Deep Art Nature

Discogs

In Medieval Europe, a Pandemic Changed Work Forever. Can It Happen Again?

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Triumph of Death.”

“In the wake of a devastating pandemic, millions of people are dead and many more have had their lives upended. Many of those who survive, worn down by a sense of futility in their work and by the impassable gap between the wealthy and everyone else, refuse to return to their old jobs or quit en masse. Tired of being overworked and underpaid, they feel they deserve a better life. This could be a story about today, but it is also the pattern that emerged across Europe in the aftermath of one of the deadliest pandemics in recorded history, the Black Death. ...”

Harvard University: Does the Fourteenth-Century Black Death Hold Lessons for Today’s Pandemic?

W - Black Death

YouTube: The Black Death: Worst Pandemic in History Visualized

2017 September: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara Tuchman (1978)

Inspired by the Black Death, The Dance of Death, or Danse Macabre, an allegory on the universality of death, was a common painting motif in the late medieval period.

Reveling in the Winter Milky Way

“Last December I joined Sky & Telescope Senior Editor Kelly Beatty on a solar eclipse cruise to Antarctica. While the eclipse was clouded out, we scored four nights of mostly clear skies farther north in the Falkland Islands, which were also on the ship's itinerary. Because of nightlong twilights I saw only Sirius and Canopus from Antarctica, but Falkland skies delivered spectacular views of the southern Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. From my home in Minnesota, the southern horizon cuts off the Milky Way a short distance below Canis Major. ...”

Sky & Telescope

In this model of the Milky Way, the Sun (yellow dot) lies halfway between the Galaxy's center and edge inside a minor spiral arm called the Orion Spur. During Northern Hemisphere winter, we look away from the center toward the Perseus and Outer Arms.

Lee 'Scratch' Perry And The Upsetters – Battle Of Armagideon (1986)

“Let’s be wary of ‘madness’, of the ‘loon’ or the ‘lunatic genius’ motif in popcrit. Beyond its insensitivity to the nuances and complexities of mental illness it’s notable how it’s so often used as a power game that gets played when white male critics talk about female artists, or Black artists. It's a reductive way of thinking that stems from the assumption that having the medical condition of mental illness somehow promotes, feeds and sustains creativity. Sylvia Plath, Dostoevsky, Brian Wilson, Kristin Hersh and of course Lee Perry have all had the same ‘troubled’, ‘eccentric’ epithets thrown around their work mainly as a way of forestalling proper investigation into the motivations and meaning of their artistry. ...”

The Quietus

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Lee "Scratch" Perry & The Upsetters ‎– Battle Of Armagideon (Millionaire Liquidator) 9 videos

2021 September: Lee “Scratch” Perry

The rise of Mohamed Salah

“Mohamed Salah has a claim to be one the best players in the world on current form. He is one of the most recognisable players on the planet. But how did he get to this point? Alex Stewart charts Salah’s rise from a small village in northern Egypt, avoiding military service, and being rejected by Chelsea, to becoming Premier League and Champions League winner, and captaining his country. Illustrated by Philippe Fenner.”

YouTube

Monica Vitti, from Alienated Beauty to Madcap Comedienne

“Though she was a widely beloved star of Italian and international comedies in the late 1960s and ’70s, Monica Vitti, who has passed away at the age of ninety, will be remembered first and foremost for the four films she made with Michelangelo Antonioni between 1960 and 1964. In 2014, the great critic Gilberto Perez ranked this remarkable pairing of director and star with those of D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, and Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. But while ‘it may be said that, in these cases, the woman is a figure of beauty, an object of contemplation for the man behind the camera,’ the dynamic between Antonioni and Vitti was altogether different. ...”

Criterion

L’Avventura’: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Visual Poetry and Its Impact on the World of Film (Video)

What makes Antonioni’s L’avventura great, YouTube: Observations on Film Art: The Restraint of L’AVVENTURA

1960s: Days of Rage – Michelangelo Antonioni: L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962), Red Desert – Michelangelo Antonioni (1962)

L’Avventura (1960)

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Looking to Make Their Own History

“Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the Socialist Worker, pitched at ‘activists interested in making their own history.’ ...”

