​Deafman Glance - Robert Wilson (1971)

 

“When Robert Wilson's work first appeared internationally it was generally seen from a single and limited viewpoint—as a return to the image. Wilson was understood as a proponent of two-dimensional theater, of theater to be looked at only. This was because he came into the public eye at the beginning of the ’70s, when the figurative gesture ruled supreme on the stage, and the body, in its expressive entirety, was at the center of a tendency to involve the spectator. But Wilson’s push was to stretch the visual; it was a recuperation of the grand deliriums of the Surrealist painters, basing dramatic narrative on a simple sequence of backdrops and the unfolding of a tableau vivant, immobile yet in continuous and unstoppable evolution. ...”

ARTFORUM - ROBERT WILSON: IT’S ABOUT TIME

BAM: Deafman Glance, February 25, 1971, March 5, 1971

Deafman Glance (1971)

Robert Wilson’s Deafman Glance

YouTube: (Deafman Glance) 1981 45:24

2008 April: Robert Wilson, 2010 January: Einstein on the Beach, 2010 July: The CIVIL warS, 2011 May: Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera , 2011 August: Stations (1982), 2012 February: Absolute Wilson,  2012 August: Einstein on the Blog: Christopher Knowles’ Typings, 2013 March: The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, 2013 April: Death, Destruction and Detroit, 2013 October: crickets audio recording slowed way down, 2013 October: Beached, 2014 January: The Louvre invites Robert Wilson - Living Rooms, 2014 November: The Old Woman - Robert Wilson, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe, 2015 May: Watermill Quintet: Robert Wilson Curates New Performances, 2015 June: THE EARTH MOVES. A documentary about Einstein on the Beach., 2018 March: Video 50 (1978)

​On the M4 Bus With Cartoonist Roz Chast

 

“One sunny day in early October, I sit on the sprawling steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, waiting for cartoonist Roz Chast. At her publicist’s request, for purposes of identification, I feebly hold aloft a copy of Chast’s new book, Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York, aware that to the tourists milling around the museum’s entrance it probably appears that I am hocking stolen goods or maybe getting stood up by a Tinder date. Chast is late, but there are few better places for people-watching than the Met steps at lunch (just ask Blair Waldorf), so I spend the time speculating about who might make for good Roz Chast cartoon fodder. ...”

VOGUE

amazon

2016 March: Roz Chast’s Pysanky

The Skatalites - "Freedom Sounds" (1967)

 

"This week we are back at 13 Brentford Road, Kingston, Jamaica, with Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd at the controls for The Skatalites' ‘Freedom Sounds’, first released on the ‘Ska Authentic’ LP in 1964... I have seen this credited to Tommy McCook, Roland Alphonso and just The Skatalites (there is also a rock steady version by The Soul Vendors) but being as they were both in The Skatalites, I am going to stick to that 'umbrella' credit. It was omitted from the 1967 UK issue of ‘Ska Authentic’ which only adds to the confusion, but there is no confusion once you hear the tune. A heavyweight ska classic that became something of a theme for the various line ups of Skatalites that played over the years. Absolutely crucial !’ - KV ...”

The Skatalites, "Freedom Sounds" (Video)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Freedom Sound (Live )

Songs in the Key of Consciousness: XI’s Extrasensory Dance Poetry

 

Reid Wilkie, from XI, (Photo by Liz Hassett)

“... Following along that thread, the young African American poet Amanda Gorman saw her popularity soar after her poetry recitation at President Biden’s inauguration, celebrating a new humanistic political era. Marianne Faithfull’s forthcoming spoken word album, She Walks in Beauty, is a commemoration of the Romantic poets and utilizes Nick Cave’s not-so-secret musical weapon, Warren Ellis, to provide much of the aural backdrop. The LA Times even corralled Courtney Love to help hype Faithfull’s newest issue. Rolling Stone devoted frontpage space on its website to the once whispery London chanteuse’s poetic recitations. Poetry is once again king. ...”

