“The New Deal not only established a great legacy, but a greater generation of artists whose works defined the American spirit. The visual art produced under the Federal Arts Project of the WPA (Works Progress Administration), and the other ‘alphabet agencies’ remains timeless. Capturing vernacular architecture to the rise of the modern city, the elevation of visual and performing arts, interior scenes of domestic laborers to pool halls — allowed artists to paint, print, and photograph during a period of great strife as a means to forge forward. They helped form a modern American identity, capturing American life in all its variety, one rooted in pride and tenacity. ...”
The Artists of The WPA
Ronnie Spector: You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory
“On Wednesday, in the hours after Ronnie Spector’s family announced her passing from cancer at seventy-eight, I played, on loop, her cover of the Johnny Thunders punk anthem ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.’ Recorded for The Last of the Rock Stars, her 2006 comeback album, the song is also a dirge for Thunders, who died in 1991; he had been one of Ronnie’s crucial supporters in the period after she left her abusive ex-husband, the megalomaniac, murderer, and iconoclastic music producer Phil Spector. On YouTube, you can watch her perform a live version of the song from 2018: after showing footage from an archival interview the Ronettes did with Dick Clark sometime in the sixties, she comes out, to applause, and says, ‘Sorry, I was backstage crying.’ ...”
The Most Exciting Sporting Event in the World Is Happening Right Now
How French Music Teacher Nadia Boulanger Raised a Generation of Composers: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass & More
The Comfort of Childhood Media During Lockdown
Steampowered - Myst: Masterpiece Edition
Time Fades Away - Neil Young (1973)
2008 February: Neil Young, 2010 April: Neil Young - 1, 2010 April: Neil Young - 2, 2010 May: Neil Young - 3, 2010 October: Neil Young's Sound, 2012 January: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History, 2012 June: Like A Hurricane, 2012 July: Greendale, 2013 April: Thoughts On An Artist / Three Compilations, 2013 August: Heart of Gold, 2014 March: Dead Man (1995), 2014 August: Ragged Glory - Neil Young + Crazy Horse (1990), 2014 November: Broken Arrow (1996), 2015 January: Rust Never Sleeps (1979), 2015 January: Neil Young the Ultimate Guide, 2015 March: Old Black, 2015 September: Zuma (1975), 2016 January: On the Beach (1973), 2016 April: Sleeps with Angels (1994), 2016 November: Eldorado (EP - 1989), Long May You Run - The Stills-Young Band (1976), 2017 June: "River Of Pride" / "White Line" (1975), 2017 July: "Thrasher" [Live at the Cow Palace, 1978], 2017 November: Words (Live at Red Rocks, 2000), 2020 November: Neil Young Releases a Never-Before-Heard Version...
“Shamus Town” Raymond Chandler Mystery Map of Greater Los Angeles
2009 September: The Maltese Falcon, 2013 July: Raymond Chandler, 2014 November: Finding Marlowe, 2019 August: Raymond Chandler: The Art of Beginning a Crime Story, June 2021: The Port of Missing Women
Doomsday Clock Says World Remains ‘100 Seconds’ From Disaster
Calhoun-Fall
“I first visited Charleston 50 years ago, as South Carolina celebrated the 300th anniversary of its birth in 1670. As a Harvard graduate student studying early American history, I hoped to write a dissertation on the beginnings of African enslavement in the colony, although my Ivy League mentors wondered if sufficient sources existed. While turning my research into a book, I fell in love with Charleston, except for one huge and forbidding public monument. More than a century after black emancipation, a monstrous statue of John C. Calhoun still hovered over the old port city. Even after the Freedom Movement of the 1950s and ’60s, a leading mastermind of white supremacy retained a central place of honor, high above Marion Square. As I came to understand how deeply his defense of racial oligarchy was still rooted in the soil of the Lowcountry, I wondered if he would remain there forever. ...”
John C. Calhoun statue taken down from its perch above Charleston’s Marion Square (June 2020) (Video)
amazon: The 1619 Project Chapter 7 - Politics: Jamelle Bouie
A Guide to William Parker
Spanish Artist Pejac Responds to Environmental and Social Ills in Poignantly Expressive Artworks
“While many of us were pondering the world’s fragile state in the early months of the pandemic, the brilliantly inventive and socially conscious Spanish artist Pejac was busy creating art in response to it. And this past fall, he shared his vision in APENA, a ten-day exposition held in a former train manufacturing site in Berlin. Over 40 new artworks — addressing such themes as environmental pollution, climate change, the refugee crisis and inequality — were displayed in eight different rooms and spaces. Several play on classical paintings; all are at once poetic and unsettling,
Early Arabic Sound Recordings and the Public Domain
“... To celebrate, we’re releasing a small subset of our early 20th century Arabic 78 collection on our new Aviary site. Acquired over many years, the Arabic 78 Collection currently contains nearly 600 cataloged recordings of Arab and Arab-American music spanning the first half of the 20th century, from roughly 1903 through the 1950s, valuable not only for their musical content, but also as artifacts of the early sound recording industry. ...”
