​Travelling in the giant footsteps of Tony Soprano’s New Jersey

 

“After the fuzz of the classic HBO intro screen departed, a fractured view of the New Jersey turnpike rolled into the lounge and television would never be the same again. Even the mere opening credits sequence hinted at the cinematic twist The Sopranos was about to give TV that has proved wildly seminal ever since. Iconic skyline sights melded with the gritty inner workings of the locale, all through the occasional plume of puffed cigar smoke, giving the show a deep sense of contextualisation from the off. Sadly, a lot of modern shows have mimicked this cinematic sense without ever delivering the same substance. ...”

Far Out Magazine (Video)

2011 June: The Sopranos, 2012 March: The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos, 2013 June: James Gandolfini, 2015 April: David Chase Reveals the Philosophical Meaning of The Soprano’s Final Scene, 2019 January: Television Learned the Wrong Lessons From The Sopranos, 2019 June: Don’t Stop: The Sopranos ends, 2020 July: The Sopranos - Season 1, 2020 July: Season 2, 2020 August: Season 3, 2020 August: Season 4, 2020 September: Season 5, 2020 December: Season 6, 2021 October: The 12 Defining Scenes of ‘The Sopranos’

​The Encyclopedia of Reggae: The Golden Age of Roots Reggae

 

“This heavily illustrated guide to reggae is a colourful, herbally endowed and sunsplashed history of one of the world’s most popular musical styles. Reggae was born in 1960s Jamaica, a potent mix of such indigenous genres as ska and rocksteady plus R&B, jazz and traditional African rhythms. Before long, it had conquered the globe, influencing musicians from Britain to Brazil. The Encyclopedia of Reggae focuses on the music’s golden age, from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s heyday of dancehall and features more than 500 images, including rare album art and ephemera. Written by one of the foremost experts on the subject, this amazing resource profiles more than 200 key performers, impresarios and producers from reggae’s history. ...”

Pauze Radio

Mike Alleyne, author of "The Encyclopedia of Reggae..."

amazon

YouTube: Encyclopedia of Reggae - The Golden Age Of Roots Reggae - MyVinyl preview

A French Village: The Complete Series

“A French Village starts off on June 12, 1940, with a premiere that includes a German fighter plane shooting at children on a school trip. The scene is suspenseful but also staged with deliberate restraint, like a dream slowly turning into a nightmare before anybody quite realizes it. The series that follows sticks to that matter-of-fact, almost detached tone. Life in the fictional Villeneuve, a village in occupied France about sixty miles from Switzerland, is irreversibly upended by German rule but still retains a routine element.The pitch for A French Village could fit on half a napkin: Each season covers roughly one year of the occupation of Villeneuve in World War II. ...”

Voice: ‘A French Village,’ Streaming on Amazon, Examines Life After Evil Triumphs (Nov. 2016)

The Nation: Tangled in the Garden of Good and Evil (Sep. 2018)

A Historical Drama and a Master Class (Oct. 2020)

Why the Wartime TV Series “A French Village” Is Important (July 2018)

W - Un village français

amazon

YouTube: "A French Village" - Season 5 Critic's Quotes (Trailer)

Conceptual Personae: The many imagined lives of Fernando Pessoa

 

“‘Sockpuppeting’ is internet slang for the contemporary variety of an age-old hoax: with a fake account registered under a pseudonym, a social media user becomes free to post whatever they like, unfettered by the wearisome burdens of attribution. Perhaps a pundit wishes to promote his own book without appearing to do so himself. ... The poet who produced that work was named Fernando Pessoa, but the majority of his finest poems were signed with three different names. Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis were not, however, mere pseudonyms; they were separate identities—what Pessoa called ‘heteronyms’—crafted to undertake distinct and diverging poetic projects. ...”

