​Museum rivalry ‘could make Dutch Vermeer show last of its kind’

 

Girl with a Pearl Earring will be loaned to the Rijksmuseum from the Mauritshuis in The Hague.

“Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has announced a ‘first and last’ exhibition of all the paintings by Johannes Vermeer that are fit to travel, as its director claimed growing museum rivalry makes such international cooperation unlikely in the future. Vermeer, whose most famous work is Girl with a Pearl Earring, dating from around 1665, is thought to have painted 35 masterpieces, of which 23 were shown together 26 years ago at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum director, said his institution would surpass that number but he did not expect such a collection to ever be possible again owing to the age of the works and the intense competition among galleries to draw in visitors. ...”

Guardian

2009 September: Vermeer's Masterpiece, The Milkmaid, 2011 February: Vermeer: Master of Light, 2013 October: Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, 2015 December: This Is Not a Vermeer ™, 2017 January: The Art of Painting (1665–1668)

 

Detail from The Little Street, circa 1658.

​Best Ornette Coleman Pieces: Songs of Limitless Creativity

“Ornette Coleman is regarded as one of the great pioneers of free jazz, a genre that emerged in the late 1950s and continues to influence music today. Perhaps his most famous record is The Shape of Jazz to Come, a prophetically titled album that remains an essential listen for anyone looking to learn about free jazz. ... If the record sounds fairly tame and accessible to our ears today, that’s because of its impact. Shape literally changed the way jazz musicians thought about jazz. At the time, though, Coleman’s approach of taking away chordal instruments (e.g. piano) and emphasizing melody over harmony was completely alien. Coleman called his philosophy for improvisation ‘harmolodics.’ Unlike his peers, for whom improvisation was driven primarily by harmony, Coleman considered harmony, melody, speed, rhythm, time, and phrases as separate entities worthy of investigation. ...”

udiscover (Video)

2019 July: Complete Science Fiction Sessions (2000), 2020 July: How Ornette Coleman Shaped the Jazz World: An Introduction to His Irreverent Sound, 2020 July: How Ornette Coleman Freed Jazz with His Theory of Harmolodics

December: Geminid Meteors & Comet Leonard

“This month’s night sky features two appearances that are sure to capture your attention. One is the annual display of Geminid meteors, which always challenges August’s Perseids for the title of ‘Best Meteor Shower.’ Our Sky Tour podcast gives you all the details you’ll nee for when and where to look.The second celestial headliner is Comet Leonard (officially designated C/2021 A1), which was discovered last January and is just now reaching its peak brightness. ... The western evening sky is packed with planets right now. As twilight gives way to full darkness, Venus is unmistakably bright low in the southwest. Well to its upper left you’ll encounter a bright, easy-to-spot 'star' that’s actually the planet Jupiter. ...”

Sky & Telescope (Audio)

Who is the best player from each of England’s 48 counties?

 

"England’s system of counties is rarely discussed in relation to professional football. If you say you support Surrey or Lancashire or Worcestershire, you are clearly talking about cricket rather than football. England’s second sport is played by sides who take their names from the county they’re based in, but football is contested by teams almost universally named after cities and towns. There are, of course, Notts County and Derby County; Notts literally being the name of the county and Derby representing the county of Derbyshire. Things become more complex when you consider Stockport County, named because Stockport was once a ‘county borough’, independent from control of any wider county, and across the border in Wales there’s Newport County, originally named Newport & Monmouth County, after the historic county of Monmouthshire. ..."

The Athletic - Michael Cox

Doll’s House - Courtney Harris

 

“Have I always loved small things? I’ve asked myself that question many times over the past few years as my obsession with all things miniature has grown and grown. I was certainly interested in tiny objects before the doll’s house arrived at the MFA in 2017 thanks to the generosity of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, but its appearance and immediate integration into our galleries fanned the flames of my growing love for everything small. An object like the doll’s house is full—literally and figuratively—with opportunity. Opportunities for research, for study, for connection, for exploration. With nine rooms and more than 200 silver miniatures, it begs for repeat visits. This house has become a living object to me—one I come back to time and time again. I probably speak, write, and think about this artwork more than any other in the Museum. ...”

