“A baby shower in a retirement home – that would surely raise some eyebrows. Likewise, astronomers were surprised to find a fast radio burst in a globular cluster. Astronomers think the enigmatic, millisecond-duration flashes of radio waves arise on newborn neutron stars. However, the stars in globular clusters are almost as old as the universe itself. ... Fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first discovered in 2007. In about one-thousandth of a second, they release as much energy as the Sun does in days. ...”
Fast Radio Burst's Unlikely Home Puzzles Astronomers
With Russian troops moving on Kyiv, the Kremlin sends mixed signals on talks.
“Ukrainians on Friday battled for their capital, Kyiv, as officials warned residents to stay indoors and ‘prepare Molotov cocktails’ to defend against Russian forces who had entered a northern district of the city. Kyiv could fall quickly, the Biden administration warned Congress on Thursday. As missile strikes hammered Kyiv and a rocket crashed into a residential building, President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Ukrainians to defend the country. Russian officials signaled an openness to talks, but President Vladimir V. Putin derided the Ukrainian government and it was unclear under what conditions the Kremlin would consider negotiations. ... Mr. Putin urged Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms and described Mr. Zelensky’s government as ‘a band of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.’ The brutal language suggested he was not seriously planning to engage Mr. Zelensky in peace talks. ...”
NY Times: Opinion - Mr. Putin Launches a Sequel to the Cold War
Whistler’s Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan
“Joanna Hiffernan’s close professional and personal relationship with artist James McNeill Whistler lasted more than two decades—yet who was she? She is featured in numerous works by Whistler, including his three famous ‘Symphony in White’ paintings, which are being shown together for the first time in the United States. While the intriguing “woman in white” has inspired artists from the Victorian era to today, little has been shared about Hiffernan and her influential role in Whistler’s life and work—until now.”
Understanding the Ukraine Crisis: A Comprehensive Reading List
Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism
2013 December: Hannah Arendt
From James Brown to Tom Waits: Robert Pattinson's 15 favourite songs of all time
Claire Denis’s Closet Picks
2009 September: Claire Denis, 2013 October: Claire Denis Dialogue with Eric Hynes, 2017 June: White Material (2009)
Ukraine Live Updates: Biden Joins Europe in Punishing Russia With Sanctions
What Made Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus a Revolutionary Painting
Neon Noir: How Miami Vice Helped Me Navigate My Tropical Nightmare
Screen Time - Thurston Moore (2021)
2015 August: Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture - Thurston Moore (2005), 2019 August: Rhythm and Blues Jazz Handbook, edited by Thurston Moore, 2021 June: Chicago '82: A Dip in the Lake (1982)
In Orlando, 25 Mysterious Basquiats Come Under the Magnifying Glass
“It seems like a story too good to be true, and for some in the art world, it is. Last weekend, 25 Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings were publicly unveiled at the Orlando Museum of Art before several thousand V.I.P.s. All of the paintings were said by the museum to have been created in late 1982 while Basquiat, 22, was living and working out of a studio space beneath Larry Gagosian’s home in Venice, Calif., preparing fresh canvases for a show at the art dealer’s Los Angeles gallery. ...”
2013 April: Saving Basquiat: Seeing the Art Through the Myth-Making at Gagosian, 2015 February: Now's the Time, 2015 May: Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, 2015 December: The Notebooks, 2017 June: New Art, New Money (February 10, 1985), 2021 November: Downtown 81 - Edo Bertoglio (1980-81)
No no no, nonsense, never: Hidden notebooks reveal the tense relationships behind Gertrude Stein’s genius
“In Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007), Janet Malcolm turned to the murky world of Gertrude Stein scholarship. ... In 1948, two years after Stein’s death, while working in the Yale University Library as a doctoral student exploring her early writings, Katz had come across a brown paper packet containing a tranche of grey-covered notebooks. As he leafed through their pages, Katz became gripped. He realized that these were the notes from which Stein had worked during the years 1902 to 1911, while drafting The Making of Americans, a sprawling 1,000-page epic eventually published in 1925, which broke away from previous forms of narrative writing and sought to tell a complete ‘history of everyone who ever was or is or will be living’. ...”
2007 November: Gertrude Stein, 2011 July: The making of "Tender Buttons", 2012 March: The Steins Collect, 2012 May: Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the record straight, 2014 November: Lost Generation, 2015 January: The Making of an American by Edward White, May 2020: Seeing Robert Wilson plain, 2020 December: Tender Buttons (1914)
Déneigement Montreal
Chris Cutler & Fred Frith: 2 Gentlemen In Verona (1999)
In Medieval Europe, a Pandemic Changed Work Forever. Can It Happen Again?
“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. ...”
Reveling in the Winter Milky Way
Lee 'Scratch' Perry And The Upsetters – Battle Of Armagideon (1986)
YouTube: Lee "Scratch" Perry & The Upsetters – Battle Of Armagideon (Millionaire Liquidator) 9 videos
2021 September: Lee “Scratch” Perry
The rise of Mohamed Salah
Monica Vitti, from Alienated Beauty to Madcap Comedienne
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)
Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Looking to Make Their Own History
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
Du Y Moroedd - Llyn Y Cwn (2022)
Regina King – One Night in Miami … (2020). Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke
Biden and Putin Speak for One Hour; U.S. Orders All but ‘Core Team’ to Leave Ukraine Embassy
“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. ...”
Making Moves at the Marshall Chess Club
“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. ...”
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
Trump’s Missing Call Logs Present a Challenge for Jan. 6 Investigators
“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. ...”
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