Revolt of the Delivery Workers
The Desolation Age - Beyond the Ghost (2021)
Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant
“As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march. The recipient was his F.B.I. handler. In the middle of an unfolding melee that shook a pillar of American democracy — the peaceful transfer of power — the bureau had an informant in the crowd, providing an inside glimpse of the action, according to confidential records obtained by The New York Times. In the informant’s version of events, the Proud Boys, famous for their street fights, were largely following a pro-Trump mob consumed by a herd mentality rather than carrying out any type of preplanned attack. ...”
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, 2021 July: ‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins.
The Internet Should Be a Public Good
“On October 1, the Internet will change and no one will notice. This invisible transformation will affect the all-important component that makes the Internet usable: the Domain Name System (DNS). When you type the name of a website into your browser, DNS is what converts that name into the string of numbers that specify the website’s actual location. Like a phone book, DNS matches names that are meaningful to us to numbers that aren’t.For years, the US government has controlled DNS. But in October, the system will become the responsibility of a Los Angeles-based nonprofit called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).ICANN has actually already been managing DNS since the late 1990s under a contract with the Commerce Department. ...”
Kawina, coups, and Sranan soul: a brief history of Surinamese music
“A culmination of political windfall has struck the country of Suriname in recent months. President Dési Bouterse, who had held office since 2010, was found guilty in July 2019 of the murder and execution of 15 political opponents in the aftermath of a 1982 military coup. ... Though no arrests have been made, Bouterse, the 74-year-old politician, faces a potential 20-year prison sentence. In celebration of this historic victory for the Surinamese people, and in celebration of the country’s original independence day from Dutch colonial rule on November 25, 1975, we want to look into Suriname’s volatile political history and explore how, through the trials of the centuries, Surinamese music has become a symbol of hope, strength, and perseverance. ...”
The Louvre Under Snow - Camille Pissarro (1902)
Fire Music: a history of the free jazz revolution, writer/director Tom Surgal
Harvest Moon - Nina MacLaughlin
“In 1957, the first satellite was launched into orbit around the earth. A gleaming metallic sphere about two feet in diameter with four long antennae, it had the look of a robot daddy longlegs. It weighed a hundred and eighty-four pounds and sped through space at about eighteen thousand miles per hour. After three months and more than fourteen hundred spins around this planet, it reentered earth’s atmosphere, blazing into flames. ...”
2021 May: What Color Is the Sky?, 2021 June: Strawberry Moon, 2021 August: Sturgeon Moon
‘The Village Detective’ decays into the avant-garde
2012 June: Bill Morrison, 2015 October: Decasia (2002), 2017 December: The Miners' Hymns (2011), 2018 January: The Dockworker's Dream (2016), 2018 October: Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) , 2018 November: Director Bill Morrison
When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien “Has Not Measured Up to Storytelling of the Highest Quality” (1961)
2010 January: The Lord of the Rings, 2018 January: An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More, 2019 January: The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More, 2020 January: Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve, 2020 August: The Complete Guide to Middle-earth - Robert Foster (1971)
John Ashbery: On The Inside Looking In by Roger Gilbert
"Some poets invite us into their homes. W. B. Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee and Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House figure prominently in their poetry while remaining coldly majestic edifices. Not so Gertrude Stein’s Paris apartment, whose rooms and objects spark the verbal fireworks of 'Tender Buttons,' or W. H. Auden’s Kirchstetten cottage, lovingly displayed from bathroom to attic in 'Thanksgiving for a Habitat.' James Merrill’s Stonington residence plays an intimate role in his work, especially the flame-colored salon in which the poet and his partner contacted the spirit world. ... John Ashbery is not exactly that kind of poet. His poems contain little in the way of conventional description. ...”
Cabaret Voltaire: Biography by John Bush
YouTube: Landslide (Live), Sensoria (Live), I Want You & Hells Home Live Sheffield 17.12.85, Live At "La Edad De Oro" (1983)
2009 December: Cabaret Voltaire, 2015 June: #7885 (Electropunk to Technopop 1978-1985), 2017 November: The Original Sound Of Sheffield '83 / '87 (2001), 2018 March: Micro-Phonies (1984)
Green Guerillas
Revisiting Some Texture
Toasting
“Toasting, chatting (rap in other parts of the Anglo Caribbean), or deejaying is the act of talking or chanting, usually in a monotone melody, over a rhythm or beat by a reggae deejay. Traditionally, the method of toasting originated from the griots of Caribbean calypso and mento traditions. The lyrics can either be improvised or pre-written. Toasting has been used in various African traditions, such as griots chanting over a drum beat, as well as in the United States and Jamaican music forms, such as ska, reggae, dancehall, and dub; it also exists in grime and hip hop coming out of the United Kingdom, which typically has a lot of Caribbean influence. Toasting is also often used in soca and bouyon music. The African American oral tradition of toasting, a mix of talking and chanting, influenced the development of MCing in US hip hop music. The combination of singing and toasting is known as singjaying. ...”