Open Culture

2010 January: Howard Zinn, 2013 November: The Problem is Civil Obedience - 1970, 2014 May: A People's History of the United States - (1980), 2017 March: The People Speak (2009)

The story of the hidden garden inside a Turtle Bay tenement block

“East 49th Street between Second and Third Avenues in Turtle Bay is a block with a backstory. During the 17th century, this was farmland owned by Dutch settlers; in the 18th century, a stagecoach stop on Boston Post Road was established here. By the Civil War, the farms vanished, subsumed into the urban city and turned into brownstones and tenements.But the story in this post concerns something that came to Turtle Bay in 1946: a hidden romantic garden of shady trees, decorative flower pots, stone block walls and paved walkways unseen from the street and accessed through a thin-slatted iron gate. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Du Y Moroedd - Llyn Y Cwn (2022)

“’Du Y Moroedd’ (Welsh - the black of the sea) is an album of abyssal dark ambient - environmental soundscapes and atmospheres from above, below and beside the ocean; field recordings made onboard vessels at sea; sounds from submerged recording devices deep underwater; recordings from the coasts of North Wales to Greenland and the Arctic Ocean. The tracks were created onboard the RV Prince Madog whilst conducting research using multibeam sonar to locate, survey and identify shipwrecks from WW1. ...”

Cold Spring (Video)

Criterion – One Night in Miami . . .: In the Room

Regina King – One Night in Miami … (2020). Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke

“Regina King’s feature-film directorial debut, One Night in Miami . . . (2020), persuasively envisions an astonishing true-life convergence of Black heroes at a portentous mid-twentieth-century juncture in American life. ... All that’s known for certain is that the fresh (in more ways than one) new champion got together at that predominantly Black motel that same evening to celebrate his win with Jim Brown, the nonpareil professional football player of his era; Sam Cooke, the rhythm-and-blues recording idol and emerging music mogul; and Malcolm X, the acerbic, inflammatory voice of the Nation of Islam, who was at that time mentoring Clay toward his reinvention as a Black Muslim named Muhammad Ali. ...”

Criterion (Video)

NY Times – ‘One Night in Miami’ Review: After the Big Fight, a War of Words By A.O. Scott (Video)

Voice – ‘One Night In Miami’ Brings Four Black Icons Into Tight Focus

W – One Night in Miami…

Biden and Putin Speak for One Hour; U.S. Orders All but ‘Core Team’ to Leave Ukraine Embassy

US intelligence assessment on the movement of Russian troops near the Russo-Ukrainian border (3 December 2021).

“The leaders spoke by telephone on Saturday, but details were not yet available. The State Department again warned all Americans to leave Ukraine amid concerns of an imminent Russian attack. President Biden spoke with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for one hour on Saturday in a bid to defuse the crisis over Ukraine, and the State Department ordered all but a “core team” of its diplomats and employees to leave the American Embassy in Kyiv over fears that Moscow would soon mount a major assault.Details of the phone call were not yet released early Saturday afternoon. ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times: Running a Business Under the Shadow of War

W - 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis

Politico: Opinion | How the West Gets Ukraine Wrong — and Helps Putin As a Result

NY Times: Emmanuel Macron in His Labyrinth

NY Times: How Russia’s Military Is Positioned to Threaten Ukraine (Jan. 7, 2022)

Ukraine depicted as "Ukraine, Land of the Cossacks" in a 1720 map by Johann Homann

Making Moves at the Marshall Chess Club

Playing by the book: Marshall Chess Club member Edward Frumkin makes a move.

“Writer Frank Brady was 9 years old when he first learned how to play chess. His older brother had bought a small chess set, and they figured out the moves together. Brady, who is now 87, still remembers the exact moment he truly became fascinated with the game of chess. ... Later that year, Brady decided to take a trip downtown to Greenwich Village to visit the acclaimed Marshall Chess Club—he had read about it in several chess magazines. ...”

Voice

W - Marshall Chess Club

2008 October: World Chess Championship 1972, 2009 January: Sicilian Defence, 2009 February: Mikhail Tal, 2009 February: Garry Kasparov, 2009 April: Vasily Smyslov, 2009 August: Chess960, 2009 November: Bent Larsen,2011 November: The Lewis Chessmen, 2012 July: 40 Years Ago Today: Chess Rivals Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky Meet in the ‘Match of the Century’, 2015 September: The Subtext Buried In Seven Great Movie Chess Scenes, 2018 December: The Last Chess Shop in New York City, 2019 May: Deep Blue, 2021 May: Chess in the arts, 2021 July: The Sharp Game

Visit the Marshall Chess Club in NYC, they have events going on almost every single day

Trump’s Missing Call Logs Present a Challenge for Jan. 6 Investigators

Protesters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has discovered gaps in official White House telephone logs from the day of the riot, finding few records of calls by President Donald J. Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them. Investigators have not uncovered evidence that any official records were tampered with or deleted, and it is well known that Mr. Trump routinely used his personal cellphone, and those of his aides, to talk with other aides, congressional allies and outside confidants, bypassing the normal channels of presidential communication.But the sparse call records present a major obstacle to a central element of the panel’s work: recreating what Mr. Trump was doing behind closed doors during the assault on Congress by a mob of his supporters. ...”

