Paris Street; Rainy Day

 
Paris Street; Rainy Day, Gustave Caillebotte (1877)

Paris Street; Rainy Day (French: Rue de Paris, temps de pluie) is a large 1877 oil painting by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894), and is his best known work. It shows a number of individuals walking through the Place de Dublin, then known as the Carrefour de Moscou, at an intersection to the east of the Gare Saint-Lazare in north Paris. Although Caillebotte was a friend and patron of many of the impressionist painters, and this work is part of that school, it differs in its realism and reliance on line rather than broad brush strokes. Caillebotte's interest in photography is evident. The figures in the foreground appear ‘out of focus’, those in the mid-distance (the carriage and the pedestrians in the intersection) have sharp edges, while the features in the background become progressively indistinct. The severe cropping of some figures – particularly the man to the far right – further suggests the influence of photography....”

 
Childe Hassam's 1885 painting Rainy Day, Boston bears "an uncanny resemblance" to Caillebotte's work.

​Awesome Tapes From Africa puts Gabonese harp in the spotlight with Papé Nziengui

 
“The American label is set to reissue Kadi Yombo, a monument to Gabonese ‘postmodernism’ from the late 1980s. The album Kadi Yombo, originally released in 1989, is a particularly successful project in the quest for a fusion between tradition and modernity. Musician Papé Nziengui presents a dialogue characteristic of ngombi harp playing with male call and response choirs, adding female cult rhythms and Tsogho ritual music, while combining the beating of rattles with synthesizer layers. ...”

Foreword to Ariel: The Restored Edition written by Frieda Hughes

"The Restored Edition of Ariel by my mother, Sylvia Plath, exactly follows the arrangement of her last manuscript as she left it. As her daughter I can only approach it, and its divergence from the first United Kingdom publication of Ariel in 1965 and subsequent United States publication in 1966, both edited by my father, Ted Hughes, from the purely personal perspective of its history within my family. When she committed suicide on February 11, 1963, my mother left a black spring binder on her desk, containing a manuscript of forty poems. She probably last worked on the manuscript's arrangement in mid-November 1962. ...”

New York City Subway

 

“The New York City Subway is a rapid transit system owned by the City of New York and leased to the New York City Transit Authority, an affiliate agency of the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Opened on October 27, 1904, the New York City Subway is one of the world's oldest public transit systems, one of the most-used, and the one with the most stations, with 472 stations in operation (424 if stations connected by transfers are counted as single stations). Stations are located throughout the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The system has operated 24/7 service every day of the year throughout most of its history, barring emergencies and disasters. By annual ridership, the New York City Subway is the busiest rapid transit system in both the Western Hemisphere and the Western world, as well as the seventh-busiest rapid transit rail system in the world. ...”

28th Street station after the W train was discontinued in mid-2010. Note the dark grey tape masked over the W bullet.

The Duchamp Research Portal Digitally Unites Three Museum Archives

 
The Duchamp Research Portal houses nearly 50,000 digitized objects covering the artist’s life and work in France and the United States. 

“In 1964, towards the end of his life, Marcel Duchamp delivered the pithiest of artist statements, ‘Je suis un respirateur.’ Too apt that this ‘respirateur’ or ‘breather’ — one who creates art out of everyday life — should be the keeper of a seven-decade oeuvre of abstract paintings and provocative readymades that significantly shifted the plates of Dada, Cubism, and Conceptualism.So massive was Duchamp’s output that for years, his works, sketches, and papers have been scattered across the collections of various museums. But no more: this week, three institutions have merged their separate Duchamp archives for a digital resource set to illuminate one of the past century’s most seminal artists. ...”

 
Marcel Duchamp in a hammock at his residency in Cadaquas, Spain in 1965, by Man Ray.