The Baffler

2008 March: Fernando Pessoa, 2012 October: The Book of Disquiet, 2012 November: Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, 2014 May: Aspects by Fernando Pessoa, 2016 March: Passoa's Trunk - 13+ ways of looking at a poem, 2017 September: Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act, 2020 February: Strange Music Of Silence: Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, 2021 August: The Heteronymous Identities of Fernando Pessoa By Richard Zeniths

Hasaan Ibn Ali ‎– Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album (2021)

 

“During his lifetime, pianist and composer Hasaan Ibn Ali (1931-1980) was a jazz enigma. The Philly musician practiced with John Coltrane during the early '50s and is credited as the primary influence on the saxophonist's ‘sheets of sound’ harmonic approach first articulated on Giant Steps -- a sound that exploded across his Impulse! work. Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album is a genuine jazz holy grail, one of only two albums to feature the pianist's compositions and unique playing style. ... The music, though easier to approach in the 21st century, is quite radical in harmonic density and rhythmic invention. Opener ‘Atlantic Ones’ offers a Monk-esque lyric intro before the band careens across a knotty bop head. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

All About Jazz

W - Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Metaphysics (Full Album)

Weekly Beats 2022: "Three Clock Problem"

 

“I’m gonna give the Weekly Beats series (weeklybeats.com) another go this year. It’s a great online community, one where people post their tracks and comment on each other’s. Unlike with the Disquiet Junto and other communities, there is no required compositional prompt, though folks do propose such things in the WB forums. My first Weekly Beats recording of the year, ‘Three Clock Problem,’ is a simple drone (yeah, yeah, arguably beat-less) I put together in VCV Rack 2. A series of quantized pitches are sent through a reverb that has a wide array of controls. ...”

disquiet (Audio)

Checking Privilege in the Animal Kingdom

 

Check your privilege, squirrel.

“Some North American red squirrels are born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They live in pine forests where the adults defend caches of food. Without a cache of their own, many baby squirrels won’t survive the winter. But each year, some squirrel mothers abandon their territory, bequeathing all their food to one or more babies who stay behind. These young squirrels are much more likely to survive until the spring. Across the animal kingdom, there are other examples of species that share resources such as territory, tools and shelter between generations. ...”

NY Times

W - American red squirrel

​AFCON 2021 guide: The storylines, the underdogs and the games you won’t want to miss

 

“The latest Africa Cup of Nations is just around the corner. It’s been a long road to get here for a competition that has been moved around the calendar multiple times and, in the style of Euro 2020 last summer has the ‘wrong’ year in its official title, but 24 teams are now finally set to duke it out in Cameroon to become the next champions of Africa, with the tournament getting underway on Sunday, and finishing on Sunday, February 6. Here’s everything you need to know. ..."

The Athletic (Audio)

NY Times: The Joy in Embracing the Unknown (Video)

New Frame: Behind concerns over Afcon is a culture of disdain

Predicting the Africa Cup of Nations 2021 Winner

GOAL - Afcon 2021 predictions: The contenders and the pretenders (Video)

BBC - Afcon 2021: Everything you need to know about tournament in Cameroon (Video)

****Africa Is a Country 1:11:15 (Audio)

​In ‘African Origin’ Show at Met, New Points of Light Across Cultures

 

Partnerships: Spanning eras and cultures, a pairing of artworks from “The African Origin of Civilization” includes “The King’s Acquaintances Memi and Sabu” from Egypt, ca. 2575–2465 B.C. and “Seated Couple”  from Mali, 18th or early 19th century.

“Object for object, there isn’t an exhibition in town more beautiful than ‘The African Origin of Civilization’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nor is there one more shot through with ethical and political tensions.The gathering of 42 sculptures in one of the Met’s Egyptian galleries unites, for the first time here, pieces from its Ancient Egyptian and sub-Saharan African holdings, centuries apart (the earliest sub-Saharan work on view is from the 13th century). The pretext for the display is a practical one. ...”

NY Times

MET Museum: The African Origin of Civilization

​A photographer captures a New York City of abstraction in the 1940s

 

“The street photographers who point their cameras all over the city tend to focus on people in motion in recognizable places—the rush of crowds on a subway platform, barflies at a corner tavern, or the random strollers, workers, loafers, and others found at any moment in time on specific streets and sidewalks. ...”