MFA

2013 April: Dollhouse

Why the Discredited Dossier Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation

 

“Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have stepped up an effort to conflate the so-called Steele dossier with the Russia investigation following the indictment of a researcher for the document on charges that he lied to the F.B.I. about some of its sources.Mr. Trump and his supporters have long sought to use the flaws of the dossier to discredit the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — and the nature of numerous links between Russia and the Trump campaign — as a ‘hoax.’ But the available evidence indicates that the dossier was largely tangential to the Russia investigation. Here is a look at the facts. ...”

NY Times

Why the Discredited File Does Not Undercut the Russia Investigation

NY Times: Trump Tested Positive for Virus Days Before Debate, 2 Ex-Officials Say

African Guitar Heroes

 

Dr Nico Kasanda

“Let’s kick it off with Djelimady Tounkara, one of the best instrumentalists of his generation, who happens to play the guitar. The former member of the Rail Band of Bamako has managed to make his instrument take on the accents and triplets he previously learnt on the ngoni, the Mandingo lute, and even makes it flirt with flamenco and Afro-Cuban sounds. While Mali is not lacking in six-string talent (the eternal Ali Farka Touré, father of Saharan-accented deep blues, Kante Manfila, Zani Diabaté, and Mama Sissoko, who was part of Super Biton of Ségou’s best days), the best sounds are coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Listen to our African Guitar Heroes playlist on Spotify and Deezer. ...”

PAN (Audio)

​Wild Things – The Creatures EP (1981)

 

“Wild Things is the first release by British duo the Creatures (singer Siouxsie Sioux and drummer Budgie). It was issued on 25 September 1981 by Polydor Records as two 7″ single records in a ‘double-album’ style card cover, and is usually referred to as an EP. It peaked in the UK Singles Chart at No. 24, and the pair performed ‘Mad Eyed Screamer’ on Top of the Pops. … The initial idea for Wild Things, and the Creatures, came about during the recording sessions for the Siouxsie and the Banshees album Juju. While bassist Steven Severin and guitarist John McGeoch took a break, Siouxsie and drummer Budgie created the song ‘But Not Them.’ ...”

Wikipedia

Genius (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Mad Eyed Screamer (Live), So Unreal, Wild Things

2017 April: "Hong Kong Garden" / "Voices (On The Air)" (1978), 2017 September: "Playground Twist" (1979), 2018 October: Juju – Siouxsie and the Banshees (1981)

Gilbert Sorrentino - The Orangery (1978)

 

“... The Orangery is one of [Gilbert] Sorrentino’s most memorable collections of poetry. Each poem includes the word ‘orange,’ the ‘preconceived constraint’ upon which the poet planned this book. Orange appears and reappears as a color, a fruit, a memory, an intrusion, a word seeking a rhyme, or an unexpected presence. On first publication William Bronk wrote, ‘In The Orangery Sorrentino makes things which are hard, gaudy, and sometimes scary. They are stark artifacts of our world. . . . They are made to last.’ The poem titled ‘King Cole’ takes two lines from a song that Nat King Cole made popular—’Wham! Bam! Alla Kazam!/ out of an orange colored sky’—and focuses on the nonsense words. ...”

Analysis of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Poems

Rogue Embryo

W - Gilbert Sorrentino

amazon

​An 1873 map shows rural Brooklyn on the cusp of big changes

 

“I can’t help but get lost in the Beers Map of Gravesend. Drawn in 1873 by cartographer Frederick Beers, it’s an impressive survey of one of the original six towns of Brooklyn—founded in 1643 by English-born Lady Deborah Moody and her group of Anabaptist followers, according to heartofconeyisland.com. What amazes me most is how rural this pocket of southern Brooklyn was in the 1870s—and how much change was right on the horizon. (If you can’t magnify the map above, try visiting this link.) First, look at that craggy shoreline of Coney Island. At some point, as Coney transitioned into the beach resort dubbed the People’s Playground in the next few decades, all those inlets and little islands were filled in and straightened out—including Coney Island Creek, making Coney no longer an island. ...”