East Harlem/Spanish Harlem/El Barrio
2011 November: Charlie Palmieri, 2014 March: Harlem River Drive - Harlem River Drive (1971), 2014 October: Fania at Fifty, 2017 December: Nu Yorica: Culture Clash In New York City - Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77, 2018 December: Latin Underground Revolution: Swinging Boogaloo, Guaguanco, Salsa & Latin Funk from New York City 1967-1978, 2017 June: Eddie Palmieri - Unfinished Masterpiece (1976), 2018 July: The Soul Of Spanish Harlem / El Barrio: Sounds from the Spanish Harlem Streets, 2011 June: Mario Bauzá, 2017 June: Rhythm & Power: Salsa in New York, 2012 February: Rubén Blades, 2017 December: Carlos Vera: Barcelona's Boogaloo: Mixes and Mashups, 2019 April: An NYC Mambo, Boogaloo and Salsa Family Tree, 2019 October: Best Fania Samples: 20 Latin Grooves That Helped Build Hip-Hop, 2021 February: Fania Records
Eno is a 1973 documentary short film directed by Alfons Sinniger.
Is Old Music Killing New Music?
“I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—have to look on these figures with fear and trembling.But the news gets worse. The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs. Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago. ...”
Just Mercy - Destin Daniel Cretton (2019)
Pharoah Sanders – Live In Paris (1975) (Lost ORTF Recordings)
2015 December: Maleem Mahmoud Ghania With Pharaoh Sanders - The Trance Of Seven Colors (1994), 2016 January: Ptah, The El Daoud - Alice Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders (1970), 2016 November: Tauhid (1967), 2017 May: The Pharoah Sanders Story: In the Beginning 1963-1964, 2017 November: Let Us Now Praise Pharoah Sanders, Master of Sax, 2018 February: Anthology: You've Got to Have Freedom - Pharoah Sanders (2005), 2018 February: James Blood Ulmer & Pharoah Sanders - Live 2003, 2018 May: How Pharoah Sanders Brought Jazz to Its Spiritual Peak with His Impulse! Albums, 2019 January: Africa (1987), 2021 December: Promises - Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra
A Holocaust Survivor’s Hardboiled Science Fiction
2011 June: Stanisław Lem, 2017 March: Pilot Pirx (1979-1982), 2017 April: The Star Diaries (1971), 2018 February: His Master's Voice (1968), 2021 December: A Century in Stanislaw Lem’s Cosmos
Little Glitches: Laurie Anderson’s Big Science
YouTube: The end of the moon (Legendado), The beginning of memory, "The Speed of Darkness" The Shaughnessy, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, MN Feb 8, 1997. 1:37:14
2008 June: Laurie Anderson, 2009 December: Personal Service Announcements, 2011 February: Home studio (late 80's), 2011 March: I Don't Need It, I Don't Want It, And You Cheated Me Out of It, 2011 October: Big Science, 2011 October: Delusion, 2013 June: United States Live, 2021 December: Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans
Elvin Jones And Richard Davis - Heavy Sounds (1967)
2022 January: Elvin! (1962)
When Martin Luther King Came to Harlem
2008 January: Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther King Jr. - 1, 2013 August: The March at 50 , 2015 January: Freedom Journey 1965: Photographs of the Selma to Montgomery March by Stephen Somerstein, 2015 February: Spider Martin’s Photographs of the Selma March Get a Broader View, 2015 March: Revisiting Selma, 2015 December: Atlanta: Darker Than Blue, 2016 February: Unpublished Black History, 2018 January: The Evolution of Dr. King, 2018 January: Restoring King, 2018 April: Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’, 2020 January: Martin Luther King Jr. Day: 8 Places in New York to Remember His Legacy
The Diaspora Suite: Ephraim Asili
Is Civil War Looming, or Should We Calm Down?
Fragmented Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Cuttings at the V&A
Trail of Tears
“The Trail of Tears was part of the Indian removal, a series of forced displacements and ethnic cleansing of approximately 60,000 Native Americans of the Five Civilized Tribes between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. Tribal members ‘moved gradually, with complete migration occurring over a period of nearly a decade.’ Members of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations (including thousands of their black slaves) were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to areas to the west of the Mississippi River that had been designated Indian Territory. The forced relocations were carried out by government authorities after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. ... The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after. Suzan Shown Harjo of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian describes it as a genocide. ...”
How to Photograph the Northern Lights
“As the Sun heads south for winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the nights grow longer and the opportunities to catch the northern lights, or aurora borealis, increase the further north you live or travel. Aurorae occur when charged particles (mostly electrons and protons) in the solar wind sneak past Earth's magnetic shield and collide with atoms in the upper atmosphere. As the ionized oxygen and nitrogen molecules return to their ‘ground’ state, they glow, much like a neon light does when electrical current runs through it. The results are awe-inspiring, and if you’ll forgive the metaphor, magical. ...”