“On July 18, Brytney Cobia, a physician in Birmingham, Alabama, took to Facebook to talk about caring for Covid-19 patients. ‘One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine,’ Cobia wrote. ‘I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.’ Cobia’s post, which has since been shared 16,000 times on the social platform and amplified in local and national news outlets, proved to be an early entry in a grisly new genre of pro-vax deathbed confessions from the unvaccinated, where the dying admit their mistakes and beg others not to repeat them. ...”
The Chilling Popularity of Anti-Vax Deathbed Videos
Art Zoyd - 44 1/2 : Live and Unreleased Works (2017)
2015 September: Rock in Opposition Festival 2015
“I Would Not Take Prisoners.” Tolstoy’s Case Against Making War Humane
“It would take Tolstoy some time to sound the alarm that humanitarianism could entrench war. On the way to doing so, he had one of his most famous characters embrace the inverse proposition: brutality can make it rare.“One thing I would do if I had the power,’ Prince Andrei, the debonair and reflective leading man of War and Peace, declares, ‘I would not take prisoners.’ It comes to the hero as an epiphany: if in battle an enemy soldier were captured, or if he laid down his arms and surrendered, it should not save him from death. No one today thinks it is permissible to kill enemies in war summarily when they are captured or surrender. In fact, to do so is today a gross war crime. ...”
2019 July: War & Peace (TV 2016)
What Comes After - Takeyuki Hakozaki (2021)
Norman Seeff: Photographing the Invisible
“’What is the nature of change and healing in the creative process? What is invisible in us?’ muses Norman Seeff. ‘Photograph that.’ Seeff has created some of the most recognizable images of iconic innovators in music and pop culture across the past five decades, and this week, a monumental selection of new prints of classic works goes on view in Los Angeles. But as his Sessions Project video series and nascent Power and Passion to Create foundation make clear, in some ways, his truer work exists on a higher plane that transcends portraiture to touch on the very essence of human creativity. ...”
The abolitionist history of a little house on Riverside Drive
“When Berenice Abbott photographed 857 Riverside Drive near 160th Street in 1937, the small, wood-frame house in today’s Washington Heights was a charming relic from New York’s antebellum era. Built in 1851 in the Italianate style, it boasted clapboard siding, wood shutters, a wraparound porch with decorative trim, and a roof topped with an octagon-shaped cupola. The cupola must have allowed for gorgeous views of the Hudson River in the unspoiled countryside of uptown Manhattan. Today, number 857 retains little of its original beauty. ...”
Stages on Life's Way - Søren Kierkegaard (1845)
2011 July: Søren Kierkegaard, 2013 April: Repetition (1843), 2013 December: The Quotable Kierkegaard, 2014 October: Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard (1843), 2014 December: The Dark Knight of Faith - Existential Comics, 2015 July: I still love Kierkegaard, 2015 October: The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 2016 October: Cruel intentions, 2017 July: Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, 2018 January: Either/Or (1843), 2018 November: The Seducer’s Diary (1843), 2020 November: W. H. Auden - The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952), 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard
A World Cup Every Two Years? Why?
“This is soccer’s age of the Big Idea. There is an incessant, unrelenting flow of Big Ideas, ones of such scale and scope that they have to be capitalized, from all corners of the game: from individuals and groups, from clubs and from leagues, from the back of cigarette packets and from all manner of crumpled napkins. The Video Assistant Referee system was a Big Idea. Expanding the World Cup to 48 teams was a Big Idea. Project Big Picture, the plan to redraw how the Premier League worked, was a Big Idea. The Super League was the Biggest Idea of them all — perhaps, in hindsight, it was, in fact, too Big an Idea — an Idea so Big that it could generate, in the brief idealism of its backlash, more Big Ideas still, as the death of a star sends matter hurtling all across the galaxy. …”
Earth, Wind And Fire: An Interview With Annea Lockwood
“This begins with a love story. New Zealand-born composer Annea Lockwood’s most recent composition ‘For Ruth’ is a reply to a love letter on tape her late partner Ruth Anderson made her in 1974, titled ‘Conversations ‘74’. In ‘For Ruth’, their affectionate conversational fragments, loving affirmations and the bubbling laughter of two people giddy for one another are embraced by field recordings of rich birdsong, grumbling frogs and passing cars, as well as resonant vocal intonations, which sound like the tintinnabulation of struck metal. The few complete sentences that surface contain an exchange that is a sort of found poetry on the feeling that the world has become whole through partnership with another person. ...”
