Initial Talks End Between Russia and Ukraine

 
Russia hits Ukraine fuel supplies, airfields in new attacks Ukrainian soldiers take positions outside a military facility after an explosion in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Feb. 26, 2022. ...

“As Ukraine’s second-largest city reeled under a barrage of Russian rockets that officials said  killed dozens of people, a Ukrainian delegation met counterparts from Russia for several hours of talks on Monday in Belarus. The bombardment of a residential area of Kharkiv five days after Russia’s invasion began signaled a possible intensification of the conflict. Moscow’s actions have fueled nationwide resistance, forced half a million refugees to flee Ukraine and left Russia to deal with growing sanctions and increasing isolation. Among Monday’s other major developments. Belarus hosted the first face-to-face talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials since the Russian invasion began, but President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said before the meeting that he was not hopeful that it would end the hostilities. The Treasury Department announced that it would freeze assets of the Russian Central Bank that are held in the United States and impose sanctions on the Russian Direct Investment Fund. The value of the ruble plunged by more than 25 percent as the effects of Western sanctions shook Russia’s economy. ...”

​Navigating Pete Namlook’s Sprawling Musical Universe

 
“It was on the banks of the River Main in Frankfurt, Germany that one of the most powerful visions of electronic ambient music was born. An employee at the city center bank, a 30-year-old named Peter Kulhmann was walking along the Main with his gig bag in hand—Kuhlmann played guitar in his free time. At the time, he was a skilled jazz fusion player, but the scene had left him feeling disenchanted. He decided to stop for a moment, take out his guitar, and look out on the lapping waters of the city river. He began to strum the instrument, aligning his playing to the natural sound of the water. As he played, he could feel himself opening up fully to nature—and to the present moment—finally hearing the natural music that existed all around him. ....”

Cyber tensions rise as West fears invasion of Ukraine

 
A day before Ukraine announced its Defense Ministry and banking servers had been hacked, our video team toured the country’s Cybercommand Center, where officials have been preparing for this scenario for years.

“In the online world, the West and Russia are already at loggerheads over Ukraine.As government leaders scramble to come up with a diplomatic deal to avert all-out war in Ukraine, cybersecurity officials warn of a potential wave of Russia-backed cyberattacks that could destabilize NATO countries. Meanwhile, disinformation experts fret Moscow is pushing false narratives through Russian state-affiliated media to tee up a pretext for war by fueling claims that Kyiv or NATO members may soon attack Russian military targets. ...”

The Enigma of Roberto Bolaño

 
“I discovered the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s work in 2008, which, not coincidentally, was also the year I discovered that the United States had helped deliver his native country into 17 years of ultra-right-wing authoritarianism. I learned this history shortly after stumbling into a student exchange program that dropped me in Quillota, Chile, where I went to a high school that happened to be the dictator Augusto Pinochet’s alma mater. Everybody I knew in Quillota was lovely to me, and very patient with both my error-riddled Spanish and my shocking historical ignorance. ...”

​Protesters taking to streets of Russia are warned they face TREASON charges

“Putin has cracked down on Russians calling for peace, with authorities warning protestors they could face 'treason' charges as more than 1,700 demonstrators were detained after showing solidarity with global protestors. Rarely seen protests against Russian president Vladimir Putin broke out in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, as the global outcry against the Russian strongman grew louder. Pictures showed officers physically picking up protesters and dragging them away from the demonstrations, which are rare in the authoritarian country which does not tolerate dissent against the Kremlin.Russian police have detained more than 1,700 people at anti-war protests across Russia after President Vladimir Putin sent troops to invade Ukraine, an independent monitor said Thursday. ...”