Ephemeral New York

​The Legacy of Atlanta Hip Hop, Mapped

 

“A new map tells the story of Atlanta’s expansive hip hop legacy. For this week’s MapLab, CityLab’s Brentin Mock has the details: Some of the places and buildings on the ATL Rap Map are no longer actually still standing. They live in memory, and in the lyrics recited by the Atlanta rappers the map honors. The kings and queens of Atlanta’s hip hop culture — Outkast, Jermaine Dupri, Crime Mob and one of its newest stars, Latto, to name a few — frame a portrait of the city, which from a distance looks like a cluster of buildings and street signs surrounded by forests. ...”

Bloomberg

Reddit - Maps

​The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way

 

“I am sure that many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and apparently even less about how to properly use one. Coffee expert and author of The World Atlas of Coffee James Hoffmann introduces us to the appliance we think we know in the above video.Alfonso Bialetti didn’t originally get into the coffee business. In 1919, the Bialetti company was an aluminum manufacturer, with the Moka Express invented somewhere around 1933 by Luigi de Ponti, who worked for the company. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

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, 2021 November: Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship

Mario Batkovic - Introspectio (2021)

 

“Mario Batkovic plays the accordion. Sounds straightforward enough. Except he plays the accordion in the manner of Steve Reich or Terry Riley if they were entranced by the carnivalesque dancing of a youthful Alejandro Jodorowsky, their nimble fingers reenacting the exuberant choreography upon compressed keys. And Batkovic’s fingers work overtime, like Lubomyr Melnyk transported to a squeezebox. He approaches his instrument in the same way that Richard Dawson plays the guitar: it’s recognisable but the musician doesn’t appear to be following any of the rules or tropes that you would normally associate with that instrument. Instead, we’re treated to mantle-deep bellows, glistening twinkles, and squelchy, fuzz-caked riffage akin to the guitar work of Muse but with ideas beyond basic pageantry. This is music for classicists. ...”

The Quietus (Audio)

Mario Batkovic

Bandcamp: Introspectio (Audio)

YouTube: INTROSPECTIO   1 / 6

Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom

 

“On the title page of my paperback copy of Walden, an echo of a former self greets me. My name, written in loopy adolescent script, and the date: August 12, 1993. I was 17 when I bought the Vintage Books/Library of America edition at Waldenbooks in the Bridgewater Commons Mall, using proceeds from a summer job. I dutifully read it in those final weeks of summer, with pen in hand, underlining here, making embarrassing marginal comments there. One late afternoon, I was sitting alone at home, working my way through the book, when my boyfriend stopped by unexpectedly. I couldn’t have planned it better. I had wanted to be seen just so: dim room, puddle of light from a lamp, reading Thoreau. So goes a story about the Transcendentalists and my world. ...”

New Republic (Audio)

2020 April: Henry David Thoreau - I, 2020 May: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal - II

 

The Morgan Library & Museum: Henry David Thoreau’s journal, The Transcendentalist: 5 March 1853 (Audio)

Stargazing with Ice Cold Enthusiasm

“It was New Year’s Eve Eve — New Year’s Eve Squared? — and a friend sent an email to our writers’ group about greeting the coming year with deliberate passion and cheer. There was a reply chain about setting aside difficulties in order to appreciate the bigger picture, like celebrating that you’re on a hike in an old-growth forest instead of lamenting the cold rain. In short, we wanted to prioritize enthusiasm, re-centering our experiences to focus on the positive despite the humdrum, and to appreciate the awesomeness of each moment so that nothing becomes ‘old hat.’ It’s a worthy theme for a new year. ...”

Sky & Telescope

Elvin! - Elvin Jones (1962)

 

“No one can prove that Elvin Jones — or Buddy or Max or anyone else — was the greatest jazz drummer. But making the case for Elvin wielding a more profound influence than any rhythm master is a snap. Take him out of the history of this music and suddenly you have nobody there to prove that drummers could play in rhythm and out of meter at the same time. You have nobody making the case that the drums could play with rather than behind a soloist. You have nobody pushing way beyond the beat, into texture and dynamic interaction, where drummers once scarcely roamed. ...”

The Magnificent Life Of Elvin Jones

W - Elvin!

