2009 April: Coney Island, 2010 July: Nathan's Famous, 2011 March: "An Underground Movement: Designers, Builders, Riders", Owen Smith, 2013 August: Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze, 2013 October: Last Days of Summer at Coney Island, 2014 July: Coney Island - Directors: Steve Siegel and Phil Buehler (1973), 2015 May: The Case for Riding the Subway to the Last Stop, 2016 December: Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008, 2017 August: Here's What Coney Island Looks Like In The Empty Pre-Dawn Hours, 2019 August: Pierless, 2021 July: The 1916 stunt that made Nathan’s Famous a Coney Island hot dog icon
An 1873 map shows rural Brooklyn on the cusp of big changes
Road - Fred Frith Trio (2021)
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021)
2021 April: The 1619 Project
In Willem de Kooning’s Loft at the Dawn of Bohemian New York
The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011 - Edith Schloss
Coffee or Chai? At 2 Kolkata Cafes, ‘Adda’ Is What’s Really on the Menu
“KOLKATA, India — At one of the cafes, to ask for chai is to invite a gaze of withering contempt from the turbaned waiter, as if blasphemy has been committed: It’s called the Indian Coffee House, stupid. At the other cafe, exclusively chai is served, slow-cooked over coal fire in the same dark kitchen for 103 years with the silent care of performing an old ritual. The history of this place, the Favorite Cabin, is visible in the layers of soot covering the walls, in the arched windows that filter the light in a soft aura of a bygone time, in the little attic overhead that’s an open burial vault for all the chairs broken under some storied customer who got carried away during a passionate debate. ...”
Legendary DJ John Peel Makes a List of His 20 Favorite Albums
2012 June: John Peel
The Art of Reading: An Illustrated History of Books in Paint
Thanksgiving with John Ehle
Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading - Anjali Joseph
2012 August: On Cataloguing Flaubert, 2013 March: Sentimental Education - 1(1869), 2016 December: Three Tales (1877), 2017 August: The Sentimental Education (1869), 2018 May: In Which Our Tragic Effects Remain Purely Professional, 2019 March: The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1911)
Negativland Is Still Culture Jamming and Taking on Our Masters
UbuWeb: Our Favorite Things (Video) 1:18:11
2009 March: Negativland, 2012 January: Negativland (sound collage), 2012 December: No Other Possibility (1989), 2013 November: No Business (2005)
Drone Music, Stretched and Sliced
Off the Beaten Track - African Head Charge (1986)
Solskjaer Out at Manchester United After a Loss Too Far
A Friend, An Enemy
How German Expressionism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Camera Shot That Defined Classic Films by Welles, Hitchock, Tarantino & More
Sylvère Lotringer (1938 – 2021)
Radical Tea Towel
Did a Comet Explode Over South America 12000 Years Ago?
“A decade ago, researchers discovered huge chunks and slabs of dark green and black glass strewn across a 75 kilometer–long swath of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. New evidence suggests they were created by an incoming fireball.The glass pieces are uncannily similar to trinitite, the glassy mineral forged by the heat of the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert in 1945. Carbon-14 dating of organic matter in soil directly beneath and in contact with the glass indicated that the chunks formed about 12,000 years ago, when the area was a grassy wetland dotted with trees. ...”
The Avon Bard series of Latin American literature
Whatever Happened to the New York Auteur?
“... The city was his first subject. (Martin) Scorsese is what has been called a New York auteur; wherever else his moviemaking jones has taken him, he always returns to the city. He has been, in fact, part of a lineage of New York filmmakers—voices that have found their quintessence on the street corners and rooftops, in the long bars and half-finished lofts and too-small apartments and late-night diners and subway cars. Ever since the postwar era found its footing culturally, the New York auteur has been a vital megafauna in American film, the calloused, smart-mouthed countercharge to the homogenized, corporatized Hollywood model of film artist. But look around, in 2021: Where are they? ...”
25 Essential Jazz Soundtracks You Should Own
The lovely Art Nouveau window grille on a Riverside Drive row house
My Own Jazz: An Interview With A Guy Called Gerald
Nomadland - Chloé Zhao (2020)
The Rumba Kings
College Basketball Begins With Plenty of Changes
Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship
“Wilston Vilchez, a third-generation coffee farmer in the mountains of Nicaragua, has witnessed drastic climatic changes on his 25-acre coffee and cacao farm for years, but when two hurricanes hit within 15 days last year, many other farmers he knows realized they needed to be part of the solution. ... Mr. Vilchez, who also manages an agricultural cooperative of about 300 farmers, said that the effects of climate change — rising temperatures, less predictable rainfall, wild swings from drought to flooding, new pests and more — were making it more and more difficult to earn a living from coffee, an experience felt by farmers around the world. ...”
2010 September: Espresso, 2013 April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard, 2021 July: The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, August 2021: The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented, 2021 October: Brew: A Brief History of Coffee
How Kraftwerk Made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
“... In this vein, we might call German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk a ‘seminal matrix’ of musical activity, an economy of creative work led by two fathers — Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter — who midwived a techno/electro revolution, and — indirectly — through early spin-off projects like NEU!, an experimental post-punk/New Wave revolution. The best known of the ‘Krautrock’ bands to emerge in the 1970s, early versions of Kraftwerk included in its ranks German producer Conny Plank (unofficially) as well as drummer Klaus Dinger, and guitarist Michael Rother, both of whom went on to play in the aforementioned NEU! and ‘seminal’ avant-garde bands like Harmonia and La Düsseldorf. ...”
2008 April: Kraftwerk, 2011 March: Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution, 2011 March: Kraftwerk - Documentary, 2011 April: Krautrock: The Rebirth of Germany, 2011 May: Autobahn, 2011 October: Trans-Europe Express, 2012 February: Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, 2012 October: Radio-Activity, 2014 May: "The Telephone Call" (1987), 2014 November: Kraftwerk - live at Cirkus, Stockholm, 2020 September: Tour de France Soundtracks (2003), 2020 October: Fassbinder and Kraftwerk: A Marriage Made in a New Germany