euphemia, and that her mother died shortly after giving birth. The name means ‘well-spoken’ (or ‘well-spoken of’) in a dead language, and the story is tinged with grief right from the start. That combination pretty much sums up the foghorn: a device both famed for its emotionally resonant seaside dirges and synonymous with a certain breed of foreboding moodiness. Jennifer Lucy Allan shines light into the mist, and the mist of history alike, in a new book that traces the roughly 170 year arc of the foghorn’s existence: from innovative safety measure to ambivalently received coastal sentinel to what it is today, a fading cultural heirloom. ...”

disquiet

Guardian: The Foghorn’s Lament by Jennifer Lucy Allan review – a whole world in a sound

“The Foghorn’s Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast” (Video)

W - Foghorn

amazon

YouTube: Sounding the Sumburgh Foghorn

Cape Wrath lighthouse foghorn, Sutherland, Scotland

​Jupiter Dazzles at Opposition on August 20th

 

A single moon shadow transit Jupiter is exciting enough, but on August 15, 2021, there was a rare triple transit of Europa (II), Ganymede (III), and Callisto (IV) paired with a double shadow transit of Ganymede and Europa. In addition, Ganymede occulted Europa while Io appeared in partial eclipse (center frame) off the planet's limb. The prominent, pale pink vortex dubbed Oval BA is also shown. North is up and "s" indicates shadow. For more images click the link. 

“Jupiter comes to opposition on August 20th, when it will shine brighter and closer than at any other time this year. With nights starting earlier and cooler temperatures arriving, there’s no better time to make the most of the planet. Roughly every 13 months Earth comes from behind and passes Jupiter in a planetary horse race that's been going on for billions of years. And the prize? Spectacular views of the solar system's largest planet from dusk till dawn. ...”

Sky & Telescope

Blue Moon, Perseids Shower, Jupiter-Saturn Opposition, & Other Exciting Events To See This Month.

W - Perseids, W - Perseus

YouTube: What's Up: August 2021 Skywatching Tips from NASA

Perseus Freeing Andromeda by Piero di Cosimo (c. 1515)