​Astronomia Playing Cards (1829)

 

“... One particularly fine example is the Astronomia deck. Transcending the earthly concerns of betting and regal motifs, this pack focuses exclusively on the heavens. From the collection of card aficionado Melbert Cary, which contains another lovely celestial spread from c. 1717, the Astronomia pack — printed in London in 1829 and reissued in 1831 — recalls the mystical origins of playing cards. Whereas the Tarot tradition followed astrology into occult realms, this deck remains soberly astronomical. Above the skyscape on each card is a table of cosmological data for particular extra-terrestrial objects: its distance from the sun, orbital eccentricity, and progression-per-hour are displayed on decorative curtain swags. Were you to fan them across a table, it would be like gazing through fifty-two windows onto outer space, framed by classical stone columns. ...”

Public Domain Review

​Will We Remember the Victims of the Kabul Drone Strike?

 

Graffiti denouncing US drone strikes in Sanaa, Yemen in 2014.

“As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a ‘righteous strike.’ The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that August 29 air strike averted an Islamic State car-bomb attack on the last American troops at Kabul’s airport. At least, that’s what the Pentagon told the world. Within two weeks, a New York Times investigation would dismantle that official narrative. Seven days later, even the Pentagon admitted it. Instead of killing an ISIS suicide bomber, the United States had slaughtered 10 civilians: Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a US aid group; three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10; Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three children of Ahmadi’s brother Romal, Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2; and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya. ...”

The Nation

​The Lenox School of Jazz 1959

 

Percy Heath

“1959 was the year Ornette Coleman broke into the jazz consciousness, a big bang event that forever changed the perception of what jazz is and the esthetics of the genre. In May of that year, while still in the west coast, he recorded his debut on Atlantic Records, the milestone album The Shape of Jazz to Come. In November he opened a two week engagement at the Five Spot Café in New York City, which expanded to ten weeks and generated a heated debate about his music. In between these events, that watershed year also included a period of three weeks that gave Coleman a flavor of what’s to expect from the jazz community, in particular fellow musicians. ...”

The Music Aficionado

W - Lenox School of Jazz

amazon: The Lenox School of Jazz: A Vital Chapter in the History of American Music and Race Relations

Discogs: Featuring Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry And Kenny Dorham – Lenox School Of Jazz Concert, 1959 (Video)

amazon: Lenox Jazz School: Concert August 29 1959

​Revolt of the Delivery Workers

 

“The Willis Avenue Bridge, a 3,000-foot stretch of asphalt and beige-painted steel connecting Manhattan and the Bronx, is the perfect place for an ambush. The narrow bike path along its west side is poorly lit; darkened trash-strewn alcoves on either end are useful for lying in wait. All summer, food-delivery workers returning home after their shifts have been violently attacked there for their bikes: by gunmen pulling up on motorcycles, by knife-wielding thieves leaping from the recesses, by muggers blocking the path with Citi Bikes and brandishing broken bottles. ...”

THE VERGE

 

August 25, 4:30 P.M. Between the lunch and dinner shifts, delivery workers rest at an underground garage that serves as a makeshift break room.

The Desolation Age - Beyond the Ghost (2021)

 

“Beyond the Ghost presents his second album in the Europa Series, a futuristic, bleak and moving sound voyage that merges electronics and acoustics. London, the year is 2061. War is raging across Europe. Ultra-nationalist powers are fighting against each other, trying to conquer more territory and assert their supremacy. In London, enemy armies of cyborg soldiers and drones are taking over the city.  The capital is quickly falling into ruins, the dust from the rubble is still suspended in the air. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Bandcamp: The Last Resort (Audio)

YouTube: The Desolation Age, You Disappeared

Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant

 

Records show that an F.B.I. informant marched from the Washington Monument to the Capitol and told his handler that Trump supporters were entering the building.

“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. ...”

NY Times

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

 

ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer. US Army

“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. ...”

Jacobin

Should the Internet be a Public Good?

​Kawina, coups, and Sranan soul: a brief history of Surinamese music

 

Lieve Hugo and The Happy Boys

“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. ...”