Ephemeral New York

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

Road - Fred Frith Trio (2021)

 

“Road is a live album recorded as a double CD by the Fred Frith Trio, with Fred Frith on electric guitar, Jason Hoopes on electric bass, and Jordan Glenn on drums. It was released on October 15, 2021, on Intakt Records. ... The first CD is somehow more accessible—at least, the first part of the suite—compared to what Fred Frith usually releases. It starts with some jazz-rock parts, sounding like an instrumental version of Frank Zappa or King Crimson, but then it moves more and more towards experimental jazz, luring us into it and helping us understand the connections and progressions, stepping into the Trio’s other dimension. Fred Frith often blurs the line between jazz and rock, but in this case, it really makes a good entry point into his world, and the sound—even though it was recorded live—is just amazing, purely electrifying. ...”

Best of Jazz (Audio)

W - Fred Frith Trio

Discogs

Bandcamp (Audio)

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021)

 

“Has a book ever come into the world when at least four other books were already in print attacking it? Admittedly, these broadsides were against earlier incarnations of The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which appeared in this newspaper two years ago, followed by a podcast, public forums, lesson plans for schools and a Pulitzer Prize for the originator, Nikole Hannah-Jones. The project asserted that the full origin story of the United States begins not with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, but with that of the White Lion and its cargo of captive Africans in Virginia the year before. This declaration provoked a Twitter firestorm of angry accusations from critics and combative replies from Hannah-Jones. ... The appearance now of an expanded version of the project in book form is sure to provoke yet more assaults. I picked up ‘The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story’ with some apprehension. Not because I disagree with the project’s basic aim, but because I had been troubled by some overstatements and factual errors in the newspaper version, such as the claim that there were ‘growing calls to abolish the slave trade’ in Britain in 1776. ...”

NY Times: A Landmark Reckoning With America’s Racial Past and Present

NY Times: The 1619 Project and the Long Battle Over U.S. History (Audio) (Nov. 9, 2021)

SLATE: The New 1619 Project (Nov. 16, 2021)

amazon: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

2021 April: The 1619 Project

 

A panel by Jacob Lawrence from his series “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954-56)

​In Willem de Kooning’s Loft at the Dawn of Bohemian New York

 

“When I first met her, I did not recognize her. The truth is, I did not even care for her. It was in Elaine and Willem (Bill) De Kooning’s loft—in 1943 or 1944—on an icy New York winter’s day. I was going to the Art Students League. Bill was about forty, she and I were in our twenties, and I had just come from the first loft I had ever laid eyes on, which I then had no idea I would ever call my own. Coming from Europe, I believed in abstraction. The Art Students League and the few galleries up and down Fifty-Seventh Street showed figuration—pensive and sad or acid and lurid, of men and women in sweatshops, in subways, and on farms, the exploited exhausted by the Depression—or modern French masters. But the first art show I ever saw in my life had been a Paul Klee exhibition in the Buchholz Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street, where they also showed the severe, neat Cubism of Juan Gris. I was hungry for more abstraction. ...”

LitHub

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly: Portraits and Sketches, 1942-2011 - Edith Schloss

From Willem de Kooning’s loft to the threat of the wrecking ball: The history of 827-831 Broadway

W - Willem de Kooning

 

Willem and Elaine de Kooning with a state of Excavation in his Fourth Avenue studio, c. 1949.

​Coffee or Chai? At 2 Kolkata Cafes, ‘Adda’ Is What’s Really on the Menu

 

The Indian Coffee House in Kolkata, India, has a storied history as a place for intellectuals to gather, and debate.

“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. ...”

NY Times

W - Masala chai

Legendary DJ John Peel Makes a List of His 20 Favorite Albums

 

“Before there were influencers, there was John Peel. The BBC radio DJ and journeyman music writer’s tastes helped define listening habits for generations — from his early championing of Pink Floyd and Captain Beefheart to his early championing of The Smiths and Nirvana, to… well, most everything he played, wrote about and recorded in his legendary John Peel sessions from the 1960s until his death in 2004. For someone with such influence, Peel had a singularly humble attitude about his own importance and that of music tastemakers generally. ...”

