“As Russian artillery and rockets land on Ukrainian hospitals and apartment blocks, devastating residential districts with no military value, the world is watching with horror what is, for Russia, an increasingly standard practice. Its forces conducted similar attacks in Syria, bombing hospitals and other civilian structures as part of Russia’s intervention to prop up that country’s government. Moscow went even further in Chechnya, a border region that had sought independence in the Soviet Union’s 1991 breakup. During two formative wars there, Russia’s artillery and air forces turned city blocks to rubble and its ground troops massacred civilians in what was widely seen as a deliberate campaign to terrorize the population into submission. ...”
Aïda Gómez Sculpts Housing for Squirrels and Birds in Roma Verde MXCD
Laurent Bardainne & Tigre d’Eau Douce — Hymne au Soleil
Citizens of Kyiv
“In the weeks after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv, the capital, became a city transformed. Much of its population evacuated. New defense units gathered and took up arms. Impromptu social support — field kitchens, aid stations, bomb shelters, evacuation convoys — sprouted into functional shapes. The city endured intermittent bombardment throughout. This altered streetscape became the uneasy milieu of Alexander Chekmenev, a Ukrainian documentary and portrait photographer who since the 1990s has visually chronicled his country’s post-Soviet life. ...”
Copyright is colonialism - Boima Tucker
George Inness - Green Landscape (1886)
2009 August: George Inness, 2008 August: Hudson River School
Russia Is Destroying Kharkiv
“Last month, Dmytro Kuzubov put on his headphones and walked around Kharkiv for hours. He felt that the war would start soon and he wanted to visit some of his favorite places. Kharkiv is his hometown: a vibrant, youthful city of nearly 1.5 million people steeped in academia, art and literature. The attacks started a few days later. Unable to take control of the city, Russia has resorted to destroying it. As in Syria and Chechnya, Russia aims to demoralize the city’s inhabitants with overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower. It is following a similar plan in other Ukrainian cities, such as Mariupol and Mykolaiv. ‘The most horrible thing was the whistle of jets. I will remember them all my life,’ said Mr. Kuzubov, who has since fled Kharkiv, along with hundreds of thousands of others. ...”
Using Thoreau’s Notebooks to Understand Climate Change
“Walden was more than a thought experiment. During Henry David Thoreau’s contemplative time by the pond, he recorded countless observations on spring flowering and bird arrivals. These notes are the backbone for a recent study that examines how the area surrounding Walden Pond has been gradually impacted by climate change. In a 2016 study, a team of scientists from Boston University examined Thoreau’s records and compared them to their own leaf-out (dates on which leaf buds begin to open) and spring flower notes from the same area, showing how citizen science can help scientists better understand how climate change is impacting ecosystems worldwide. ...”
2020 April: Henry David Thoreau - I, 2020 May: This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal - II, 2022 January: Emerson and Thoreau’s Fanatical Freedom
Ghetto-ology Dub -- Sugar Minott (1979/2000
Zelensky Evokes U.S. History in Appeal to Congress
"President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine made an urgent and emotional appeal to Congress on Wednesday to come to his country’s aid as it fights off a brutal Russian invasion, asking for help protecting its air space, military assistance and stronger sanctions as part of what he cast as a war for the cause of democracy itself.In a remarkably direct appeal by a wartime leader to policymakers in Washington, Mr. Zelensky addressed lawmakers on a large screen in a movie theater-style auditorium under the Capitol, invoking the memories of Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — when the United States came under attack — as he pleaded for support saying, ‘we need you right now.’ ...”