Riot Material (Audio)

Pro-Trump Professors Are Plotting an Authoritarian Comeback

 

“On Halloween, the second National Conservatism conference, or NatCon II, will kick off in Orlando, Florida. It is hard to know quite what to make of the lineup for the three-day fest, which boasts a few household names (Senators Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio are both keynote speakers), but also features conspiracist Jack Posobiec of Pizzagate fame. One through line, with a few exceptions, is support for Donald Trump. But the animating ideas come less from the ex-president than from a disparate group of formerly obscure academics. Media coverage of the Trump phenomenon typically begins and ends with the base—the coal miner at the Midwestern diner, or the MAGA rally crowd. We don’t talk much about the professors. ...”

New Republic

Sojourner (rover)

 

Sojourner rover pictured by Pathfinder lander

“Sojourner is a robotic Mars rover that landed in the Ares Vallis channel in the Chryse Planitia region of the Oxia Palus quadrangle on July 4, 1997. Sojourner was operational on Mars for 92 sols (95 Earth days). It was the first wheeled vehicle to rove on a planet other than Earth and formed part of the Mars Pathfinder mission. The rover was equipped with front and rear cameras, and hardware that was used to conduct several scientific experiments. ... The Sojourner mission formally ended on March 10, 1998, after all further options were exhausted....”

Wikipedia

Space: The Mars Rovers (Video)

NASA: Mars Pathfinder / Sojourner Rover

Faust: 1971 – 1974 Box Set

“Of all the kosmische bands, Faust were the least ‘Krautrock’ with a capital K. In Faust’s three-year imperial phase, there’s none of the perceived teutonic efficiency or arch awareness of Kraftwerk; little of the benign new age leanings of Tangerine Dream and Cluster and, while they shared rhythmic characteristics with motorik pioneers Can and Neu!, Faust always had a Dadaist impulse to disrupt anything that might be running too smoothly, as much inveterate self-saboteurs as sonic innovators. Faust were always the strangest of the strange, the outliers, the black sheep, completely unclassifiable, a genre all of their own. ...”

The Quietus

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Fernlicht (official Video), Vorsatz (official Video), It's A Bit Of A Pain, Morning Land (Official Video)

2012 October: Faust

Joan Mitchell - SFMOMA

 

“In 1948, Joan Mitchell was a 23-year-old artist living in a drafty apartment in Paris. She had arrived in France in the aftermath of World War II to a nation that was still reeling from rations and riots. A newly minted graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mitchell had come to Paris to study the history of French painting and learn the techniques of the masters but found that her workaholism had frayed her nerves and rendered her too anxious to take part in the bustling social life of the city. Mitchell spent her nights awake, feverishly trying to improve her craft, huddling around her stove for warmth. ...”

NY Times: The Roots of Joan Mitchell’s Greatness

SF MoMA: Joan Mitchell (Video)

We Wanted to Unmoor Her From the 1950s’: A Joan Mitchell Retrospective at SFMOMA Shows the Artist as You’ve Never Seen Her Before

The Long-Awaited Joan Mitchell Retrospective & Why it Matters

2009 July: Joan Mitchell, 2016 February: Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings, 2018 April: Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler (2018)

 

Bonjour Julie, 1971

Demystifying Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand,” and How It Was Inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost

 

“Youtuber Polyphonic has done a good job of looking at some hoary old classics of ‘60s rock, but he doesn’t always dip his toe in taking on contemporary music, or even considering a modern canon. Pronouncing what is essential listening of the last few decades is a minefield, especially among the ranks of Commentus YouTubus.So their choice to explore Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ‘Red Right Hand’ is a deft one. It’s not Cave’s most well-known song—-that would be ‘The Mercy Seat’—-but it’s one that many non-Cave fans know regardless. Though released in 1994, it’s now best known as the theme song from Peaky Blinders, though it also showed up in all three of the first Scream films. It’s been used to sell tequila and tourism as well. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2008 August: Nick Cave, 2010 November: Henry Lee - Nick Cave & PJ Harvey, 2011 March: The Boatman's Call, 2011 December: B-Sides & Rarities, 2012 January: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - White Lunar, 2013 January: "We No Who U R", 2013 April: No More Shall We Part, 2013 June: The Secret Life Of The Love Song/The Flesh Made Word (1999), 2013 October: The Abattoir Blues Tour (2007), 2014 March: Push the Sky Away (2013), 2014 May: Live from KCRW (2013), 2014 July: I Am the Real Nick Cave, 2014 March: God Is In The House (2001), 2015 June: Nocturama (2003), 2015 July: Higgs Boson Blues, 2020 March: Nick Cave's inspiration: pictures and notes from his archive

