​The Many Giants of Black Baseball

 

The Harlem River and 155th Street. The Polo Grounds isn’t the only ballpark in NYC that disappeared.

“The first all-New York World Series occurred 100 years ago, as the Giants beat the Yankees in eight games, all played at the Polo Grounds of Coogan’s Hollow, at 155th Street along the Harlem River. (The better-known ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ technically refers to the ridge that overlooked the park.) But as Major League Baseball neared its 1921 finish, the Series was not the only game in town. It might not even have been the best. Elsewhere in NYC, Black teams like the Lincoln Giants, the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Bacharach Giants, and the visiting Chicago American Giants—yes, they were all Giants in those days—showcased elite-level baseball. On weekends and holidays, Black fans traversed the city to cheer on their teams in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Upper Manhattan, and Queens. ...”

Voice

2015 March: Negro league baseball, 2016 March: Black Ball - Jules Tygiel and  John Thorn (Essay), 2017 April: Baseball color line, 2017 May: Negro National League (1920–31), 2019 October: Can the Rebirth of a Negro League Stadium Revive a Distressed City?, 2020 December: A push to recognize the statistics of Black players from baseball’s era of apartheid

The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

 

“The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) is a 1949 book by the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, in which the author discusses the treatment of women throughout history. Beauvoir researched and wrote the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949. She published it in two volumes, Facts and Myths and Lived Experience (Les faits et les mythes and L'expérience vécue in French). Some chapters first appeared in Les Temps modernes. One of Beauvoir's best-known books, The Second Sex is often regarded as a major work of feminist philosophy and the starting point of second-wave feminism. ... The first French publication of The Second Sex sold around 22,000 copies in a week. It has since been translated into 40 languages. The Vatican placed the book on its List of Prohibited Books. The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey was critical of The Second Sex, holding that while it was an interesting literary production, it contained no original data of interest or importance to science. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times: Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’

The Second Sex

YouTube: An Introduction to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex- A Macat Literature Analysis

2010 June: Simone de Beauvoir

Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band - Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) (1978)

 

“Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is the tenth studio album by American rock band Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, released in October 1978 by Warner Bros. Records. The album emerged from production difficulties surrounding Bat Chain Puller, an album Captain Beefheart recorded for DiscReet and Virgin Records in 1976. DiscReet co-founders Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa feuded over the production of the album, because Cohen funded the production with Zappa's royalty checks. Captain Beefheart recorded a new album titled Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) due to Zappa withholding the master tapes of the original Bat Chain Puller album. ...”

W - Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)

reDiscover Captain Beefheart’s ‘Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)’ (Audio)

PERFECT SOUND FOREVER: ... by Stewart Osborne (February 1999)

Discogs (Video), Discogs - Frank Zappa Presents Captain Beefheart, Original 1976

amazon

YouTube: Bat Chain Puller (Live)

YouTube: Shiny Beast [Bat Chain Puller]  12 videos, The Shiny Beast Sessions  1:22:23

2009 October: Captain Beefheart, 2010 December: Captain Beefheart, Art-Rock Visionary, Dead At 69, 2011 October: Interview with Captain Beefheart, 2013 August: This Is The Day (1974-Old Grey Whistle Test), 2014 July: Safe as Milk (1967), 2014 August: Some YoYo Stuff: An observation of the observations of Don Van Vliet by Anton Corbijn (1993), 2015 January: It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper, 2016 November: Doc at the Radar Station (1980), 2017 October: Works on Paper, 2017 November: How Nona Hendryx Captured the World of Captain Beefheart, 2020 September: ‘Doc At The Radar Station’: How Captain Beefheart Came Back Fighting Fit

​The Year of Prophetic Desire

 

“The American Right throbs with prophetic desire, from The Late Great Planet Earth, the classic End Times fantasy of Reaganite revanchism, to QAnon’s ‘great awakening’. This is not the prophetic desire of the multitude, of which Hardt and Negri speak. The subcultural apocalyptic anticipations of the United States at the turn of the millennium, with its curious ambivalent opening to the ‘alien’ and the ‘alt’, and its distrust of overpowering elites, had transversal elements that partially flowed into anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. By plague year, however, these currents had been skilfully canalised by online far-right entrepreneurs into outright authoritarian longing. The reactionaries yearn, not for the immanent power of the multitude, but for a word from their celestial trump card. ...”

SALVAGE

TriBeCa Gallery Guide: New York’s Most Vibrant Art Scene

 

Looking south on Cortlandt Alley in TriBeCa.

“Galleries have been moving to TriBeCa for a good five years, but the migration has finally hit critical mass. As everyone from tiny new project spaces to the blue-chip titan David Zwirner floods in, this cast-iron and cobblestone neighborhood in Manhattan — south of Canal, north of Vesey and west of Broadway — is no longer just one option of many. For any New York-area gallery that needs to move or is opening another branch, TriBeCa is now the most exciting place to show contemporary art — the destination that has to be considered. There are now at least 41 galleries in TriBeCa, according to the real estate broker Jonathan Travis — who placed 22 of those himself — compared with fewer than 20 galleries two years, and still more are set to move in. ...”

NY Times

 

Works by Milton Graves, the visionary drummer who died this year, at Artists Space. In his remarkable practice and worldview, art, medicine, plants, human perception, the nervous system and the cosmos are all connected

Zonal Marking: From Ajax to Zidane, the Making of Modern Soccer – Michael Cox (2019)

 

August 24, 2019: “In life, it takes time to create successful ideas and concepts. Scientists and researchers spend years, even decades, analyzing and studying data to create trials or a study before publishing the results to the world. … I mention this because it may seem odd at first to take a 17-year period and be able to identify seven overarching and different tactical revolutions in soccer in Europe. However, Michael Cox has long established himself as a tactical observer par excellence and his new book argues that the dominant soccer cultures in Europe in the recent past have existed for merely 2-4 years. Zonal Marking: From Ajax to Zidane, the Making of Modern Soccer makes the claim that we have seen six dominant styles of soccer in Europe since 1992 with each based around a national soccer culture. …”

World Soccer Talk

Intelligent football: Michael Cox and the rise of tactical analysis (Oct 2020)

Zonal Marking

Vox in the Box: Michael Cox

amazon

YouTube: Football Tactics with Michael Cox (Zonal Marking)(Aug 13, 2019)

​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)