“A rough tune from the Conscious Minds featuring a serious horn line. Hotter The Battle + Dub: Conscious Minds. Whip Them Jah: Clint Eastwood. Pablo's Mood: Augustus Pablo. Peace and Love In The Ghetto: Jah Woosh. ...”
Radio On - Christopher Petit (1979)
“We’re pleased to present the trailer and posters for the new 4K restoration of Christopher Petit’s debut feature Radio On (1979), which sees its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 4 and 5 before opening at the Metrograph on October 15. Writing for Film Comment in 2007, Chris Chang called Radio On an ‘exquisitely bleak yet thoroughly transcendent’ road movie. London DJ Robert (David Beames) heads east to Bristol to investigate the death of his brother, and he’s accompanied by one of the great soundtracks in British cinema: David Bowie, Devo, Kraftwerk, Robert Fripp, Ian Dury. ...”
Heart & Soul of NYC
“Even though Jay and Alicia banged us out with one of the hottest New York anthems of all time last year - there's always room for more love letter to one of the most beloved cities in the world. Released right as both the weather and NBA playoffs are heating up, ‘Heart & Soul of NYC’ was produced by Kevin Couliau (the well known French streetball documentarist) who spent last summer in the five boroughs hunting down 'supreme blacktop action' which he was able to excellently capture on film. With rhymes by Red Cafe (who is fresh off his ‘I'm Ill’ success) and a dope beat by Pete Rock, this track just shows what a compatible mix hip hop, basketball and NYC really is.”
2012 November: Your Guide to the Brooklyn Nets, 2013 March: March Madness 2013, 2013 October: Rucker Park, 2014 January: History of the high five, 2015 February: Dean Smith (February 28, 1931 – February 7, 2015), 2015 June: Basketball’s Obtuse Triangle, 2015 September: Joint Ventures: How sneakers became high fashion and big business, 2015 October: Loose Balls - Terry Pluto (2007), 2015 December: Welcome to Smarter Basketball, 2016 January: The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams (1994), 2016 January: A Long Hardwood Journey, 2016 March: American Hustle - Alexandra Starr, 2016 November: 2016–17 College Basketball, 2017 November: 2017-18 College Basketball, 2017 March: N.C.A.A. Bracket Predictions: Who the Tournament Experts Pick, 2017 June: The Rise and Fall of the High-Top Sneaker, 2018 January: Chaos Is This College Basketball Season’s Only Constant, 2018 March: The End of March Madness?, 2018 March: The 2018 March Madness Cinderella Guide, 2018 August: Ancestor Work In Street Basketball, 2018 November: Where Have College Basketball’s Star Point Guards Gone?, 2019 November: Players to Watch in the 2019-20 College Basketball Season, 2020 September: Ross Gay: Have I Even Told You Yet About the Courts I’ve Loved?, 2021 February: On Hustles
Catherine Wagner - Constantine Fragments (2014)
“Rome Works investigates and interprets the history of culture. The photographs include sculptural masterpieces both within and outside of museum archives. Although rooted in antiquity each image is embedded with some form of marker that creates a collision in time. The process of conservation, the physical moving of an artifact, or the recreation of a figure from isolated fragments - serve to disrupt the historical iconography allowing for a more contemporary reading. The images often focus on overlooked details, illuminating unwritten histories. ...”
10 Ideas to Fix Democracy
“For 15 consecutive years, Freedom House’s annual tally has recorded a decline in the number of democracies worldwide. It’s a steady loss of ground that Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University, calls a ‘democratic recession.’ And no event put the reality of democratic backsliding more dramatically on display than the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—when the world’s oldest liberal democracy endured the first violent presidential transition in its 245-year history. As we mark that event’s dubious anniversary, we’re reminded how fragile democracy really is. Democracy is on the defensive, and the reasons are as deep as they are familiar. Growing inequality has fed a global mood that democratic institutions aren’t serving their citizens. The internet and social media have hypercharged political polarization and cultural divides, which populists easily exploit. ...”
The Rich Legacy of Philadelphia Free Jazz
Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines
Former President Donald J. Trump spoke to thousands of supporters at a rally in Texas on Saturday.
“Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines. ...”