NY Times: Republicans Who Railed About Clinton Emails Are Quiet on Trump’s Records

2021 February: 77 days: Trump’s campaign to subvert the election, 2021 July: Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol, 2021 July: ‘A hit man sent them.’ Police at the Capitol recount the horrors of Jan. 6 as the inquiry begins., 2021 September: Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant, 2021 October: Jan. 6 Was Worse Than We Knew, 2021 October: 90 Seconds of Rage, 2022 January: Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now, 2022 January: Oath Keepers Leader Charged With Seditious Conspiracy in Jan. 6 Investigation

Road movie

“A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives. Road movies often depict travel in the hinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence, a ‘distinctly existential air‘ and is populated by restless, ‘frustrated, often desperate characters’. The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the characters. Road movies tend to focus on the theme of masculinity (with the man often going through some type of crisis), some type of rebellion, car culture, and self-discovery. The core theme of road movies is ‘rebellion against conservative social norms’. ...”

W - Road movie

It Happened One Night (1934) is about a rich woman who learns about regular Americans when she travels the Interstate system by car.

Channel One | We Out Here: Online & On Air

“Channel One Sound System is one of the UK’s best known and most loved reggae sound systems. Having taken over the running of their father’s sound in 1979, Mikey Dread and his brother Jah T took the sound to local blues parties and dances. Mikey took the name Channel One as homage to the legendary Channel One studio in Jamaica. In 1983, Channel One started playing at Notting Hill Carnival (check out video clip of Carnival 2018 in the hyperlink), they have played at Carnival every year since. ...”

Channel One (Video)

YouTube: Channel One | We Out Here: Online & On Air | March 59:57

William Parker / Raining On The Moon – Corn Meal Dance (2007)

“Corn Meal Dance is an immaculate album work that we are deeply honored to present. Back in 2007, its creation & release is how AUM Fidelity celebrated our 10th Anniversary as a purveyor of regenerative sounds. Wisdom of an eternal nature is to be found here – and sung & danced along to – with love in your heart. ... These pieces pursue an elemental purity through mystical language and metaphor. What marks this as unique in Parker's long list of recordings is its primary accessibility. And if that serves the purpose of introducing his vision to new ears, it has more than done its job. When jazz historians look back on music at the turn of this century, William Parker will stand as a giant among men. ...”

W - Corn Meal Dance

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Pomigliano Jazz Festival 2009- William Parker Chamber Trio

2022 January: A Guide to William Parker

The Fiendishly Complicated Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Play: Discover The Campaign for North Africa

“Monopoly is notoriously time-consuming. On the childhood Christmas I received my first copy of that Parker Brothers classic, my dad and I started a game that ended up spreading over two or three days. That may have had to do with my appreciation for Monopoly’s aesthetic far exceeding my grasp of its aim, and I’ve since realized that it can be played in about an hour. That’s still a good deal longer than, say, a game of checkers, but it falls somewhat short of the league occupied by The Campaign for North Africa — which is, in fact, a league of its own. Since its publication in 1979, it’s been known as the longest board game in existence, requiring 1,500 hours (or 62 days) to complete. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

W - The Campaign for North Africa

In the ‘Genocide Olympics,’ Are We All Complicit?

“The Olympics have been in a state of moral crisis for some time now, mired in countless controversies over bribery, corruption, financial waste, cheating, environmental damage, forced displacement of local residents and, more recently, the pandemic. But as the Times sports columnist Kurt Streeter wrote last week, ‘Beijing 2022 sits at a whole other level of discord.’ Casting the darkest pall over the Games by far are the human rights abuses occurring about 2,000 miles away in the region of Xinjiang, where one million or more Uighurs, a Chinese Muslim ethnic group, and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities are reportedly being subjected to mass detentions, forced labor, sterilization and torture. Their repression has been described by the Biden administration, among other governments, as nothing less than a genocide. ...”