​The great betrayal: how the Hillsborough families were failed by the justice system

 

After 32 years of establishment lies, media smears, inquests, trials and retrials, the families of the Hillsborough dead have yet to see anyone held accountable, October 21, 2021: "On a grey morning in May this year, the English legal system’s epic failure to secure justice for the families devastated by the Hillsborough disaster finally ground to its dismal conclusion. Ninety-seven people were killed due to a terrible crush on an overcrowded terrace at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough football stadium on 15 April 1989. Since then, the families have endured a 32-year fight for the truth to be accepted – that the main cause of the disaster was police negligence, and for those responsible to be held accountable. ...” 

Guardian

Red Eye to New York - Janet Delaney (2021)

 

“Throughout the 1980s, Janet Delaney’s job in a San Francisco photography lab was punctuated by the last-minute flights she would take to New York as a courier. Within these unexpected pockets of time she spent in New York, Delaney would wander the streets with her Rolleiflex camera, attending to the rhythms and characters of this much-mythologised city. Despite being tired and often lost, the act of photographing made Delaney feel present and alert, in tune with the crowds that pushed past her and mesmerised by the depth of history woven into the city’s structures. ...”

Janet Delaney

Guardian - No sleep till Brooklyn: a red-eye view of New York – in pictures

​Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany

 

“Documentary which looks at how a radical generation of musicians created a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war. Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard. They shared one common goal – a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany’s gruesome past – but that didn’t stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock. ...”

Documentary Heaven (Video) 58:25 BBC

​A Bacchanal, follower of Dosso Dossi, 1525

 “This orgy in the countryside is a raw and racy take on a classical theme. It’s set in a mythical golden age, or at least bronze age, inspired by ancient Roman poetry, where goat-legged satyrs hang out with cupids and nymphs. Bacchus was the god of wine and his followers drunken reprobates. Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, perhaps the most famous depiction of bacchanalian behaviour, was painted as part of a series of mythic scenes for the Duke of Ferrara in the early 1500s (and today hangs in the National Gallery). This painting also from Ferrara, is in the fierce, intense style of local painter Dosso Dossi. But it playfully takes Titian’s classical revels into more pornographic territory, with dangerous liaisons everywhere you look.“

The National Gallery

W - Dosso Dossi

Five Corners - Tony Bill (1987)

 

“'Five Corners,' opening today at the Baronet and other theaters, is about coming of age in the Bronx in the autumn of 1964, when student activists were listening to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., young women were still doing their darnedest to look like Jacqueline Kennedy and glue-sniffing was an acceptable way to attain a high. Directed by Tony Bill, the film is based on John Patrick Shanley's first screenplay. ... In a period of approximately 24 hours, 'Five Corners' tells the stories of Linda (Jodie Foster), her sometime boyfriend James (Todd Graff) and Harry (Tim Robbins), who's about to go off to register voters in Mississippi. Their comparatively placid lives are thrown into chaos with the arrival back in the neighborhood of Heinz (John Turturro), a young psychotic who has been serving time for the attempted rape of Linda. ...”

NY Times: By Vincent Canby (Jan. 22, 1988)

Criterion, dailymotion

YouTube: Five Corners Trailer 1987

United States: Essays, 1952-1992 - Gore Vidal (1993)

 

“United States collects 114 essays written by Gore Vidal over the last four decades. Despite the reproduction of Jasper Johns’s forty-eight-star flag on the dust jacket, less than half of them are about politics. The rest describe books, places, and people he has known. ... Most of these pieces are anchored to a discussion of some book. If it is a book he likes, Vidal provides a summary that is both detailed and interesting. He favors a bright, staccato prose, which draws its variety from the length of its sentences. Short fragments. Good for facts. These will be followed by long, elliptical tendrils of analysis or appraisal, occasionally wise, often witty, and when neither, at least … bitchy. ...”

The New Criterion: State of the essay?

