Criterion: Trailer (Video), amazon
YouTube: King Of New York by Abel Ferrara - TrailerNew York Stories: King of New York - Abel Ferrara (1990)
Ray Harryhausen | Titan of Cinema
“Film special effects superstar Ray Harryhausen helped elevate stop motion animation to an art. His innovative and inspiring films, from the 1950s onwards, changed the face of modern movie making forever. This is the largest and widest-ranging exhibition of Ray Harryhausen’s work ever seen, with newly restored and previously unseen material from his incredible archive. Ray Harryhausen's work included the films Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad films of the 1950s and 1970s, One Million Years B.C. and Mighty Joe Young. He inspired a generation of filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, Aardman Animations, Tim Burton, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, and his influence on blockbuster cinema can be felt to this day. ...”
The Alexandria Quartet: 'Love is every sort of conspiracy'
Alexandria Castle, Egypt
"Lawrence Durrell claimed that the four books of The Alexandria Quartet were 'an investigation of modern love'. It's possible to take that idea at face value. Some have even used it as a stick with which to beat him. Notably, his Guardian obituarist (writing in 1990, at a time when Durrell's reputation was possibly at its lowest ebb) said 'a harsh judgment' of his masterpiece might be that it was 'a four-volume romantic novel written by a poet steeped in Freud and on nodding terms with Einstein'. ...”
2011 December: The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell, 2013 September: Villa that inspired Lawrence Durrell faces demolition, as Egypt allows heritage to crumble, 2014 August: Prospero’s Cell (1945), 2015 April: Bitter Lemons (1953–1956), 2015 May: Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence, 2016 July: Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), 2016 September: The Greek Islands, 2016 October: Justine (1957), 2017 February: Balthazar (1958), 2017 April: Mountolive (1958), 2017 May: Clea (1960), 2017 October: The Alexandria Quartet: 'Love is every sort of conspiracy', 2018 February: Pied Piper of Lovers (1935), Panic Spring (1937), 2020 April: The Alexandria Quartet: Mirrors and telescopes
Lawrence Durrell’s passport, with stamps for entry into Alexandria.
Faster Than Birds Can Fly | John Ashbery, Trevor Winkfield
“Trevor Winkfield has a small but intensely devoted following, and much has been written about this English painter who moved to New York City from London in 1969.As the editor of an important mimeograph magazine, Juillard, in the late 1960s, he became associated with poets and writers such as John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Harry Matthews, Ron Padgett, Larry Fagin, Charles North, Kenward Elmslie, and others connected to the New York School. In addition to collaborating with many of these writers, as well as providing inimitable designs for their books, he is the author of two marvelous collections, George Braque & Others: The Selected Writings of Trevor Winkfield, 1990-2009 (2014) and The Scissors’ Courtyard: Selected Writings, 1967-75 (1994), and the translator of a cornerstone text, How I Wrote Certain of My Books by Raymond Roussel, with an Introduction by John Ashbery, which was first published in 1977. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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 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. ...”
‘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. …”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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.’ ...”
White Horse Tavern Established in 1880, this West Village bar was a prime literary hotspot in the 1950s.
Black Film Archive
“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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
Meditations in an Emergency - Frank O’Hara (1957)
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. ...”
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. ...”
The Blood of a Poet By Jean Cocteau, Orpheus By Jean Cocteau, Testament of Orpheus By Jean Cocteau (Essays)
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. ...”
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
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.’ ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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