​‘Computer Games’: How George Clinton’s Solo Debut Played To Win

 

“Could the old funkateer still deliver the goods? Parliament-Funkadelic, the 70s masterfunkers, ran out of road as the 80s arrived, caught in a traffic jam of contractual hassles, personnel problems, personal problems, and overstretch. Parliament, Parlet, Funkadelic, Brides Of Funkenstein, Bootsy, Sweat Band, Philippe Wynne, the aborted project with showman-guitarist Roger Troutman… there was only so much Uncle Jam could cope with. And music was moving fast, with rap and electro trouncing funk as the kids’ choice, while even mainstream dance music was growing increasingly electronic. It was time to regroup, but how? George Clinton, leader of P-Funk, knew what to do. ...”

udiscover (Video)

2009 January: George Clinton, 2010 December: Mothership Connection - Houston 1976, 2011 October: Funkadelic - One Nation Under A Groove, 2011 October: "Do Fries Go With That Shake?", 2012 August: Tales Of Dr. Funkenstein – The Story Of George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic, 2015 July: Playing The (Baker's) Dozens: George Clinton's Favourite Albums, 2015 August: Chocolate City (1975), 2016 February: Maggot Brain - Funkadelic (1971), 2016 June: P-Funk All Stars - Urban Dancefloor Guerillas (1983), 2017 March: Up for the Down Stroke - Parliament (1974), 2017 May: P-Funk mythology, 2019 September: Tear the Roof Off the Sucker: An Introduction to Parliament Funkadelic, 2019 December: Cosmic Slop - Funkadelic (1973), 2020 July: How George Clinton Made Funk a World View

War and Peace - Sergei Bondarchuk (1967)

 

“War and Peace (Russian: Война и мир, trans. Voyna i mir) is a 1966–67 Soviet war drama film co-written and directed by Sergei Bondarchuk and a film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's 1869 novel War and Peace. The film, released in four installments throughout 1966 and 1967, starred Bondarchuk in the leading role of Pierre Bezukhov, alongside Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Ludmila Savelyeva, who depicted Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova. ... War and Peace also won the Grand Prix in the Moscow International Film Festival, the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Since its release, the film is often considered to be the grandest epic film ever made, with many asserting its monumental production as unrepeatable and unique in film history. ...”

Wikipedia

Criterion - War and Peace: Saint Petersburg Fiddles, Moscow Burn, A Tolstoy Adaptation That Defies Gravity (Video)

Criterion (Video)

NY Times: A Peerless ‘War and Peace’ Film Is Restored to Its Former Glory

One of film’s greatest epics is a 7-hour adaptation of War and Peace. Really.

2019 July: War & Peace (TV 2016), 2021 September: ​“I Would Not Take Prisoners.” Tolstoy’s Case Against Making War Humane

This Week's Sky at a Glance, November 5 – 13

 

“Nova Cassiopeiae 2021 is still magnitude 8.4 as of November 5th, more than 7 months after it erupted. Charts and comparison stars. Friday, November 5.  At dusk this week, the Jupiter-Saturn line in the southern sky tilts only mildly, as shown below. Look far to their lower right for bright Venus. As evening progresses, Venus sets and the tilt of the giants steepens. The Summer Triangle Effect. Here it is early November, but Deneb still shines near the zenith as the stars come out. And brighter Vega is still not far from the zenith, toward the west. The third star of the 'Summer' Triangle, Altair, remains very high in the southwest (high upper right of Jupiter and Saturn). They seem to have stayed there for a couple months! Why have they stalled out? ...”

Sky & Telescope

​Making It: Pick up a spot welder and join the revolution.

 

Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome Patent 1965

January 5, 2014: "In January of 1903, the small Boston magazine Handicraft ran an essay by the Harvard professor Denman W. Ross, who argued that the American Arts and Crafts movement was in deep crisis. The movement was concerned with promoting good taste and self-fulfillment through the creation and the appreciation of beautiful objects; its more radical wing also sought to advance worker autonomy. The problem was that no one in America seemed to need its products. The solution, according to Ross, was to provide technical education to the critics and the consumers of art alike. This would stimulate demand for high-quality objects and encourage more workers to take up craftsmanship. ...”