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: Elvin!   Elvin Jones  1 / 7

​Lawmakers Speak After Biden Warns of ‘a Dagger at the Throat of America’

 

“President Biden forcefully denounced former President Donald J. Trump for promoting lies and tearing down democracy because he could not stand the fact that he lost a free and fair election, accusing his predecessor and his allies of holding ‘a dagger at the throat of America.’ In his most sustained and scathing attack on the former president since taking office, Mr. Biden used the anniversary of the Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol to condemn Mr. Trump for waging an ‘undemocratic’ and ‘un-American’ campaign against the legitimacy of the election system that he likened to the actions of autocrats and dictators in faraway countries. ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times - The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot

NY Times - Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation (June 2021)

 

Treasonous Clowns On January 6, 2021, a violent mob of Trump supporters invaded the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. The attack resulted in five people dead and over 130 wounded. An investigation is ongoing. By Patricia Anderson Turner

Agnès Varda: From Here to There (2011)

 

“A freewheeling travelogue, a kaleidoscopic survey of the contemporary art scene, and a loving ode to creativity in all its forms, this five-part miniseries by the inimitable Agnès Varda takes us on a journey of discovery as she travels the globe—from Stockholm to St. Petersburg, Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City to Los Angeles—meeting with friends, artists, and fellow filmmakers. Along the way there are chats with titan auteurs Chris Marker (offering a window into his virtual reality world) and a 102-year-old Manoel de Oliveira (doing his best Chaplin impersonation); visits to the Hermitage Museum, the Venice Biennale, and the home of Frida Kahlo; glimpses into the studios of acclaimed visual artists like Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, and Pierre Soulages; and Varda’s casually profound musings on everything from rivers to the Dutch masters to her own photography and installation works. ...”

Criterion

Review: Agnès Varda: From Here to There

French Culture

Criterion Channel: AGNÈS DE CI DE LÀ VARDA: Episode 1

May 2011: The Beaches of Agnès, 2011 December: Interview - Agnès Varda, 2013 February: The Gleaners and I (2000), 2013 September: Cinévardaphoto (2004), 2014 July: Black Panthers (1968 doc.), 2014 October: Art on Screen: A Conversation with Agnès Varda, 2015 September: Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), 2017 February: Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976), 2017 April: Agnès Varda’s Art of Being There, 2017 April: AGNÈS VARDA with Alexandra Juhasz, 2017 August: Agnès Varda on her life and work - Artforum, 2017 October: Agnès Varda’s Ecological Conscience, 2018 March: Faces Places - Agnès Varda and JR (2017), 2018 July: Vagabond (1985), 2019 March: Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90, 2019 April: Mur Murs (1980), 2020 May: Socialism and cha-cha-cha: Agnès Varda's photos of Cuba forgotten for 50 years, 2020 August: Four Ways of Looking at Agnès Varda

​Fifty Disguises: Selections from The Book Against Death

 

“1942 There is no longer any measure by which to gauge anything once the measure of human life no longer is the measure. Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to the task. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. 1943  Freedom hates death most of all, but love is a close second. ...”

The Paris Review

​A Long, Hard Year for Republicans Who Voted to Impeach After Jan. 6

 

Before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, members of Congress gathered at a joint session to confirm the Electoral College votes cast in the 2020 election.

“The 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump did so with the same conviction — that a president of their party deserved to be charged with inciting insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 — and the same hope — that his role in doing so would finally persuade the G.O.P. to repudiate him. But in the year since the deadliest attack on the Capitol in centuries, none of the 10 lawmakers have been able to avoid the consequences of a fundamental miscalculation about the direction of their party. The former president is very much the leader of the Republicans, and it is those who stood against him whom the party has thrust into the role of pariah. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Prosecutors Move Quickly on Jan. 6 Cases, but One Big Question Remains

NY Times: How Trump Kept His Grip After Jan. 6

NY Times: Capitol Police Chief Commits to Security Improvements

NY Times: Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies

Best Chet Baker Pieces: 20 Jazz Essentials

 