NY Times: Two Score of Gore

Gore Vidal mastered the art of the burn.

amazon

2011 May: An American history lesson with Gore Vidal, 2013 September: Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal – BBC Omnibus 1995

​In the Company of Wes Anderson

 

“It’s his first film set in France, and the first done as an anthology. But Wes Anderson’s 10th movie, ‘The French Dispatch,’ was made in much the same way, and with much the same cast, as many of the features that preceded it. Along with his fastidious and vibrant visual sense and staccato pacing, his company of free spirits has become his signature. ... ‘The French Dispatch,’ about writers at a midcentury magazine based on The New Yorker, is set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé and was filmed in Angoulême, France. ...”

NY Times

NY Times - ‘The French Dispatch’ Review: Remember Magazines? (Video)

NY Times - When Wes Anderson Comes to Town, Buildings Get Symmetrical

Exclusive Exhibition Celebrating ‘The French Dispatch’ To Open In London (Video)

amazon

YouTube: THE FRENCH DISPATCH | Official Trailer

2013 November: Wes Anderson Honors Fellini in a Delightful New Short Film, 2013 November: Rushmore (1998), 2013 Decemher: Hotel Chevalier (2007), 2014 March: Wes Anderson Collection, 2014 April: The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies, 2014 July: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), 2014 August: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), 2014 December: Welcome to Union Glacier (2013), 2015 January: Inhabiting Wes Anderson’s Universe, 2015 July: Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A Supercut for Bibliophiles, 2015 November: Moonrise Kingdom (2012), 2015 December: Chapter 8: "The Grand Budapest Hotel", 2016 June: Here's pretty much every song used in a Wes Anderson film, 2016 November: Watch Come Together, Wes Anderson’s New Short Film...., 2018 September: Isle of Dogs (2018), 2020 May: Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie, 2020 July: Exploring Wes Anderson’s wonderful cinematic commercials, 2020 September: Steal Like Wes Anderson...

How Neal Stephenson’s Sci-Fi Novel Snow Crash Invented the “Metaverse,” Which Facebook Now Plans to Build (1992)

“Whatever the benefits and pleasures of our current internet-enriched world, one must admit that it’s not quite as exciting as the setting of Snow Crash. Originally published in 1992, that novel not only made the name of its author Neal Stephenson, it elevated him to the status of a technological Nostradamus. It did so, at least, among readers interested in the internet and its potential, which was much more of a niche subject 29 years ago. Of the many inventions with which Stephenson furnished Snow Crash‘s then-futuristic 21st-century cyberpunk reality, few have captured as many techie imaginations as the ‘metaverse,’ an enormous virtual world inhabited by the avatars of its users. ...”

Open Culture

amazon

2021 September: Cryptonomicon (1999)

​Illuminate I Could: On Lucille Clifton

 

Caroline and son. Courtesy of the Clifton family.

What is our relationship to history? Do we belong to it, or is it ours? Are we in it? Does it run through us, spilling out like water, or blood? I think the answers to those questions, at least in America, depend upon who you are—or rather, on who you’ve been taught to believe that you are. If the history you descend from has been mapped, adapted, mythologized, reenacted, and broadcast as though it is the central defining story of a continent, perhaps you can be forgiven (up to a point) for having succumbed to a collective distortion. ...”

The Paris Review

The Paris Review - Generations: A Memoir, Lucille Clifton

The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism - Benjamin Holtzman (2021)

 

“... The reasons for that seemingly abrupt development were complex and long in the making, and they are traced with precision and care by Benjamin Holtzman’s history of the intertwined crises of liberalism and the metropolis, The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism (Oxford 2021). Whereas Smith opens The New Urban Frontier with the policing of houselessness at Tompkins Square Park, Holtzman’s book concludes with it, building over five chapters before coming to a crescendo with the 1980s spike in houselessness. The action in that final chapter sits like an all-too-avoidable train wreck whose multi-causal derailing demands careful study. We are fortunate to have Holtzman holding the magnifying glass....”

The Privatized City from Below: Benjamin Holtzman’s The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism

The Nation: New York City’s State of Permanent Crisis

New York City and the path to neoliberalism in the 1970s [timeline] By Benjamin Holtzman

amazon

Raincoats - The Kitchen Tapes (1983)

 

“The first thing to be said about the Raincoats is that they are the most appropriately named London band in the history of pop music. The second is that their music has moved from emotional manifestations of situations and events to statements of emotional positions taken on situations and events–and that the music here, recorded at the Kitchen in New York City in December, 1982, is a result of the latter approach. In other words, these are performances of songs. As such they can speak for themselves, but the Raincoats did not always ‘perform songs,’ and before they are subsumed into rock history–the band may well be gone by the end of 1983–or marked off as a half-page in one more new-women-in-rock book, it might be worth noting what they did instead. ...” 

