The Five Kingdoms of Football
Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now
NY Times: The Capitol Police and the Scars of Jan. 6. (Audio) “On the morning of Jan. 6, Caroline Edwards, a 31-year-old United States Capitol Police officer, was stationed by some stairs on the Capitol grounds when the energy of the crowd in front of her seemed to take on a different shape; it was like that moment when rain suddenly becomes hail. A loud, sour-sounding horn bleated, piercing through the noise of the crowd, whose cries coalesced into an accusatory chant: ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’ ...”
VOX: How does this end? “Americans have long believed our country to be exceptional. That is true today in perhaps the worst possible sense: No other established Western democracy is at such risk of democratic collapse. January 6, 2021, should have been a pivot point. The Capitol riot was the violent culmination of President Donald Trump and his Republican allies’ war on the legitimacy of American elections — but also a glimpse into the abyss that could have prompted the rest of the party to step away. Yet the GOP’s fever didn’t break that day. ...”
Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate Over Colors
“Exploring the surprising but steady opposition to printed color in nineteenth-century France, Hue & Cry showcases the Clark’s extraordinary holdings of French color prints by artists including Pierre Bonnard, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Jules Chéret, Maurice Denis, Camille Pissarro, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edouard Vuillard.Brightly colored prints and posters, synonymous with Belle Époque Paris in the 1890s, remain beloved images in our own era. Yet their extreme popular appeal masks the fact that, for a very long time, color in print was an outlier phenomenon. Not only was printed color difficult and expensive to achieve, it was also frowned upon as a matter of aesthetic taste. ...”
Long Live the Microcinema
“About a decade ago, I went to see Welcome, or No Trespassing at Spectacle. It’s still the only time I’ve known anyone to project the movie, a 1964 satire of Soviet summer camps that was the debut feature of Elem Klimov (Come and See). Walking into the compact space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I remember there being only two or three other people among the cluster of seats, and I thought I spotted a sink just behind the screen, but really, the room was immediately recognizable as a cinema. ... Though the term ‘microcinema’ has been applied since the 1990s to describe local DIY spaces or series curated with an idiosyncratic mix of programming (whether little- or well-known movies), the word has always had too clinical a ring for such spaces and their cozy, communal, handmade, human feel. ...”
This 1930 neon hotel sign still illuminates East 42nd Street
Hania Rani
YouTube: Hania Rani & Dobrawa Czocher – Malasana (Official Music Video), Hania Rani & Dobrawa Czocher – Con Moto, Hania Rani - Ombelico, F major (live) | Detect Classic Sessions
2021 April: Live from Studio S2 (2021)
Fassbinder and the Red Army Faction
“Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day is not Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s most renowned work, but it’s certainly the legendary German filmmaker’s most politically sophisticated. The five-part television series revolves around a cast of working-class characters in Cologne: the young toolmaker Jochen, his coworkers, his family, and his girlfriend, Marion. Over the course of the series, the factory workers, led by the popular Jochen with encouragement from the inquisitive and principled Marion, grow increasingly determined to assert control over the production process and take a bigger share of the profits. The series aired on West German public television in the fall of 1972. ...”
2014 May: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2014 June: Effi Briest (1974), 2014 July: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), 2014 September: A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema, 2014 October: Lola - (1981 BRD Trilogy), 2014 October: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979 BRD Trilogy), 2014 December: Veronika Voss (1982 - BRD Trilogy), 2015 January: Digital Anthology: Rainer Werner Fassbinder - $0.99, 2016 February: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), 2019 June: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), 2020 October: Fassbinder and Kraftwerk: A Marriage Made in a New Germany
When a Master Printer Picks Up the Camera
“Is technical wizardry enough to make someone an artist? Richard Benson was unrivaled as a printer of photographs before he became a photographer. Hired in his early twenties by an art-book printing company to make halftone negatives to run on an offset press, he realized, as he later wrote, ‘I couldn’t understand printing without first mastering photography, and so my career began.’ At the time of his death at 73 in 2017, Benson profoundly understood the processes and techniques of photographic printing. He was also a beloved professor and dean at Yale. His own work with a camera, however, received less attention. ...”