“It can be difficult to untangle the romantic myth surrounding Chet Baker from the merits of his music. His stratospheric rise in the early 1950s owed much to the elegant style and rhythmic grace of his trumpet playing, but his good looks didn’t hurt, and by the time he started to sing in a fragile and androgynous tone that sounded unlike any other singer, he became a teenage pin-up and a celebrity, a rarity in the jazz world. Baker spent his early years in Oklahoma and moved to Southern California with his family as an adolescent. By 1952, he became a regular at jam sessions at the Hermosa Beach club The Lighthouse and played with Charlie Parker on a string of dates on the West Coast. ...”

udiscover (Video)

2019 May: Italian Movies (2014), 2019 June: Let's Get Lost - Bruce Weber (1988), 2019 July: Time After Time: The Lasting Legacy Of Chet Baker

The Five Kingdoms of Football

 

“... Farther up the snowy coast you meet a druid. Actually, he calls himself a ‘football data analyst’ — more impenetrable dialect from the locals, but in English, it seems to mean druid or mage or something. He’s carrying enchanted parchments painted with numbers and colourful shapes. You catch a glimpse of one that sort of looks like a pizza.The Counter Kingdom is at war, the druid tells you, against not one rival sovereign but four. The Five Kingdoms have always been at war. He says no one remembers exactly how it started but the whole conflict has to do with a ball. ...”

The Athletic

Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now

 

“The Editorial Board. One year after the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet. ...”

NY Times

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. ...”

POLITICO - Hundreds of crimes, little punishment: Inside the sentences since the Capitol attack

The Nation: The Uncanny Resemblance of the Beer Hall Putsch and the January 6 Insurrection

NY Times: Jan. 6 Panel Faces Difficult Questions as Anniversary of Capitol Riot Approaches

NY Times: Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump

Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate Over Colors

 

Camille Pissarro, Peasant Women Weeding the Grass, c. 1894

“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. ...”

The Clark

Clark Art's 'Hue & Cry' examines the rise of color printmaking in late 19th-century France

YouTube: Opening Lecture for Hue & Cry: French Printmaking and the Debate Over Colors  42:41

 

In the Times of Harmony (detail; c. 1896), Paul Signac.

Long Live the Microcinema

 

A screening at the Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, New York

“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. ...”

Criterion

W - Spectacle Theater

Spectacle (est. 2010) is a collectively-run screening space in Brooklyn, NY

 

A street view of the Spectacle Theater

This 1930 neon hotel sign still illuminates East 42nd Street

 

“Rising 20-plus stories above 42nd Street, the old-school sign for what was once called the Hotel Tudor is a beacon for Tudor City, the apartment complex mini-city of 12 Tudor Revival-style buildings built in the late 1920s. Like so many vintage neon signs in New York, its future was threatened. ‘The sign dates from 1930 when the hotel opened, and has a fleeting brush with demolition in 1999,’ according to Tudor City Confidential, a blog that covers the complex. Community opposition helped keep it in place. Today the hotel is officially known as the Westgate New York Grand Central—and the red glow of the sign lights the way along the eastern end of 42nd Street.“

Ephemeral New York

Hania Rani

 

“I feel like ‘Home’ is a second part of the same book, that the start was in ‘Esja’, a musical prelude to a real plot. I feel Home is a story with an ending, so the next book can tell a totally different one. I am constantly looking for new ways of expression. I am curious where ‘Home’ will lead me and my music. One can be lost but can find home in his inner part – which can mean many things – soul, imagination, mind, intuition, passion. I strongly believe that when being in uncertain times and living an unstable life we can still reach peace with ourselves and be able to find ‘home’ anywhere’. This is what I would like to express with my music – one can travel the whole world but not see anything. It is not where we are going but how much we are able to see and hear things happening around us. ...”

Hania Rani (Video)

Handcamp (Audio)

YouTube: 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

 

What accounts for Fassbinder’s political evolution? To understand it, we must trace the arc of the West German New Left.

“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. ...”

Jacobin

Criterion - Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day: The Utopia Channel

Criterion (Video)

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

 

Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day (1972)

When a Master Printer Picks Up the Camera

 

“John Bull’s Great Stone, Common Burying Ground, Newport, Rhode Island” (1973-8), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“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. ...”

NY Times

MoMA

W - Richard Benson

 

Richard Benson, “Newfoundland (Green Boat),” ca. 2006.