New Yorker

Off the Rim: Jim Carroll

 

December 2010: “If there is one moment when the 1995 film adaptation of ‘The Basketball Diaries’ manages to come alive, it occurs when the preening, miscast Leonardo DiCaprio—playing the teen-age Jim Carroll—gets nearly as wet as he soon will in ‘Titanic.’ Carroll and his buddies are shooting baskets in a Manhattan playground after having attended the funeral of their pal Bobby, who has died of leukemia at the age of sixteen. The skies suddenly open, but the boys play on through a rain-lashed catharsis. As DiCaprio hangs by his arms from the basketball hoop, soaked and giddy with rage and release, the soundtrack delivers Carroll’s most famous song, a blasting, propulsive necrology called ‘People Who Died’: Teddy’s sniffing glue, he was 12 years old / He fell from the roof on East Two Nine / Cathy was eleven when she pulled the plug / On 26 reds and a bottle of wine. . . .Those are people who died, who died / Those are people who died, who died / They were all my friends, and they just died. ...”

New Yorker

YouTube: Lou Reed - People Who Died w/ Jim Carroll - 9/25/1984 - Capitol Theatre

2009 September: Jim Carroll, 2014 October: Catholic Boy (1980)

Culture Clash In Havana Cuba - Experiments In Latin Music 1975-85 Vol. 1, Vol. 2

 

“Cuba: Music and Revolution: Culture Clash in Havana: Experiments in Latin Music 1975-85 Vol. 1 is the new album compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker (Soul Jazz Records) that explores the many new styles that emerged in Cuba in the 1970s as Jazz, Funk, Brazilian Tropicalia and even Disco mixed together with Latin and Salsa on the island as Cuban artists experimented with new musical forms created in the unique socialist state of Cuba. ...”

sounds of the universe: Vol. 1 (Audio), Vol. 2 (Audio)

Discogs - Vol. 1 (Video), Vol. 2 (Video)

amazon: Vol. 1, Vol. 2

​Your Garden Isn’t Winding Down: It’s Still Lichen Season

 

Unpainted wood garden furniture is a popular substrate for colonies of certain lichens, including common greenshield (Flavoparmelia caperata), spangled rosette (Physcia millegrana), hammered shield (Parmelia sulcata) and a crustose species called Lecanora strobilina.

“What are lichens? They are neither plant nor animal. If that doesn’t make them inscrutable enough, there is also this: A lichen might, at first glance, be mistaken for an errant wad of chewing gum or a misplaced splatter of paint.But they are very much living creatures and are thought to be one of the earliest land-dwelling forms of life. They are among the most widespread, too, present on every continent, covering an estimated 8 percent of the planet’s land. They inhabit even Antarctica and the harshest deserts, including some places where plants and animals cannot thrive. Closer to home, you may find them happily taking up residence on your wooden garden bench or picket fence, stone walls or other rock surfaces, or on the trunks and branches of trees and shrubs. ...”

NY Times

W - Lichen

PBS: For the Love of Lichens (Video)

 

 Rhizocarpon geographicum

Spiritual Jazz 12: Impulse!

 

“... Home to John and Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Yusef Lateef, McCoy Tyner and countless other musical pioneers, Impulse! was the most important and forward-thinking jazz label of the 1960s. With the music-first attitude of an independent but the clout of a major, producers Creed Taylor and Bob Thiele made Impulse the defining imprint of a crucial decade of social upheaval that still resonates today. They hand picked the top players of the moment and gave them freedom to record the music they wanted, setting out their stall with a bold slogan – ‘The New Wave Of Jazz Is On Impulse!’ ...”

Bandcamp

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: spiritual jazz 12 : Impulse !      16 videos

​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