Common Ground vol.1 (2021)
Tour 15 of the Brightest Stars on New Year's Eve
“Tour 15 of the sky’s brightest stars all in one night on this New Year’s Eve! This interactive Worldwide Telescope video will show you the way. Every year around the winter solstice, all 15 of the northern night sky’s brightest stars – those first-magnitude and brighter – are above the horizon and visible sometime between sunset and sunrise. Get the New Year off to a good start by coming along with Scott Levine and the Worldwide Telescope on our interactive video tour! ...”
Black Print
Photos Of BSA 2021
“An earliest New York street artist – socio/political commentator, John Fekner has battled through many wars and storms in this city over the last four decades. Despite the hardships we’re enduring with Covid and economic near-collapse, we trust Fekner when he reassures us simply in his forthright unadorned stencil style. ...”
The Same Old Song: A Guide to Neonoir
”When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously mythic and fatalistic about the American crime fiction tradition: the idea of cautionary tales being told at street level. ... The same anxious malaise inflecting detective stories of Depression-era novelists like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—whose twisty plots doubled as picaresque guided tours through a newfangled urban wilderness—would manifest in the flow of postwar thrillers that either literally adapted their contents or else reconfigured their themes for a visual medium. Stories set in moral grey zones and gritty environments were transformed into cinematic shadow plays by filmmakers who recognized and exploited the material’s expressionist potential. ...”
2018 September: Neo-noir
Art Ensemble of Chicago - Certain Blacks (1970; 2004)
Siren (mythology)
“In Greek mythology, the sirens (Ancient Greek: singular: Σειρήν, Seirḗn; plural: Σειρῆνες, Seirênes) were dangerous creatures, who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island. It is also said that they can even charm the winds. Roman poets placed them on some small islands called Sirenum scopuli. In some later, rationalized traditions, the literal geography of the ‘flowery’ island of Anthemoessa, or Anthemusa, is fixed: sometimes on Cape Pelorum and at others in the islands known as the Sirenuse, near Paestum, or in Capreae. All such locations were surrounded by cliffs and rocks. ...”
Various Artists – Cryo Chamber Collaboration – Dagon (2021)
Street Views | Kim Beil
“City streets seemed eerily empty in the early years of photography. During minutes-long exposures, carriage traffic and even ambling pedestrians blurred into nonexistence. The only subjects that remained were those that stood still: buildings, trees, the road itself. In one famous image, a bootblack and his customer appear to be the lone survivors on a Parisian boulevard. When shorter exposure times were finally possible in the late 1850s, a British photographer marveled: ‘Views in distant and picturesque cities will not seem plague-stricken, by the deserted aspect of their streets and squares, but will appear alive with the busy throng of their motley populations.’ ...”
James White And The Blacks - Off White (1979)
2009 December: James Chance, 2011 December: No New York, 2014 July: No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980, 2014 July: Bush Tetras, 2015 January: Buy - James Chance and the Contortions (1979), 2015 October: Pat Place, 2016 January: Lost Chance (1981), 2017 January: Twist Your Soul: The Definitive Collection (2010), 2017 April: Contort Yourself / (Tropical) Heatwave full 12” (1979), 2017 May: Filmed by Libin+Cameron: James White & The Blacks (1980 Live Performance Hurrah NightClub), 2017 August: Live Aux Bains Douches - Paris 1980, 2017 September: Soul Exorcism Redux - James Chance & The Contortions (2007)
An Impressionist artist captures the rural feel of early 1900s Upper Manhattan
“Throughout his life, painter Ernest Lawson lived in many places. Born in Halifax in 1873, Lawson moved to New York at 18 to take classes at the Art Students League. Over the years he studied and worked in Connecticut, Paris, Colorado, Spain, New Mexico, and finally Florida, where his body was found on Miami Beach in 1939—possibly a homicide or suicide. But if there was one location that seemed to intrigue him, it was Upper Manhattan—the bridges and houses, the woods, rugged terrain, and of course, the rivers. From 1898 to about 1908, while fellow Ashcan School artists focused their attention on crowded sidewalks and gritty tenements, Lawson lived in sparsely populated Washington Heights, drawing out the rural beauty and charm of the last part of Manhattan to be subsumed into the cityscape. ...”