The Making of a Coronavirus-Criminal Presidency

 
“The United States is the product of an accountability movement that was never fully realized. Thomas Paine called the country into being with Common Sense, a pamphlet that invited the beleaguered residents of 13 British colonies on the eastern shore of North America to indulge their fury at the imperial abuses of King George III. ... Rejecting the prospect of reconciliation with ‘the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land,’ Paine encouraged Americans to ask themselves pointed questions. ... This was about more than refusing to shake hands with the murderers, however. It was, Paine recognized, about forging a new mentality that would see beyond the lie of reconciliation with those who abused positions of authority to the detriment of the people. No excuses. No forgiveness. The stakes were too high for that. ...”

Who is Nathan Davis? A guest post

 
LJC says: Who is Pedestroika? An expat in Pittsburgh with an ear rooted in Indian classical music, who says he came to jazz by way of McCoy Tyner’s Search for Peace, in graduate school nearly 20 years ago. Having navigated the ‘have the time but not the means, and have the means but not the time’ phases of life without losing his passion for jazz, he tries to make it an integral part of every day life. ‘I see collecting the vinyl form as an assumed stewardship of sorts; what we collect, enjoy, share, and hopefully preserve will ultimately be part of what we hand on to future generations.’ Amen to that, the floor is yours Pedestroika.. ...”

The Artists of The WPA

 
Daniel Celentano, Pelham Bay, oil on canvas, 1935.

“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. ...”

 
Elizabeth Olds, Harlem Street Dance, gouache, 1937.

Ronnie Spector: You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory

 
Publicity photo of the Ronettes—Nedra Talley, Veronica Bennett (Ronnie Spector) and Estelle Bennett

“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.’ ...”

 
Phil Spector, Los Angeles CA, Gold Star Studios. Ronnie Spector.

The Most Exciting Sporting Event in the World Is Happening Right Now

 
“In March 1957, Ghana cast off British colonialism and became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve political self-rule. At its independence celebrations, the new prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, offered a hopeful message: ‘We are going to create our own African personality and identity. It is the only way we can show the world that we are ready for our own battles.’ I was remembering that line last week as I watched the early matches of the Africa Cup of Nations, a tournament of soccer teams representing 24 countries from across the continent. This year’s competition is being hosted by Cameroon; it began on Jan. 9 and runs until Feb. 6. …”

​How French Music Teacher Nadia Boulanger Raised a Generation of Composers: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Quincy Jones, Philip Glass & More

 
“... That wisdom comes not from Jaco Pastorius but from 20th century French music teacher and composer Nadia Boulanger, who might not have approved of the libertine jazz phenom’s life, given her aristocratic conservatism, but heartily endorsed his wisdom about continuous creative growth. Although deeply rooted in a classical tradition which strove for perfection, Boulanger taught, influenced, and championed some of the century’s most avant-garde composers, such as Igor Stravinsky, who broke violently with the past, as well as jazz greats like Quincy Jones, who took her lessons in an entirely different modern pop direction. ...”
 
Boulanger in her apartment in Paris, which became a kind of musical salon, around 1925.

The Comfort of Childhood Media During Lockdown

 
“We are entering Week 3 of social isolation, and I have regressed. The plush yellow duck of my youth has waddled out of storage and into my bed. Real pants are a distant memory. And all I want to do is play Myst, an immersive adventure computer game from the 1990s that I was obsessed with when I was 11. Myst begins on a mysterious island, on a dock next to a sunken ship. As you traverse Myst Island — encountering riddles, age-worn letters and magic books that transport you to new ‘ages,’ or levels of the game — you also unravel the story of Myst, which concerns an olde tyme teleporting family that loves drama. But the game’s real draw is its meditative atmosphere. ...”