Open Culture

2012 June: John Peel

​The Art of Reading: An Illustrated History of Books in Paint

 

“‘Why do artists love books?’ This volume takes this tantalizingly simple question as a starting point to reveal centuries of symbiosis between the visual and literary arts. First looking at the development of printed books and the simultaneous emergence of the modern figure of the artist, The Art of Reading appraises works by the many great masters who took inspiration from the printed word. Authors Jamie Camplin and Maria Ranauro weave together an engaging cultural history that probes the ways in which books and paintings represent a key to understanding ourselves and the past. Paintings contain a world of information about religion, class, gender, and power, but they also reveal details of everyday life often lost in history texts. Such artworks show us not only how books have been valued over time but also how the practice of reading has evolved in Western society. ...”

Getty

amazon

Thanksgiving with John Ehle

 

“The Land Breakers, by John Ehle (1925–2018), the first in the author’s ‘Mountain Novels’ series, is a story of America’s founding, set in the mountains of Appalachia and full of the hardscrabble food of the early settlements—wild turkey hen, deer meat, corn pone. These dishes are historically accurate, like Ehle’s work, but diverge from those traditionally associated with the early American table, at least those represented on holidays like Thanksgiving. Ehle’s novels depart from our traditional patriotic fare in more ways than one: they’re mythic, like all origin stories, but hold a broad view of who should take part in them, and honor the country’s origin without diminishing its moral complexity. To me his food suggested an opportunity for a better Thanksgiving, a project which also allowed me to make cornbread in a skillet, serve an entrée in a gourd, and offer an authentic recipe for buckeye cookies found nowhere else on the Internet. ...”

The Paris Review - Valerie Stivers

The Paris Review - Category Archives: Eat Your Words

Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading - Anjali Joseph

 

“The first time I read Madame Bovary I was fourteen or fifteen. My family lived in England; at school I was learning French. Denise King, my French teacher, lent me her copy of the book, which was the one she’d used in university. I think it was a Gallimard paperback, but not a pocket edition. It had a primrose yellow cover with no picture. The paper was thick. Denise, as an undergraduate, had looked up all the words she didn’t know, and written the English in the margin. The novel is not written in very complicated language but it was a stretch for me at that point. I wasn’t very comfortable with the past historic tense which is usually only used in written French. The reward for wading through the book was a story about a depressing guy named Charles in rural nineteenth century Normandy. ...”

Literary Activism

LA Review of Books: Reading Madame Bovary in the Provinces

The Paris Review: Trust and Betrayal by Lydia Davis, amazon: Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

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

 

“It's understandable that you might know Negativland only for the controversial moments of their career -- the mockery of U2, which got them into legal trouble, or their satire on the soft-drink industry in the album Dispepsi. And maybe you've even heard about their pranks on the news media. If you're a longtime Bay Area resident, maybe you've caught their radio show, Over the Edge, on KPFA, though you might not have known who the masterminds behind it were. If that describes your level of awareness, here's something else you need to know: Negativland is a great band. ...”

KQED

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

 

“In late 2017, when David First announced a drone-music performance in Brooklyn, I circled the date on my calendar. ... The nearly two-hour work he performed in Brooklyn in 2017, ‘The Consummation of Right and Wrong,’ was more consistently active and surprising than a lot of contemporary drone music. Yet it still carried that genre’s powerful, cumulative effect, with the easy instrumental interplay that is only possible from a well-drilled working band, recalling Mr. First’s past engagements with jazz. The final version of ‘Consummation,’ released this month by Important Records, is even more impressive. One major reason is that it’s no longer a continuous extravaganza. The album’s first 98 minutes are now divided into discrete ‘scenes,’ which fade in and out. ...”