Greil Marcus

Discogs (Video)

W - The Kitchen Tapes (The Raincoats album)

YouTube: Only loved at night, The Kitchen Tapes: 12 - Puberty Song 13 - No Side To Fall In 14 - Honey Mad Woman

2015 July: Odyshape (1981), 2017 January: The Raincoats (1979)

​Cockroaches, car camping, poverty wages: Why are minor-leaguers living in squalor?

 

“It happened in Rochester, home of the Nationals’ Triple-A affiliate, a few times during the early part of the season. In San Antonio, where the Padres’ Double-A team is located, they’re up to five break-ins this year, as players’ cars — which can double as living quarters or storage facilities — are easy fodder for a potential burglar. Several players on the Brewers’ Triple-A roster in Nashville piled into a small one-bedroom apartment thinking they struck gold within their budget: instead they found a roach infestation. At the Mets’ Double-A affiliate in Binghamton, N.Y., last month, a group of players lost electricity and went nearly three days without power and running water. ...”

The Athletic

2021 September: Minor Threat, 2019 January: Strike up the band: Mariachis win the cup, 2019 July: Cape Cod Baseball League, 2019 December: Across the Country, Minor League Towns Face Major League Threat

​The Best of Townes Van Zandt

 

“After a number of short-lived compilations, it seems that The Best of Townes Van Zandt is finally going to be the album that definitively represents Van Zandt's classic Tomato recordings. ... On the plus side, it is generally agreed that Van Zandt's music is best heard in an intimate acoustic setting, and The Best of Townes Van Zandt leans heavily toward that supposition, featuring ‘Tecumseh Valley’ and ‘White Freightliner Blues’ from the concert album Live at the Old Quarter and the second recorded version of ‘For the Sake of the Song’ that Van Zandt preferred to the 1968 original. ... People are going to cry out over some of this stuff, asking where's this and that, but such omissions ensure that people will continue to buy Van Zandt's proper records, and that is essential.”

allmusic

Discogs

YouTube: The Best of Townes Van Zandt   1 / 16

2014 March: Heartworn Highways - James Szalapski (1975), 2014 September: The 10 Best Townes Van Zandt Songs, 2015 January: Solo Sessions (Jan 17, 1995), 2015 September: Townes Van Zandt & Nanci Griffith - "Tecumseh Valley," 1993, 2016 February: "If I Needed You" - Townes Van Zandt (1972), 2021 March: In The Beginning... (1966)

90 Seconds of Rage

 

“The American flag became a blunt instrument in the bearded man’s hands. Wielding the flagpole like an ax, he swung once, twice, three times, to beat a police officer being dragged down the steps of a United States Capitol under siege. Other officers also fell under mob attack, while the rest fought to keep the hordes from storming the Capitol and upending the routine transfer of power. Sprayed chemicals choked the air, projectiles flew overhead and the unbridled roars formed a battle-cry din — all as a woman lay dying beneath the jostling scrum of the Jan. 6 riot. Amid the hand-to-hand combat, seven men from seven different states stood out. Although strangers to one another, they worked as if in concert while grappling with the phalanx of police officers barring entry to the Capitol. ...”

NY Times (Video)

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., 2021 September: Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant, 2021 October: Jan. 6 Was Worse Than We Knew

​Poussin and the Dance

 

W - A Dance to the Music of Time (painting)

“Richly illustrated and engagingly written, this publication examines how the pioneer of French classicism brought dance to bear on every aspect of his artistic production. Scenes of tripping maenads and skipping maidens, Nicolas Poussin’s dancing pictures, painted in the 1620s and 1630s, helped him formulate a new style. This style would make him the model for three centuries of artists in the French classical tradition, from Jacques-Louis David and Edgar Degas to Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. Poussin and the Dance, the first published study devoted to this theme, situates the artist in seventeenth-century Rome, a city rich with the ancient sculptures and Renaissance paintings that informed his dancing pictures. ...”

