​Down and out in George Orwell’s Paris: A guide to the secret Paname

 

“To begin our guide to Paris: the city of love, luminosity and four macaroons for a mortgageable fee — we start with a little-known condition called Kalopsia. This alluring word denotes the delusion of things appearing more beautiful than they actually are. It is commonly induced in Asian tourists when visiting the French capital owing to a sizeable smack of a Parisian culture shock. That is not to say that Kalopsia sufferers overrate the beauty of the Sine or marvel a little too much at the Eiffel Tower, but that they sport such rose-tinted eyes that coughed out phlegm on the pavement is transfigured into a tramp’s oyster that somehow represents an abstraction of civility. ...”

Far Out Magazine (Video)

W - Down and Out in Paris and London

2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 2012 March: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), 2012 June: "The Spanish Earth", Written and Narrated by Ernest Hemingway, 2013 January: The Real George Orwell, 2015 August: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 2016 September: George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia (1938), 2017 January: Guernica (2016), 2019 September: What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural

 

Cafe du Dome

Driving by the Lake With John Ashbery

 

“It was convenient for John Ashbery, and dumb luck for me, that I was living in Rochester and could pick him up at the airport whenever he arrived from New York to visit his mother. Sometimes, because he didn’t like to fly, he’d arrive at the bus station instead; but I could meet him there too. It was an arrangement from which we both might profit, he explained, not profit in the American sense but in a way best expressed if you said it in French, profiter de. And thus we began my unexpected education, a kind of improvised fellowship with visiting tutor and bonus bits of wisdom delivered in French. ...”

LitHub: By Douglas Crase (October 28, 2020)

​When the Solution Is the Problem

 

That split-second when everyone thinks the ends justify the means.

“Not once, in two decades, had David Beckham heard the moment. He had witnessed it at the time, of course. More than that, in fact: He had summoned it and created it and lived it. He had, presumably, watched the moment more than once in the intervening years, too. But it was not until a couple weeks ago that he sat down and listened to it. The moment he did was — obviously — captured for posterity, a social media post as meta as they come: a man recording his own reaction to a recording of himself. As Beckham listens, he has a look of fierce concentration on his face, mixed with just a little genuine concern, as if he really does not know how it all ends. The audio plays in the background, an echo of his past: the last couple minutes of the BBC radio commentary of England’s meeting with Greece on the road to the 2002 World Cup. …”

NY Times (Audio)

 

Reading Around New York

 

1979 | The New York Public Library

“On Thursday, May 3, 1979, the New York Times staff photographer Fred Conrad visited the main branch of the New York Public Library. A crowd had gathered on the steps outside — in groups, in pairs, talking, eating. But among this gathering, a few sat slightly apart, heads bent. They appeared oblivious to those around them, unaware of the photographer’s lens. They were reading. Even in the busiest of places, if you have a good book, you can retreat into solitude. And when you live in a city like New York, a book can be even more than a story at your fingertips. It can also be a respite, an escape, a sanctuary, a diversion and a travel companion. ...”

NY Times

2015 August: The New York Public Library, 2015 August: Underground New York Public Library, 2016 January: Lifting the Veil on the New York Public Library’s Erotica Collection, 2016 March: 11 Essential Feminist Books: A New Reading List by The New York Public Library, 2017 September: Get NYPL Digital Collections Tab for Your Browser, 2017 September: Ex Libris: The New York Public Library

 

1961 | Barnard College

Creation Rebel - Dub From Creation (2004)

 

“This is the seminal first studio work by revered dub producer Adrian Sherwood (Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, African Head Charge), engineered by Dennis Bovell (Fela Kuti, The Slits, Orange Juice). Dub From Creation was originally released on pre-On-U Sound label Hitrun in 1978. Recommended for fans of Scientist, King Tubby and the Wackies label. A classic of the genre unavailable on vinyl since original release and now commanding high prices second-hand. Feeling quiet nostalgic and honoured that this one came my way for a review as it is choc a bloc with memories of dubbist sessions from the late 70s and 80s, whence as a student of the I ‘n’ I music vibes I would literally close my ears to virtually everything else. As long as it was dub it was dubbed. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Dub From Creation, Frontline Dub, Rebel Rouser

Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented

 

“‘We regarded ourselves as engineers, we maintained that we were building things…we put our works together like fitters.’ So declared the artist Hannah Höch, describing a radically new approach to artmaking in the 1920s and ’30s. Such wholesale reinvention of the role of the artist and the functions of art took place in lockstep with that era’s shifts in industry, technology, and labor, and amid the profound impact of momentous events: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the rise of fascism. Highlighting figures such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova, John Heartfield, and Fré Cohen, Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented demonstrates the ways in which artists reimagined their roles to create a dynamic art for a new world. ...”

MoMA (Video)

NY Times: The Artists Who Redesigned a War-Shattered Europe

amazon

​‘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