The 10 Worst Americans of 2021
“At this time of year we traditionally reflect upon our blessings and forgive those who have trespassed against us. But we’ve been trying that for millennia, and the results have been unsatisfactory. So let’s discard the accumulated wisdom of all humanity’s spiritual traditions and focus our mental energy instead on how much we dislike various awful people around us. Merry Christmas. ...”
Edward Said’s Orientalism and Its Afterlives
“Few works have had a greater influence on the current left than Edward Said’s Orientalism. In the first instance, it has become the lodestone for critical scholarship around the colonial experience and imperialism. But more expansively, in its status as a founding text of postcolonial studies, its imprint can be discerned across the moral sciences — in race studies, history, cultural theory, and even political economy. Indeed, it is hard to think of many books that have had a greater influence on critical scholarship over the past half century. There are some respects in which Said’s placement of colonialism at the center of the modern era has had a salutary effect, not just on scholarship, but also on politics. ...”
2018 April: Orientalism - Edward W. Said (1978), 2019 January: Orientalism’s Equestrian Eye, 2020 April: A Journey into the World of the Ottomans
Space Is the Place - John Coney (1974)
Bump & Hustle Music - Various (2021)
Snowball Fights in Art (1400–1946)
“Few seasonal activities are as universal — across time, place, or culture — as the snowball fight. As many of us head into the cold, winter months, hoping for a holiday season with frosted trees or icicles dripping like stalactites from the eaves of homes, we might also long for that slightly slushy grade of powder that makes for perfect packing. Snowmen and angels can be created later. And perhaps there will be sledding: on toboggans (for connoisseurs) or cafeteria trays (for the crafty). Yet nothing signals the year’s first snowfall quite like an apple-sized projectile cutting a parabolic path — through crisp evening air, the haloed light of streetlamps, and exhalations of foggy, illuminated breath — to make direct contact with an unsuspecting hat or coat. ...”
Fear and Falsehoods Fill the Premier League’s Vaccination Gap
Pogo's 'Deck Us All With Boston Charlie:' A Walt Kelly Christmas Carol
Okay Cupid: Reopening Vermeer’s love letter to contradiction
“In Dresden, a city renowned for the picture-perfect restoration by which it looks the same and yet entirely strange, an old tale of love and deception is playing out. Since Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, c. 1657–59, arrived in the Saxon capital from Paris in 1742, a girl in a green dress has been intently studying a letter by pale daylight against a white wall. As other of the Dutch master’s pictures, and indeed many of those made by his contemporaries, tend to do, the unadorned interior offers no clue as to what she might be thinking. Instead, what long impressed viewers about this particular girl was her apparent modernity. She was free, it seemed, of mythology and religion, exemplifying a unity of form and substance, a kind of pure presence. ...”
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), 2021 December: Museum rivalry ‘could make Dutch Vermeer show last of its kind’
Charles Mingus’s Secret Eggnog Recipe Will Knock You on Your Ass
Difference and Repetition / A Musical Evocation Of Gilles Deleuze - Palo Alto
A Grim, Long-Hidden Truth Emerges in Art: Native American Enslavement Image
Run-D.M.C. - Christmas In Hollis (1987)
A Memorial in the Stars
“A wise friend recently reminded me that ‘goodbye’ is the price we pay for every ‘hello.’ This painful inevitability feels as old as the stars themselves.Our ancestors told their stories of joy and sorrow in the sky. Great heroes and legends are enshrined in the constellations we recognize today. And while the International Astronomical Union has decreed 88 constellations with set names, there’s no rule that says you can’t create your own star patterns or asterisms for significant and poignant events. It’s something I did to memorialize a significant death. ...”