The Athletic – Cox: Italy-esque Senegal shackled Egypt with five men – they were deserved winners (Audio)

The Graphic Novel as Architectural Narrative: Berlin and Aya

“The comic strip, la bande dessinée, the graphic novel. These are all part of a medium with an intrinsic connection to architectural storytelling. It’s a medium that has long been used to fantasise and speculate on possible architectural futures, or in a less spectacular context, used as a device to simply show the perspectival journey through an architectural project. When the comic strip meshes fiction with architectural imagination, however, it’s not only the speculation on future architectural scenarios that takes place. It’s also the recording and the critiquing of the urban conditions of either our contemporary cities or the cities of the past. ...”

ArchDaily

Africa Cup of Nations review: sorrow, anger and Mané’s redemption

“Our writers relive their highs and lows of a tournament completely overshadowed by the Olembe Stadium tragedy. … This Cup of Nations was played under a shadow from the moment eight supporters died outside Olembe Stadium a fortnight ago. There is no excusing what happened at a venue surrounded by vast spaces and the depressing sense remains that its causes will be swept under the carpet. After driving back to Yaoundé the following day and speaking with Romaric, who had been in the ground and encountered people who had been caught up in the crush as he left, the horror of what had occurred started to become clear. A subsequent visit to the emergency hospital brought some harrowing testimonies; these are, sadly, the words and images that linger. …”

Guardian

NY Times – Africa Cup of Nations: Soccer Tournament Offers Joy Amid Coups and Covid

****An African Cup of Nations Primer

AFCON 2021: The Review

W – 2021 Africa Cup of Nations

YouTube: Senegal vs Egypt | AFCON 2021 FINAL HIGHLIGHTS | 02/06/2022, Cameroon vs Egypt – CAF African Cup of Nations 2022 2:10:39

The Largest Autocracy on Earth

“In 1947, Albert Einstein, writing in this magazine, proposed the creation of a single world government to protect humanity from the threat of the atomic bomb. His utopian idea did not take hold, quite obviously, but today, another visionary is building the simulacrum of a cosmocracy. Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined. ...”

The Atlantic

Cooking with Virginia Woolf By Valerie Stivers

“The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This ‘savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,’ in its huge pot, gives off an ‘exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.’ It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive. ...”

The Paris Review

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. ...”

Ephemeral New York

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. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

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)

NY Times (Audio)

Black History, Black Freedom, and Black Love

“... From critical race theory to the 1619 Project, Black intellectuals are reshaping conversations on race in America. Now seven of those preeminent voices share their insight on the reckoning with race in America in three parts: past, present, and future. Gain a foundational understanding of the history of white supremacy and discover a path forward through the limitless capacity and resilience of Black love.The class includes several hours of videos about ‘the history you weren’t taught in school” from an absolutely incredible lineup of instructors: Angela Davis, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jelani Cobb, Sherrilyn Ifill, John McWhorter, and Cornel West. This is a fantastic resource. ...”

Black History Month (Video)

2021 April: The 1619 Project, 2021 November: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

A Time For Healing - Kahil El'Zabar Quartet (2021)

“Chicago’s legendary spiritual jazz shaman Kahil El’Zabar returns, leading an enviable ensemble of young masters from his hometown! Kahil El’Zabar delivers yet another epic double LP’s worth of ancient/future music for the mind, body and soul. From swinging jazz that sings of his Chicago pedigree, to talking drums and soothing spiritual grooves that reconnect Black Classical Music with its African roots. Multi-percussionist, band-leader, vocalist, composer, conductor and educator, Kahil El’Zabar has been at the forefront of the unceasingly creative avant-garde jazz scene in Chicago and beyond for over 4 decades. ...”

Discogs (Video)

The Athletic: Football and cryptocurrency sponsorship: is the free-for-all over? (Audio)

Football Is Sinking in Crypto Snake Oil

“Football fans have had to put up with a lot lately. Match-going diehards have been squeezed for decades, with tickets in many of Europe’s top leagues becoming unaffordable. Attending away games isn’t just expensive but near impossible for many fans, with the spread of matches across weekdays and a constant rise in fixture congestion. Even for those stuck at home, things aren’t much easier. TV and digital streaming rights are often split between three or more providers, meaning fans have to shell out hundreds of dollars a season. Fans are sacrificing time, money, and attention just as all these things seem scarcer than ever. ...”

Jacobin

An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way

Electrical storms light up the center of the Milky Way galaxy. A new radio image reveals supernova remnants, threads of energy and other features both new and known.

“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. ...”