NY Times (Video/Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs

vimeo: The Consummation of Right and Wrong (9:50 excerpts) David First/The Western Enisphere (Live)

Off the Beaten Track - African Head Charge (1986)

 

“In 1986, when African Head Charge released this album it was a newly remade ensemble lead by a percussionist and including a live kit drums, melodica/keyboardist, and bass backed by samples and tape loops. The resulting album still sounds modern, fresh, and innovative in the electronica plethora. Programmed chants and unexpected sounds (barking dogs, breaking glass, etc.) are salient features of this rhythmic, international dub. Particularly strong tracks are the title cut (featuring Jah Wobble on bass) and the ambient selection ‘Language & Mentality,’ crafted around an Albert Einstein monologue of the same name. These lengthy and dense loops and samples are showcased in attenuated, flowing rhythm beds. Largely made of slinky rhythms from a segmented funk, Off the Beaten Track is both a landmark recording in the use of sound-bite technology and an excellent example of the integration of live instrumentation and programmed music. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

​Solskjaer Out at Manchester United After a Loss Too Far

 

“Manchester United had not done it after a humiliation by Liverpool. And the club’s executives had managed to tolerate the sight of Manchester City’s cruising to victory at Old Trafford while barely breaking a sweat. After each defeat, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the manager who had overseen both calamities, somehow remained in his post. He could not, though, survive a third. Solskjaer had promised, two weeks on since that defeat against Manchester City, that his team would react, that it would use the embarrassment as fuel for the rest of the season. ...”

NY Times

A Friend, An Enemy

 

“On April Fool's Day, 1965, Amiri Baraka (known then as LeRoi Jones) sent a postcard to the poet Kenneth Koch. The image on the front of the postcard is racist: three alligators chase a Black man, who looks up to heaven with tears streaming down his face. A four-line poem presents his ‘prayer’: Dese gater looked so feary / And yet dey 'peered so tame / But now that I done met 'em / I'll neber be de same. According to the Newberry Library, the Curt Teich Company began producing postcards with this image in 1940. But Teich produced similar postcards as early as 1918, and the ‘alligator bait’ stereotype has a much longer history. On the back of the postcard, Baraka writes: Dear Kenneth,  Better start saying your prayers, if you think you can spend your time playing chess while millions struggle!  Love, LeRoi 2X  The postcard was sent to Koch's apartment at 69 Perry Street in New York's West Village, using a five cents John Kennedy stamp. ... What kind of April Fool's Day joke was this? Was the postcard even a joke? Or was it a threat? The case for reading the postcard as a joke is precarious, yet plausible. We have the date. We know that Baraka and Koch were friends. ...”

Post45

How German Expressionism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Camera Shot That Defined Classic Films by Welles, Hitchock, Tarantino & More

 

“Expressionism was an art movement that set out to take the internal—emotions, the human condition itself—and make it external, with paintings that made no attempt to recreate reality. It was a break with the classical schools of art that had come before. It was modern, very modern, very colorful, and exciting as hell. And it was soon to run headlong into that most modern of art forms, filmmaking, in the 1920s.In the above mini-doc on the Dutch Angle, that canted framing so beloved of film noir, and apparently every shot in the first Thor movie, Vox traces its roots back to Expressionism, and particularly back to Germany of the 1910s where schools like Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were assaulting realism with brutal paintings. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

MoMA: German Expressionist (Video)

W - Dutch angle

Sylvère Lotringer (1938 – 2021)

 

“Sylvère Lotringer (15 October 1938 – 8 November 2021) was a French born literary critic and cultural theorist. Initially based in New York City, he later lived in Los Angeles and Baja California, Mexico. He is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements as founder of the journal Semiotext(e) and for his interpretations of theory in a 21st-century context. He is regarded as an influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, among others. ... In 1964, he entered the École Pratique des Hautes Études, VIe section (Sociology) writing a doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf's novels under the supervision of Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldmann. ...”

Wikipedia

Theory Daddy

Semiotext(e) written by Entropy

MIT Press: Sylvère Lotringer

Frieze: Sylvère Lotringer

 

This is the nineteenth in Entropy’s small press interview series, where we ask editors about their origins, their mission, and what it’s like to run a press.