Getty

The National Gallery (Video)

Guardian: Poussin and the Dance review – the greatest frozen ballet in all art

The Musical Wanderings of Don Was

 

“Is Don Was the definitive musical journeyman of the late 20th century? Born Don Fagenson in Detroit in 1952, he co-founded the funk/pop band Was (Not Was), of ‘Walk the Dinosaur’ fame; won four Grammys in the far-flung genres of country, children’s music and blues; serves as president of the jazz powerhouse Blue Note Records; made documentary films about The Beatles and Brian Wilson; and has produced albums for the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Elton John and Willie Nelson. It’s exhausting to  think about. ...”

Red Bull Music Academy (Video)

2021 July: Was (Not Was) - What Up Dog? (1988)

​Andrew Watson: The 'most influential' black footballer for decades lost to history

 

Watson is also depicted in a mural at the site of the original Hampden Park

"There are two murals of black footballers facing one another across an alleyway in Glasgow. One helped shape football as we know it, the other is Pele. Andrew Watson captained Scotland to a 6-1 win over England on his debut in 1881. He was a pioneer, the world's first black international, but for more than a century the significance of his achievements went unrecognised. Research conducted over the past three decades has left us with some biographical details: a man descended of slaves and of those who enslaved them, born in Guyana, raised to become an English gentleman and famed as one of Scottish football's first icons. ..."

BBC

Lanquidity (Definitive Edition) - Sun Ra (1978/2021)

 

“That’s how Sun Ra responded when Philly Jazz Records owner Tom Buchler visited the late jazz giant at his Philadelphia apartment early in the summer of 1978 in an attempt to discuss the upcoming studio session that would yield the album Lanquidity. In the liner notes assembled especially for a new expanded double-disc edition of the album, Buchler recalls his expectations. ... Of course, anyone familiar with Sun Ra can easily picture the train of thought those conversations must have followed, which is easy to reconstruct thanks to multiple longform monologues with Ra expounding on likeminded topics that are now available online. By the time he met Buchler, Ra—born Herman Blount, but later changing his legal name to Le Sony’r Ra—had advanced his central message for decades. ...”

With 1978’s Lanquidity, Sun Ra and His Arkestra Tried Their Hand at Funk on a Galactic Scale

Bandcamp (Audio), Soundcloud (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

​The Dangers of Distracted Parenting

 

“Smartphones have by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices. Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents. Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. ...”

The Atlantic

​The Trojan Story

 

“Since 1968, Trojan Records has been synonymous with the reggae, rocksteady, dub, and ska genres.  The U.K. label founded by Lee Gopthal and Island Records' Chris Blackwell was instrumental in spreading those Jamaican sounds throughout the world and popularizing such key artists as Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, and The Maytals.   By 1971, Trojan - with its focus on 45 RPM singles - had amassed enough hit records to release a label anthology. ... The Trojan Story was the first large-scale release to celebrate the music of Jamaica to the world at large.  The three-disc, 50-song anthology was curated by Trojan label manager Rob Bell, Dandy Livingstone, Webster Shrowder, and Joe Sinclair. ...”

Invitation to Jamaica: Landmark Anthology "The Trojan Story" Sees 50th Anniversary Reissue

allmusic (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

Absolut Cuba - Raúl Cañibano

 

Viñales - His approach means we find genuine people in his pictures, who never appear manipulated or contrived

“Absolut Cuba is Raúl Cañibano‘s declaration of love to his native country. His surprising, caring, yet incredibly precise take and his lightning-fast, instinctive and gripping intellect let him capture moments which might seem totally familiar: normal everyday life in urban or rural settings. This makes him one of the most gifted photographers in Latin America. His project Tierra Guajira pays tribute to Cuban farmers in an almost anthropological approach – tracing his own childhood in the east of the country. Raúl Cañibano combines it with pictures from his series Ciudad, Fe por San Lázaro and Ocaso to let us sense the heart and soul of Cuba. His images are truthful and convey a sense of identity. They are filled with tradition, happiness, tragedy and magic. ...”

Repeating Islands

Guardian: Viva Cuba! The heart and soul of an island nation – in pictures

amazon