 
Anti-War Germany

A Sleepless Night of Russian Air Strikes in Ukraine “At only takes one thumping, window-shaking boom to reach a state of sudden, adrenaline-fuelled alertness. I was already awake in my room in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, when a burst of three explosions went off at five in the morning. A moment later, I was hustling downstairs to the hotel’s basement with Emanuele Satolli, an Italian photographer with whom I’ve been travelling. We looked at our phones in silence and tracked all the places where the bombs and missiles were landing: not just in Kramatorsk—where, on the outskirts of town, there is a military airfield that houses the Ukrainian command overseeing the war in the Donbas—but in Dnipro, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Odessa, Kyiv. Days earlier, I had been staying in a sleek business hotel in the center of the capital; a colleague who was still there posted an Instagram story of the breakfast buffet on the fifteenth floor, with shelling and air-raid sirens in the distance. ...”

 
 Thousands take to the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine for the Unity March to show solidarity and patriotic spirit over the escalating tensions with Russia.

​Fast Radio Burst's Unlikely Home Puzzles Astronomers

 
A cluster of ancient stars at the outskirts of spiral galaxy M81 is the source of extraordinarily bright and short radio flashes.

“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. ...”

​With Russian troops moving on Kyiv, the Kremlin sends mixed signals on talks.

 
The body of a Russian soldier lies next to a Russian vehicle, in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Friday.

“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

 
A woman gets assistance fleeing from a civilian apartment complex that was bombed in Chuhuiv, near Kharkiv, Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

​Whistler’s Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan

 
Riverside reality … Whistler’s Wapping, 1860–64.

“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

 
“... I work as book buyer for the largest bookstore in the country, mostly specializing in nonfiction. In my role, I am responsible for curating the range of books to order and highlight. Sometimes I am asked to consult the overall book-buying for the company in my areas of interest.Many articles have been written in the last few days about whether the Russians will stop when they reach the combat lines between the rebel-held territory and Ukraine. We now have our answer. ... Over the last 48 hours, customers, booksellers, and other managers as well as head-office personnel have asked me for ideas on key reading material that the company has to ensure is ready, available, and relevant to a sudden onrush of interest in Ukraine and Russia. ...”

Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

 
“... How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterward. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F-Scale (’F’ for ‘fascism’), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type. ...”

2013 December: Hannah Arendt

From James Brown to Tom Waits: Robert Pattinson's 15 favourite songs of all time

 
“Robert Pattinson had been crystallised as Twilight’s Edward Cullen in popular culture but he has been delving into uncharted territory in recent years which has proven that he is one of the most talented actors of our generation. Pattinson has gone on to collaborate with pioneers of the artform in films that are nothing short of modern masterpieces. Ranging from his anxiety-inducing powerhouse of a performance in the Safdie brothers’ Good Time to the fever dream that was Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, Pattinson has played unconventional characters with grace and intelligence by establishing his command over his craft. ...”

Claire Denis’s Closet Picks

 
“When the great French director Claire Denis stopped by our offices for a visit this spring, she had plenty of reason to be feeling ecstatic. ... And her latest work, a mysterious sci-fi project called High Life, was just a few months away from being selected for some of the world’s most prestigious festival lineups (just yesterday, it was announced as part of the New York Film Festival’s main slate). ... In the above video, she recalls her formative encounters with the transcendent works of Carl Theodor Dreyer, jokes about Howard Hawks making her feel like ‘such a failure,’ and gets emotional about Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika, a wistful ode to young love that fills her with a sense of nostalgia and lost time. ...”

​Ukraine Live Updates: Biden Joins Europe in Punishing Russia With Sanctions

”President Biden on Tuesday announced harsh new sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for what he called ‘the beginning of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,’ joining European leaders in imposing severe economic consequences for blatant violations of national sovereignty. Speaking from the East Room of the White House, Mr. Biden condemned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for his aggression against Ukraine, saying that the Russian action is ‘a flagrant violation of international law and demands a firm response from the international community.’ ...”