2017 March: Source: Music of the Avant Garde, 1966-1974, 2019 April: The Sensual Sound Studies of Annea Lockwood
Harold Budd - Abandoned Cities (1982)
2018 February: Ambient drifting in London
William Blake’s 102 Illustrations of The Divine Comedy Collected in a Beautiful Book from Taschen
2009 April: William Blake, 2010 December: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 2011 June: The Ghost of a Flea, 2012 August: Isaac Newton (1795), 2015 November: America a Prophecy (1793), 2019 May: The Notebook of William Blake, 2019 October: ‘To Particularize Is the Alone Distinction of Merit’: Blake’s Visionary Imagination
A Household of Minor Things: The Collections of Robert Duncan and Jess
2008 March: Robert Duncan, 1919-1988, 2011 May: Robert Duncan: May 18, 1959, 2012 January: Ten Poems, 1940 to 1980, 2013 May: An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, 2017 January: Robert Duncan's notes on Ron Silliman's 'Opening'
Auditions: Field Recordings as Otherly Zones of Entanglement
“In recent decades, field recording has come into sharp focus as a rapidly evolving creative practice within the canon of sound arts. Its proliferation heralds an opening up to notions of place, environment, non-anthropic listening, divergent cultural traditions, bio-acoustics, and a curiosity towards the act of being present to our audition in time and in space. ...”
20 NYC subway stations with show-stopping tile art
“Subway stations don’t need colorful mosaics or installations by famous artists to have a distinctive style—but those things do give commuters something lovely to look at while waiting for a train to show up. And New York’s transit system doesn’t disappoint, particularly if you’re the sort of person who pays attention to the intricacies of tile station markers, or the individual pieces of a mosaic mural. In fact, the city’s subway stations are an excellent showcase for that sort of craftsmanship, whether it’s a 110-year-old bas-relief of a beaver, or a brand-new mosaic made up of ceramic tile. ...”
Jim Jarmusch’s Collages
2014 October: Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side, 2015 December: Broken Flowers - Jim Jarmusch (2005).,2016 October: An Immersive Audio Tour of the East Village’s Famed Poetry Scene, Narrated by Jim Jarmusch, 2016 July: The Philosophy of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic Persona, 2016 December: Jim Jarmusch Lists His Favorite Poets: Dante, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery & More, 2017 December: Paterson (2016)
Algonquin Round Table
“The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of ‘The Vicious Circle’, as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay, and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country. Daily association with each other, both at the luncheons and outside of them, inspired members of the Circle to collaborate creatively. ... Although some of their contemporaries, and later in life even some of its members, disparaged the group, its reputation has endured long after its dissolution. ...”
2014 August: Dorothy Parker
Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation
The Sibley Guide to Birds
2008 September: Birds, 2008 June: Bird Songs, 2017 April: Of a Feather, 2017 June: Bird Sounds, 2017 July: Beautifully Designed Tiny Houses… For Birds, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 March: She Invented a Board Game With Scientific Integrity. It’s Taking Off., 2019 June: Where Birds Meet Art … After Dark, 2019 September: The Crisis for Birds Is a Crisis for Us All, 2019 October: A Quest to Protect the World’s Last Silent Places, 2020 June: Making a Garden That Welcomes the Birds, 2020 July: New Bird Song That ‘Went Viral’ Across This Species of Sparrow Was Tracked by Scientists For the First Time, 2020 August: How to Use Binoculars - Jason Ward, 2020 October: Get the Birds To Come To You, 2020 June: BirdNET, 2021 April: Birds by the Billions: A Guide to Spring’s Avian Parade, 2021 June: Leave This Wondrous Island to the Birds
A case of the Palestinian blues
“For Kareem Samara, a British-Palestinian multi-instrumentalist, composer, and sound artist, it was naseeb — meant to be. One day in 2020, American-Palestinian filmmaker and music producer Sama’an Ashrawi messaged asking him to play ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go,’ an American blues standard, on the oud. Ashrawi was curious what the blues would sound like in the quarter tones of the Middle Eastern instrument. Minutes later, Samara sent him a recording of the tune. ...”
Eluvium - Virga II (2021), Virga I (2019)
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson (1999)
Bill Evans - Live in Switzerland (1975)
YouTube: Live in Switzerland 1:18:00
2019 June: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 - Bill Evan (2005), 2019 November: Some Other Time (2016), 2020 November: Another Time: The Hilversum Concert (1968), 2021 February: Bill Evans Live in Munch Museum, Oslo (1966)
The Names Heard Long Ago – Jonathan Wilson
New York Stories: King of New York - Abel Ferrara (1990)
Criterion: Trailer (Video), amazon
YouTube: King Of New York by Abel Ferrara - TrailerRay Harryhausen | Titan of Cinema
The Alexandria Quartet: 'Love is every sort of conspiracy'
"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