Steampowered - Myst: Masterpiece Edition

Time Fades Away - Neil Young (1973)

 
“Neil Young's 1973 ‘Time Fades Away’ is one of the most remarkable live albums ever recorded. Certainly at the time of release, it was almost unprecedented for an artist to release a live concert recording  of previously unreleased material. Long out of print on vinyl, still unavailable on CD in the early 21st century and widely bootlegged similar to the original ‘Missing 6′, the album is considered to be the ‘Holy Grail’ of all Neil Young albums. 'Time Fades Away' is the first installment of the trio of albums known as the ‘Ditch Trilogy’ along with his two other early 1970's materpieces Tonight's The Night and On The Beach. The edgy moody darkness of recording and brilliantly erratic song selection offer the portrait of the artist undergoing a deep catharsis and unraveling simultaneously. ... Key to understanding ‘Time Fades Away’ is the context within Neil Young's album discography. ...“

“Shamus Town” Raymond Chandler Mystery Map of Greater Los Angeles

 
“Flat version of ‘The Shamus Town Raymond Chandler Mystery Map of Greater Los Angeles,’ 1932 and 2014/2021: A Vintage Art Deco and Modern Map. On the front is The Raymond Chandler Mystery Map, consisting of the Vintage map designed and hand-drawn by Karl M. Leuschner in 1932. For the contemporary portion, all the handwritten text was removed. Changes, corrections, and additions were made, and the text was replaced with a modern computer font. The Key was enlarged and Chandler locations were added. 287 QR Codes were created and added to the border and on the backside, showing locations related to Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, his fictional detective. ...”

Doomsday Clock Says World Remains ‘100 Seconds’ From Disaster

 
“Humanity is 100 seconds away from total annihilation. Again. That is according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization and publication whose signature Doomsday Clock has been estimating — in the stark terms of ‘minutes to midnight’ — how close the world is to apocalypse since 1947. ‘The collective wisdom of our group is that it’s a wildly dangerous time with some incredibly important bright spots,’ Rachel Bronson, the executive director and publisher of the bulletin, said on Wednesday. The clock remains set at ‘100 seconds to midnight’ — unchanged from last year, when its hands were moved as close as they had ever been to midnight. ...”

Calhoun-Fall

 
A statue of John C. Calhoun is removed on June 24 in Charleston, South Carolina. 

“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. ...”

amazon: The 1619 Project     Chapter 7 - Politics: Jamelle Bouie

A Guide to William Parker

 
William Parker, who turned 70 on Monday, is the kind of artist who is both appropriately revered and unfairly pigeonholed.Because his roots are in New York City’s wild and wooly ‘70s loft scene, and he’s remained a beacon within the free jazz community for decades, it’s easy to underestimate the beauty and stylistic breadth of Parker’s music. The acoustic bassist’s probing beats are a familiar homing device amidst the gnarly pitch and passion of fiery improvisations, but his artistry also celebrates the entirety of the human condition. Within his vast catalog—he has released dozens of albums under his own name, and hundreds more as a sideman—is music that spans genres, countries of origin, and the full spectrum of emotions. The tenderness of some of his compositions will bring a tear to your eye; the lyrics will raise goosebumps on your neck. ...”

​Spanish Artist Pejac Responds to Environmental and Social Ills in Poignantly Expressive Artworks

 
“Urban Albatross,”  Oil, acrylic, spray paint and charcoal on paper mounted on wooden stretcher

“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

 
This rendition of “Khallayānī bilawʻātī” was recorded in 1910 on a Gramophone Co. master. The pirate label Opera Disc operated in New York in the early 1920s; the original Gramophone matrix number, 11-12490, is barely visible underneath the right side of the paper label.

“... 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

 
East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio, is a neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City, roughly encompassing the area north of the Upper East Side and bounded by 96th Street to the south, Fifth Avenue to the west, and the East and Harlem Rivers to the east and north. Despite its name, it is generally not considered to be a part of Harlem proper, but it is one of the neighborhoods included in Greater Harlem. … Southern Italians and Sicilians, with a moderate number of Northern Italians, soon predominated, especially in the area east of Lexington Avenuebetween 96th and 116th Streets and east of Madison Avenue between 116th and 125th Streets, with each street featuring people from different regions of Italy. ...”
 

Eno is a 1973 documentary short film directed by Alfons Sinniger.