What Made Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus a Revolutionary Painting

 
The Birth of Venus, we often hear, depicts the ideal woman. Yet half a millennium after Sandro Botticelli painted it, how many of us whose tastes run to the female form really see it that way? ‘I’ve always been struck by how Venus is strangely asexual, and her nudity is clinical,’ says gallerist James Payne, creator of the Youtube channel Great Art Explained. ‘Maybe that’s because she represents sex as a necessary function: sex for procreation, the ultimate goal in a dynastic marriage.’ This, safe to say, isn’t the sort of thing that gets most of us going in the 21st century. ...”
 
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486). Tempera on canvas.

​Neon Noir: How Miami Vice Helped Me Navigate My Tropical Nightmare

 
“On a sultry night at the docks of Miami, the shootout ends. Undercover cop James ‘Sonny’ Crockett is cradling Evan Freed, a former friend who gasps for words; Crockett’s partner, Ricardo ‘Rico’ Tubbs, tries to comfort Sonny by throwing his hand over his shoulder. This image in the episode ‘Evan’ from the American series Miami Vice (1984-1990) is a veritable Renaissance painting of brotherly love and despair. Created by Anthony Yerkovich and executive producer Michael Mann, Miami Vice revolved around the Cocaine Cowboys era, when Latin American drug cartels, law enforcement agencies and others were engaged in power games while the US was being knocked-out by false moralism and economic crisis, all making headlines in the news. ...”

Screen Time - Thurston Moore (2021)

 
Screen Time is a series of instrumental guitar pieces recorded during the summer of 2021 as the world confronted the pandemic shutdown and as the people of good conscious stood up against the oppression of racist police oppression and murder. ... The cover image of Screen Time is of a youngster curled into a book, the pages vibratory with text radiating through the skin, blood and bone – an aspect entirely missing from digital media, though the actuality of transparency in our daily lives through streaming etc we can only leads to the awareness of fairness. Screen Time is in reflection to dream time, a state of meditation, hypnagogia and pillow talk. ...”

​In Orlando, 25 Mysterious Basquiats Come Under the Magnifying Glass

 
Largely unseen artworks said to be by Jean-Michel Basquiat were installed at the Orlando Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Thaddeus Mumford, Jr. Venice Collection.”

“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. ...”

No no no, nonsense, never: Hidden notebooks reveal the tense relationships behind Gertrude Stein’s genius

 
Illustration by Maira Kalman; from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Illustrated by Gertrude Stein

“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’. ...”

Déneigement Montreal

 
“Before moving to Montreal in 2020, I had lived my whole life in Toronto. Toronto averages about 120 cm (47 inches) of snow a year - on the lower end for Canada, but respectable - and it always seemed to me that we were pretty good at dealing with it. Sure, we called in the army that one time during the blizzards of 1999, but what else are you supposed to do? And sure, the sidewalks in Toronto are essentially impassable for months, but where exactly is all that snow supposed to go? To me, clamoring over mounds of snow just came with the Canadian territory. One winter in Montreal cured me of that belief. ...”
 
Francon quarry from above.

Chris Cutler & Fred Frith: 2 Gentlemen In Verona (1999)

 
“On 2 Gentlemen In Verona guitarist Fred Frith and drummer Chris Cutler perpetuate an alliance that was established back in the pioneering days of ‘Henry Cow’, ‘The Art Bears’ and other projects too numerous in scope to cite here. However, their intuitive improvisational speak once again comes to fruition on this altogether fascinating live exhibition recorded in Verona, Italy, April 16, 1999. Here, the duo performs a series of ‘Acts’ subdivided into incremental ‘Scenes’, akin to a theatrical production. However, this outing does not represent anything that might resemble a musical score for an Italian melodrama or social comedy. Hence, Frith and Cutler overwhelm our imaginations as they generate multi-textured pastiches that feature abstract rhythms, otherworldly effects and mind-bending dialogue. ...”

​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. ...”

 
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. ...”

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. ...”

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.”

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. ...”
 
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.’ ...”

​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. ...”

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. ...”

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. ...”

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. ...”

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