PAM (Video)

W - Music of Suriname

YouTube: Suriname KASEKO MIXTAPE VOL.1 35:15, Folk Group NAKS_This Is Suriname (Album) 42:08

 

Parliament of Republic of Suriname; people with signs bearing slogans (Surinamese) Date: December 1, 1975

The Louvre Under Snow - Camille Pissarro (1902)

 

“You can see the echoes of Japanese prints by Hokusai and his contemporaries in this Impressionist picture of the floating world. Pissarro’s brush alights on the passing beauty of a winter white-out, observing central Paris from an apartment he rented for its great view of the Seine. The cinematic way he frames the scene, the sense of ephemerality and immediacy, even the joy in winter as a beautiful season all speak of Pissarro’s debts to Hokusai. He shares this enthusiasm with Van Gogh, Whistler and Monet. Japanese art hit Europe’s avant garde in the the 19th century like a great wave.“

National Gallery

​Fire Music: a history of the free jazz revolution, writer/director Tom Surgal

 

“Although the free jazz movement of the 1960s and ‘70s was much maligned in some jazz circles, its pioneers – brilliant talents like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane – are today acknowledged as central to the evolution of jazz as America’s most innovative art form. FIRE MUSIC showcases the architects of a movement whose radical brand of improvisation pushed harmonic and rhythmic boundaries, and produced landmark albums like Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Inspiration and Coltrane’s Ascension. A rich trove of archival footage conjures the 1960s jazz scene along with incisive reflections by critic Gary Giddins and a number of the movement’s key players. ...”

Fire Music (Video)

Film Review: “Fire Music: A History of the Free Jazz Revolution” — Informative but Incomplete

Guardian - ‘It didn’t adhere to any of the rules’: the fascinating history of free jazz (Video)

 

Sun Ra Arkestra

Harvest Moon - Nina MacLaughlin

 

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558

“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. ...”

The Paris Review

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

​‘The Village Detective’ decays into the avant-garde

 

 

“It was probably inevitable, baked into the chemical essence of film, that the medium’s own ephemerality would become a metaphor for time, aging, and death. Filmed images outlive the people in them, but time’s army eventually catches up, and what we’d long thought was immortal confronts the laws of decomposition just as we do. Movie images are ghosts, but eventually the ghosts themselves begin to rot away. It may’ve been because cinema was finally a century old, or due to a leveling-up in the world of film preservation, but it was in the ’90s when artists began recycling old film not for its subject but for its nitrate collapse. Emerging around the same time as Dutch archivist Peter Delpeut, Bill Morrison quickly became this domain’s archdruid; soon, he was, and still is, America’s most viewed and most distributed avant-garde filmmaker. ...”

Voice

NY Times - ‘The Village Detective: A Song Cycle’ Review: Soviet Film Hero Emerges (Video)

Senses of Cinema - Sunken Film: Bill Morrison Talks The Village Detective: a song cycle

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)

 

“When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spencer’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that ‘for width of imagination,’ The Lord of the Rings ‘almost beggars parallel.’ Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. ...”

Open Culture

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

 

Hudson: A gloom one knows. Dining room.

"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. ...”

Rain Taxi

 

Hudson: Much has been said about Ashbery's fondness for conjoining specimens of high and pop culture—Ariosto and Happy Hooligan, Milton and Daffy Duck. Upstairs sitting room.

Cabaret Voltaire: Biography by John Bush

 

“One of the most important, influential groups in the history of industrial and electronic music, Cabaret Voltaire combined the absurdity of Dada with the D.I.Y. ethos of the punk movement of the 1970s, then gradually evolved their sound and approach throughout the coming decades, mirroring the developments in electronic dance styles such as electro, acid house, and techno. Originally a free-form experimental unit consisting of Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Chris Watson, the group signed to post-punk institution Rough Trade in 1978, producing razor-edged avant-pop singles such as 1979's ‘Nag Nag Nag’ and seminal full-lengths like 1981's Red Mecca. ...”

allmusic, allmusic: Discography

John Peel Archive

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Landslide (Live), Sensoria (Live), I Want You & Hells Home Live Sheffield 17.12.85, Live At "La Edad De Oro" (1983)