 
“Eno is a 1973 documentary short film directed by Alfons Sinniger. The subject of the film is musician Brian Eno (shortly after his departure from Roxy Music), and features the recording sessions for Eno's record Here Come the Warm Jets. There is one live recording of one of the Eno/Winkies shows, from Kings Hall in Derby on February 13th, 1974, but it is an extremely lo-fi audience recording. ...  On February 19th, 1974 Eno and The Winkies were taped for a John Peel session performing ‘The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch’ and a cover version of Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever.’ ...”

​Is Old Music Killing New Music?

 
Old recordings, like zombies in those bad films, are out to kill the living

“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)

 
Just Mercy is a 2019 American biographical legal drama film co-written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, and starring Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Rob Morgan, Tim Blake Nelson, Rafe Spall, and Brie Larson. It tells the true story of Walter McMillian, who, with the help of young defense attorney Bryan Stevenson, appeals his murder conviction. The film is based on the memoir of the same name, written by Stevenson. ...”

​Pharoah Sanders – Live In Paris (1975) (Lost ORTF Recordings)

 
“When Pharoah Sanders played tenor saxophone with John Coltrane in the 1960s, his tone was harsh and wild. Soloing alongside Coltrane on records like Ascension, Om, and Live in Japan, Sanders’ horn would shriek and howl and cry, reaching a pitch of earth-shaking intensity on pieces that pushed jazz to the limits of legibility. But after Coltrane’s death in 1967, Sanders began exploring a different path. Playing with Alice Coltrane on Ptah, the El Daoud and Journey in Satchidananda, and on his own albums for the Impulse! label, his sound was still searching, but now it was lyrical, and his musical settings often included trance-inducing grooves. After a half-decade enduring the blast furnace of free jazz, Sanders’ style grew more spiritual and cosmic and started looking to music from around the globe for inspiration. ...”

A Holocaust Survivor’s Hardboiled Science Fiction

 
“In ‘His Master’s Voice,’ a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space. They manage to translate a fragment of the signal’s information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project’s senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. ... In a cycle of melancholy sci-fi novels written in the late nineteen-fifties and sixties—’Eden,’ ‘Solaris,’ ‘Return from the Stars,‘ ‘Memoirs Found in a Bathtub,‘ ‘The Invincible,’ and ‘His Master’s Voice’—Lem suggested that life in the future, however remote the setting and however different the technology, will be no less tragic. Astronauts disembark from a spaceship into the aftermath of an atrocity; scientists face an alien intelligence so unlike our own that their confidence in the special purpose of human life falters. ...”

​Little Glitches: Laurie Anderson’s Big Science

 
“Laurie Anderson’s 1982 debut LP Big Science opens as if her voice has been waiting for us to show up: ‘Good Evening. This is your captain.’ ... And since the 1970s, Laurie Anderson has explored the glitches and inhumanities of systems far more diffuse than air traffic control: her topics include language, sound, business, and technology at large. Early in her career, small new works came fast across a variety of media, and so her project became one of organizing, juxtaposing, and optimizing them. Her initial audience was mostly fellow downtown NYC artists, but factual talk of her eventual stardom was in the air. ...”

Elvin Jones And Richard Davis - Heavy Sounds (1967)

 
“A month later, the moods darkened considerably. Heavy Sounds was recorded on June 19 & 20, 1967. John Coltrane, Elvin’s associate from the legendary, groundbreaking John Coltrane Quartet, passed away on July 17, 1967. During his tenure with Coltrane, Jones had already recorded occasionally. Elvin! (Riverside 1961) and Dear John C. (Impulse 1965) are notable albums. In 1966, Jones allegedly felt uncomfortable with Coltrane’s new rhythmic settings that included drummer Rashied Ali and quit the band. Enormous potential besides the magnitudinous presence of Elvin Jones. Richard Davis is one of the most virtuosic bassists of the classic jazz era, arguably the most proficient. A brilliant musician who also took care of business in symphony orchestras, having performed with Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez and Leonard Bernstein. ...”

2022 January: Elvin! (1962)