Everything you need to know about the Greenwich Village of 1961 in one map
Wrapped Arc de Triomphe Is Christo’s Fleeting Gift to Paris
“PARIS — For almost 60 years, the artist known as Christo dreamed of wrapping the Arc de Triomphe. As a young man, having fled communist Bulgaria, he would gaze at the monument from his tiny garret apartment. A photomontage dated 1962 shows the 164-foot-high arch crudely bundled up. Freedom trumped the sacred. He always wanted people to look again at what perhaps they did not see. Now, a little over a year after Christo’s death at the age of 84, ‘L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped’ is a reality. ...”
Smithsonian: The Arc de Triomphe Is Wrapped in Fabric, Just as the Late Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude Planned (Video)
2007 November: Christo & Jeanne-Claude, 2009 November: Jeanne-Claude, 2010 April: Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence, 2010 September: Christo and Jeanne-Claude - The Gates, 2010 November: Over The River - Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 2012 January: 5 Films About Christo & Jeanne-Claude, 2012 June: The Pont Neuf Wrapped, 2013 January: Wrapped Floor and Stairway, 1969, 2015 April: New Christo Work to Temporarily Bridge Italy’s Lake Iseo, 2015 October: Next From Christo: Art That Lets You Walk on Water, 2020 June: Christo, Artist Who Wrapped and Festooned on an Epic Scale, Dies at 84
Eleni Karaindrou’s film scores to the movies of Theo Angelopoulos
2020 December: The Weeping Meadow (2004)
Forza Pro - Video games, small-town Italian soccer by Brian Phillips
How a Woman Becomes a Piece of Furniture
“My grandmother collected perfume bottles, a seeming whimsy for a woman of such plainness and ferocity. I have three of them, given to me when she was still alive. They lived in a drawer and then later, in a decorative moment, on the bookshelf, where I have since placed them higher and higher out of reach, as my daughter has attempted to climb up to play with them, a slow-moving game between us, until now they are so high up as to be out of view. I tend not to be sentimental about objects, but I at least don’t want them to break, this being all I possess from my grandmother, anything else guarded by her surviving daughter, who, having remained unmarried, still lives alone in the house in which she was born, that being the way in my family. ...”
Asteroid Pallas Makes a Point in Pisces
Women Bathing in a Landscape, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, c 1630
No Depression - Uncle Tupelo (1990)
2011 July: Uncle Tupelo, 2013 August: March 16–20, 1992, 2014 January: Still Feel Gone - Uncle Tupelo (1991), 2015 June: There Was a Time: The History of Uncle Tupelo, 2020 June: Can’t Look Away: Musicians, Writers, and More Reflect on 30 Years of Uncle Tupelo’s ‘No Depression’
"Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" - Bruce Springsteen (1973)
New York Shorts: Daybreak Express (1953), Skyscraper (1960), Clotheslines (1981), The Bowery (1994)
“Daybreak Express, Directed by D. A. Pennebaker • 1953. Shot in 1953, though not completed until 1957, Daybreak Express was the first film D. A. Pennebaker made, a mad rush of images of New York City captured from a train and edited to the rhythm of Duke Ellington's song of the same name. A jazz aficionado, Pennebaker thought his career would continue along this path, making short films cut to songs. Skyscraper, Directed by Shirley Clarke and Willard Van Dyke • 1960. Nominated for an Academy Award, this live-action short film by director Shirley Clarke playfully chronicles the construction of the Tishman Building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Clarke referred to this work as a musical comedy. Clotheslines, Directed by Roberta Cantow • 1981. Through oral histories and images of clothes crisscrossing backyards, Roberta Cantow looks at laundry as a form of folk art, a fraught social signifier, and a medium for women to reflect on the joys, pains, and ambivalences of household chores. The Bowery, Directed by Sara Driver • 1994. Produced for the French television series POSTCARDS FROM NEW YORK, this short documentary captures the poetry of the city’s storied skid row before its gentrification.”
Criterion: Daybreak Express, Skyscraper, Clotheslines, The Bowery (Video)
W - Skyscraper (1959), The Art of the Chore: Roberta Cantow’s Feminist Classic Clotheslines, The Bowery - Luc Sante
YouTube: Daybreak Express (1953), “SKYSCRAPER” CONSTRUCTION OF 666 5TH AVE. NEW YORK CITY DOCUMENTARY, Clotheslines Trailer
The Chilling Popularity of Anti-Vax Deathbed Videos
“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. ...”
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)