YouTube: Walls of Kyot, Don't Argue, Do Right (Remastered), Talking Time

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

 

“The Green Guerillas are a community group of horticulturalists, gardeners, botanists, and planners who work to turn abandoned or empty spaces in New York City into gardens. Formed in the 1970s, the group threw ‘seed grenades’ into derelict lots and developed community gardens, often without going through official channels. It became especially popular after the concerted redevelopment of a dangerous, trash-filled space at the corner of Houston Street and Bowery in Manhattan. The resulting press coverage and word of mouth led the group to broaden its activities from active gardening to education, training, and support for a number of community groups working on their own gardens. The Green Guerillas have been credited with beginning the community garden movement and popularizing the idea of guerilla gardening. ...”

W - Green Guerillas, W - Seed bombing

How to Make a Seed Bomb

Green Guerillas

YouTube: How radical gardeners took back New York City

​Revisiting Some Texture

 

“Listen through the shimmer. Listen through the held tones, and the bell tones, and the swelling notes. Listen past the asynchronous patterning and the resulting chance chordal play. Listen instead for the frictives, the less sinuous textural elements, the way vinyl surface noise (or its approximate) moves across the stereo field. Listen for the clatter, and how it lends a sense of scale to the sonic space. Then listen to the more tonal material, and how the presence of the less inherently sedative elements bring out textures in the seemingly texture-less. I don’t think I’ve re-upped a recording in a while, but I just love this piece, so having written about it back in April, I wanted to mention it again. This video is part of my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live ambient performances. Video originally posted to YouTube by the talented Jae Ryan.“

disquiet (Video)

Toasting

 

U-Roy

“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. ...”

Wikipedia

Toasting Artist

A Toast To Daddy U-Roy: 10 Facts For The Reggae And Dancehall Icon’s Final Farewell (Video)

U-Roy, Best Known as the Pioneer of Toasting the Forerunner to Rap

Interview: U-Roy

NYTimes: U-Roy, Whose ‘Toasting’ Transformed Jamaican Music, Dies at 78

YouTube: U Roy 1970 Version Galore Treasure Isle, U-Roy: Everybody Bawling,

 

Case Study: The South Bronx and the Birth of Hip-Hop

​Everything you need to know about the Greenwich Village of 1961 in one map

 

“’Geographically speaking, the Village is only a small part of New York City,’ so states the copy on the side of this remarkable map of the Greenwich Village of 1961 (click the map to enlarge it), which details the restaurants, bars, cafes, apartment buildings, and other notable spots from Washington Street all the way to Cooper Square. This extraordinary illustrated map, drawn and published by cartographer Lawrence Fahey, seems to be aimed at visitors. ...”

Ephemeral New York

​Wrapped Arc de Triomphe Is Christo’s Fleeting Gift to Paris

 

The rope workers and Carpenters of Paris deploying the fabric on the facade of the Arc de Triomphe on Sept. 12.

“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. ...”

NY Times

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

 

“On Tuesday, 24 January 2012 Theo Angelopoulos was crossing the street in Piraeus, at the filming location for his next movie. It was to be titled The Other Sea, the closing segment in his trilogy about modern Greece. The film was intended to address the troubling issues facing Greece: strikes, illegal immigrants, climbing suicide rate, unemployment and violence, with a backdrop story of a theater company trying to stage Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera. ... It was a tragic ending for what would have been the ninth collaboration between Angelopoulos and composer Eleni Karaindrou, who since 1984 created one of the most impressive collections of film scores in modern film history. This is the story of that collaboration, eight films in all, and the music that graces the striking visuals captured in these films. ...”

The Music Aficionado (Video)

2020 December: The Weeping Meadow (2004)

Forza Pro - Video games, small-town Italian soccer by Brian Phillips

 

"I. My Magical Connection With the Tiny Italian Soccer Club Pro Vercelli. I have a magical connection with the tiny Italian soccer club Pro Vercelli because I once spent a year pretending to be them in a video game. Moreover, I spent a year blogging extensively about pretending to be them in a video game. Without going too deeply into my reasons for doing this — more or less the usual Internet cocktail of narcissism, a 'desire to interrogate constructions of fantasy and reality in sports,' and generally warm feelings about playing Football Manager at two in the afternoon for money — I can say that the project spiraled hopelessly out of control, sucked in hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of words, generated about a million inside jokes on my old soccer site, and left me with a permanent love for this obscure little club from a city of fewer than 50,000 people in the northern Italian province of Piedmont. ..."