​Radical Tea Towel

 

“... I received a very nice note and thanks from the co-owner of the Radical Tea Towel Company for my mentioning them in my previous post about tea towels.  ... Since we humans first emerged from the primeval swamps we’ve needed to keep our cooking utensils dry. No wonder we’ve developed such a fascination with that most fundamental of accessories, the tea towel – or dish towel as it is sometimes called in the US.Fast forward to the 18th century. The tea towel has reached the pinnacle of its perfection (never again to be matched until the arrival on the scene of the Radical Tea Towel Company in the 21st century).Tea towels are now gracing the highest tables of the land and are made of linen, a delicate fibre derived from the flax of linseed plants. ...”

Tea Towel History – The Radical Tea Towel Company

Radical Tea Towel

​Did a Comet Explode Over South America 12000 Years Ago?

 

This twisted glass slab was found in Puquio de Núñez

“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. ...”

Sky & Telescope

The Avon Bard series of Latin American literature

 

“The Avon Bard series of Latin American literature was a unique publishing venture for its time, for any time really. Their assemblage of extraordinary titles from authors all over Latin America translated by many of the finest translators -  Gregory Rabassa, Harriet De Onis, Barbara Shelby Merello, and Alfred MacAdam to name a few - allowed an American reading public to experience a literature that had not benefited from the level of exposure that some other world literatures had traditionally enjoyed. The professed goal of the imprint was to publish ‘distinguished Latin American Literature’, and that they did. ...”

Zenosbooks

​Whatever Happened to the New York Auteur?

 

Sal’s Famous Pizzeria—we’ve all been there. Spike Lee and Danny Aiello in 'Do The Right Thing' (1989).

“... 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? ...”

Voice

​25 Essential Jazz Soundtracks You Should Own

 

“What American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described as the Jazz Age coincided with the demise of silent movies and the birth of talking pictures in the late 20s. In fact, the very first full-length motion picture with synchronized sound was 1927’s groundbreaking flick The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. Though in musical terms it featured very little of what we recognize today as jazz, it began a long and often fruitful relationship between jazz and the cinema, with many of the best jazz soundtracks now recognised as classic albums in their own right. ...”

udiscover (Video)

​The lovely Art Nouveau window grille on a Riverside Drive row house

 

“There’s a lot of enchantment on Riverside Drive, the rare Manhattan avenue that deviates from the 1811 Commissioners Plan that laid out the mostly undeveloped city based on a pretty rigid street grid. Rather than running straight up and down, Riverside winds along its namesake park, breaking off into slender carriage roads high above the Hudson River. (We have Central Park co-designer Frederick Law Olmsted, who also conceptualized Riverside Park and what was originally called Riverside Avenue, to thank for this.) ...”

Ephemeral New York

​My Own Jazz: An Interview With A Guy Called Gerald

 

“It is hard to speak about some cult figures without coming across like a complete fan boy. Even more so, if the person in question is not only a leading figure of the early UK acid house scene; the author of ‘Voodoo Ray’, arguably one of the most influential dance music tracks of all time; but also one of the pioneers of early breakbeat science, who in 1995 delivered Black Secret Technology, one of the most singular jungle albums ever released. Luckily, in the case of Gerald Simpson, aka A Guy Called Gerald, it becomes much easier when you actually get to speak with them, and realise how nice they are in person, seemingly unaltered by their awe‐inspiring legacy. ...”

The Quietus (Video)

W - A Guy Called Gerald

Discogs

Nomadland - Chloé Zhao (2020)

 

“Nomadland is a 2020 American drama film written for the screen, produced, edited, and directed by Chloé Zhao. Based on the 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder, the film stars Frances McDormand (who is also a producer on the film) as a van-dwelling working nomad who leaves her home after her husband dies and the sole industry in her town closes down, to be 'houseless' and travel around the United States. David Strathairn also stars in a supporting role. A number of real-life nomads appear as fictionalized versions of themselves, including Linda May, Swankie, and Bob Wells. ...”

Wikipedia

NY Times - ‘Nomadland’ Review: The Unsettled Americans (Video)

Guardian - ‘It’s an utter myth’: how Nomadland exposes the cult of the western

amazon

W - Nomadland (book), amazon