“About halfway into his Texas rally on Saturday evening, Donald J. Trump pivoted toward the teleprompter and away from a meandering set of grievances to rattle off a tightly prepared list of President Biden’s failings and his own achievements. ... Mr. Trump, who later went on to talk about ‘that beautiful, beautiful house that happens to be white,’ has left increasingly little doubt about his intentions, plotting an influential role in the 2022 midterm elections and another potential White House run. But a fresh round of skirmishes over his endorsements, fissures with the Republican base over vaccines — a word Mr. Trump conspicuously left unsaid at Saturday’s rally — and new polling all show how his longstanding vise grip on the Republican Party is facing growing strains. ...”
John Ashbery: outtakes from the film series, USA: Poetry
“John Ashbery is filmed on March 4 and 6, 1966 in New York City while both reading his poems and being interviewed. Richard O. Moore interviews Ashbery one-on-one in Ashbery's apartment, and Ashbery together with painter Jane Freilicher in her studio. 2nd edition (1978 release)“
YouTube 46:37
A New Wave of American Buyers Has Set Its Sights on European Soccer
“Last May, Venezia FC celebrated its improbable return to Italy’s top tier, Serie A, for the first time in exactly two decades, completing a remarkable five-year rise from the fourth division. Players celebrated with a ferry ride through Venice’s storied canals, steered by gondoliers wearing traditional candy cane uniforms. Among those celebrating in the victory parade was Duncan Niederauer, the club’s American president and majority shareholder since 2020. Niederauer, the former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, had been part of an American ownership group that first bought into Venezia in 2018, two years after the club emerged from its third bankruptcy in a decade. …”
The Difficult Odyssey of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’
James Joyce looking troubled in 1922—but he wasn’t the only one having difficulties.
“The wily hero of The Odyssey is repeatedly aided by women: Athena, goddess of wisdom; the Phaecian princess Nausicaa; and numerous other female characters play important roles in helping Odysseus return home to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope. Three-ish millennia after Homer composed his epic poem, Irish writer James Joyce decided he would pattern his new novel after The Odyssey. In a twist of cosmic coincidence, Joyce (1882–1941) himself, even more than his Ulysses protagonist Leopold Bloom, was aided by women in his journey. ...”
2011 March: Passages from James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1965-67), 2013: Dubliners, 2014 May: The Dead (1987 film), 2014 May: “Have I Ever Left It?” by Mark O'Connell, 2014 July: Digital Dubliners, 2014 September: Read "Ulysses Seen", A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Classic, 2015 January: The Mapping Dubliners Project, 2015 February: Davy Byrne’s, 2016 January: Port and Docks, 2016 February: Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Unabridged & Set to Music By 17 Different Artists, 2016 April: Nassau Street, 2016 May: Stephen’s Green, 2016 October: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 2016 November: Skerries, 2017 January: Walking Ulysses | Joyce's Dublin Today, 2018 October: Bloomsday Explained, 2020 March: Ireland’s Voices, 2020 June: Stephen Dedalus, 2020 November: The Homeric Parallel in Ulysses: Joyce, Nabokov, and Homer in Maps, 2021 January: The Socialism of James Joyce, 2021 March: Imagining Nora Barnacle’s Love Letters to James Joyce Image
We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was
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....”
2018 July: Markets of Paris (2012), 2015 June: Musée d'Orsays, 2014 August: Louvre, 2016 August: The Pocket Louvre: A Visitor's Guide to 500 Works by Claude Mignot, 2018 March: Jay Swanson, 2020 April: Take a Long Virtual Tour of the Louvre in Three High-Definition Videos, 2020 November: How to Pretend You're in Paris Tonight, etc.
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
2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956, 2019 January: Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story, 2021 June: The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, 2021 July: Sylvia Plath’s Tarot Cards
New York City Subway
125th Street station on the IRT Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line
“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. ...”
2009 May: Marcel Duchamp, 2009 September: Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess, 2009 November: Étant donnés, 2016 April: A Marcel Duchamp Collection, 2017 June: Rebel Ready-Made (1966), 2020 September: A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp (1956)
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.. ...”
YouTube: Makatuka 1 / 6, Sixth Sense in the Eleventh House 1 / 6
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. ...“
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
“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. ...”
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
“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. ...”
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