Grantland (August 23, 2012)

Pro Vercelli: They were one of history’s greatest teams. (2012)

​How a Woman Becomes a Piece of Furniture

 

Gustave Caillebotte, Woman at a Dressing Table, 1873.

“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. ...”

The Paris Review

Empty Wardrobes - Maria Judite de Carvalho

Asteroid Pallas Makes a Point in Pisces

 

“Spice up your fall observing with a dash of Pallas and nibble of Neptune. Both planet and asteroid are easy to spot in a small telescope. I've never been able to wrap my mind around the fact that the total mass of the main asteroid belt equals just 4% the mass of the Moon. That seems hardly enough to matter, and yet our fate rests on those scraps and shards. A single smack from a 10-kilometer-wide stray and humanity — along with thousands of other species — could face the possibility of extinction. Their small bulk paired with their outsize destructive potential is just one reason to observe asteroids. Certainly, they appear innocent enough. Even at high magnification in amateur telescopes minor planets look like inconsequential pinpoints of light. ...”

Sky & Telescope

W - Pisces

W - Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers

 

16th century woodcut by Johannes Regiomontanus.

​Women Bathing in a Landscape, Cornelis van Poelenburgh, c 1630

 

“We all dream of a bit of sunshine. In early 17th-century Netherlands, as rain fell on the polders, many painters headed on what was then a dangerous trek to sunny Italy. Van Poelenburgh was from Utrecht, a city whose artists were particularly partial to a glass of chianti. Or more precisely, Utrecht was and is a Catholic city, which stuck with the old religion while other Dutch towns went Protestant. So Van Poelenburgh, Gerrit van Honthorst and other Utrecht artists felt comfortable in Papal Rome where they learned from Guido Reni and Caravaggio. In this painting, done after he got home to Utrecht, Van Poelenburgh distils the glamour of Italy. Women bathe naked among ancient Roman ruins under a gold-tinged sky. It’s the same idyll of a Mediterranean arcadia that would seduce later northern artists from Turner to Matisse. O for a cup of the warm south.”

National Gallery - Women Bathing in a Landscape

W - Cornelis van Poelenburgh

No Depression - Uncle Tupelo (1990)

 

“Over the last few decades, it’s becoming increasingly harder to talk about the life and legacy of Uncle Tupelo without the conversation falling down one of the many rabbit holes of the band’s ever-expanding mythos. By now, most everyone knows the more substantial high points of the band’s dynamic yet short-lived arc. Founding members Jay Farrar, Jeff Tweedy, and Mike Heidorn started playing together in high school in a mid-’80s Belleville, Illinois, band called The Primitives that eventually became Uncle Tupelo after their lead singer (Farrar’s brother, Wade) quit the band and headed to college. ...”

Toil and Trouble: Uncle Tupelo’s ‘No Depression’ Turns 30 (Video)

W - No Depression (album)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

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)

 

“‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)‘ is a 1973 song by Bruce Springsteen, from his The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle album, and is especially famed as a concert number for Springsteen and The E Street Band. The song, which clocks in at just over seven minutes, is a story of forbidden love between the singer and the titular Rosalita, whose parents disapprove of his life in a rock and roll band.  ... As Springsteen gained commercial success, ‘Rosalita’ became one of his most popular airplay tracks, and is still heard on classic rock radio. The song, despite never receiving an official US single release, has been lauded hugely by music critics in the years since its release in 1973. On its release Ken Emerson of Rolling Stone dubbed it ‘a raucous celebration of desire.’ ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Rosalita (Come Out Tonight), Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) - Live

New York Shorts: Daybreak Express (1953), Skyscraper (1960), Clotheslines (1981), The Bowery (1994)

 

Daybreak Express

“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

 

Clotheslines