The Largest Autocracy on Earth
Cooking with Virginia Woolf By Valerie Stivers
2019 April: Bloomsbury Group, 2020 August: How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters, 2021 January: Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution, 2021 June: A House of One’s Own - Janet Malcolm
All the terra cotta beauty of an early uptown apartment building
“Sometimes you come across a building so rich with decoration, it knocks you out. That was my reaction when I found myself at 45 Tiemann Place, near the corner of Broadway and just below 125th Street. The building appears to be just another early 1900s apartment residence in the slightly askew neighborhood of Manhattanville—where the grid plan doesn’t necessarily hold and streets tend to have names based on early people and places in the area, not just numbers. ...”
Éliane Radigue: For a Composer at 90, There’s Nothing but Time
“Éliane Radigue lives and works in a second-floor apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris. A weeping fig tree looms above her head; across the loft-like room are three large windows adorned with house plants. The windows face a school across the street which, she wrote in a recent email, ‘gives its rhythm to days, weeks and months.’ She has lived there for the past 50 years, steadfastly writing a great deal of slow, very minimal, mostly electronic music. ...”
2018 May: Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993), 2018 October: The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue, 2019 February: Adnos I-III, 2019 May: Occam Ocean, Vol. 1 (2017)
2018 May: Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993), 2018 October: The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue, 2019 February: Adnos I-III, 2019 May: Occam Ocean, Vol. 1 (2017)
Black History, Black Freedom, and Black Love
2021 April: The 1619 Project, 2021 November: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
A Time For Healing - Kahil El'Zabar Quartet (2021)
Football Is Sinking in Crypto Snake Oil
An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way
“Noise and chaos reign at the heart of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, or so it appears in an astonishing image captured recently by astronomers in South Africa. The image, taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope, an array of 64 antennas spread across five miles of desert in northern South Africa, reveals a storm of activity in the central region of the Milky Way, with threads of radio emission laced and kinked through space among bubbles of energy. At the very center Sagittarius A*, a well-studied supermassive black hole, emits its own exuberant buzz. We are accustomed to seeing galaxies, from afar, as soft, glowing eggs of light or as majestic, bejeweled whirlpools. Rarely do we glimpse the roiling beneath the clouds — all the forms of frenzy that a hundred million or so stars can get up to. ...”
Post-structuralism
“Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. ... Writers whose works are often characterised as post-structuralist include: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva, although many theorists who have been called ‘post-structuralist’ have rejected the label. ...”
Hotter THE Battle+Dub
Radio On - Christopher Petit (1979)
Heart & Soul of NYC
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)
10 Ideas to Fix Democracy
The Rich Legacy of Philadelphia Free Jazz
Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines
“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
YouTube 46:37
A New Wave of American Buyers Has Set Its Sights on European Soccer
The Difficult Odyssey of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’
“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 (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.
Awesome Tapes From Africa puts Gabonese harp in the spotlight with Papé Nziengui
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
“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. ...”
The Duchamp Research Portal Digitally Unites Three Museum Archives
“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)
The Making of a Coronavirus-Criminal Presidency
Who is Nathan Davis? A guest post
YouTube: Makatuka 1 / 6, Sixth Sense in the Eleventh House 1 / 6
The Artists of The WPA
“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. ...”
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.’ ...”