Bernadette Mayer / Vito Acconci: 0 To 9
The Billion-Dollar Brackets of March Madness
The Iconic Doomsday Clock Now Says It’s 100 Seconds to Midnight, Following Putin’s Nuclear Threats
Belfast - Kenneth Branagh (2021)
Leaked Chats Show Russian Ransomware Gang Discussing Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine
The road well travelled: 100 years of Jack Kerouac
2009 November: Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut, 2010 July: Kerouac's Copies of Floating Bear, 2011 March: Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show, 2013 September: On the Road - Jack Kerouac, 2014 May: “Walker Evans and Robert Frank – An Essay on Influence by Tod Papageorge” (1981), 2015 March: Pull My Daisy (1959), 2015 December: Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken, 2016 July: Mexico City Blues (1959), 2017 February: The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990), 2017 May: The Subterraneans (1958), 2017 June: The Town and the City (1950), 2018 January: Big Sur (1962), 2018 March: A Slightly Embarrassing Love for Jack Kerouac, 2019 March: Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Paintings:”..., 2020 April: Book of Dreams (1960), 2020 August: Camp Like Kerouac in a Fire Lookout Station
Could Putin actually fall?
Jóhann Jóhannsson ~ Drone Mass
Ukrainians in race to save cultural heritage
“Standing in front of Lviv’s Latin cathedral, Lilya Onyshchenko offered her view of the invading Russians. ‘They are barbarians. They don’t care what they destroy,’ she said. ‘I haven’t met Hitler. I think Putin is worse. He’s a devil, not a human,’ she added, standing in the historic centre of one of Europe’s most culturally important cities. Behind her, construction workers were busy erecting scaffolding around a Renaissance chapel. The friezes showing Jesus – in the garden of Gethsemane, being arrested by Roman soldiers – were about to be wrapped up. Around the corner a team perched on a giant crane were boarding up the cathedral’s stain-glass windows. ...”
NY Times: Opinion | The Price of Putin’s Belligerence
Turner paintings not seen in UK for 100 years to go on show at National Gallery
“Two oil paintings by one of Britain’s greatest artists that have not been seen in the UK for more than 100 years will go on display at the National Gallery later this year. The paintings by JMW Turner are of European scenes that feature the artist’s trademark expanses of water and sky. ... Painted in the mid-1820s, the works reflect Turner’s lifelong fascination with ports and harbours as dynamic, transitional places, depicted in both oil and watercolours throughout his career. He travelled extensively around Europe, drawing in sketchbooks and producing paintings from them back in his studio in England. ...”
November 2007: J. M. W. Turner, 2009 April: Turner & Italy, 2011 June: J. M. W. Turner - 1, 2014 June: In Which We Find His Theory Of Color Implausible, 2014 September: The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free, 2015 May: Mr. Turner (2014), 2018 November: The Slave Ship (1840), 2018 December: Turner and Constable: The Inhabited Landscape, 2020 September: The Fighting Temeraire (1838), 2021 August: Sun Rising Through Vapour, Before 1807
Suffering goes on in encircled Mariupol as evacuation fails
“MARIUPOL, Ukraine — Corpses lie in the streets of Mariupol. Hungry people break into stores in search of food and melt snow for water. Thousands huddle in basements, trembling at the sound of Russian shells pounding this strategic port city. ‘Why shouldn’t I cry?’ Goma Janna demanded as she wept by the light of an oil lamp below ground, surrounded by women and children. ‘I want my home, I want my job. I’m so sad about people and about the city, the children.’ A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in this encircled city of 430,000, and Tuesday brought no relief: An attempt to evacuate civilians and deliver badly needed food, water and medicine through a designated safe corridor failed, with Ukrainian officials saying Russian forces had fired on the convoy before it reached the city. ...”
Robert Fripp - Music For Quiet Moments (2021)
2010 April: Robert Fripp, 2011 September: Frippertronics, 2014 April: The New World 1986 (Frippertronics), 2017 September: The Essential Fripp & Eno (1994)
Russia, Blocked From the Global Internet, Plunges Into Digital Isolation
“Even as President Vladimir V. Putin tightened his grip on Russian society over the past 22 years, small pockets of independent information and political expression remained online. Any remnants of that are now gone. As Mr. Putin has waged war on Ukraine, a digital barricade went up between Russia and the world. Both Russian authorities and multinational internet companies built the wall with breathtaking speed. And the moves have ruptured an open internet that was once seen as helping to integrate Russia into the global community. ...”
NY Times: An agreement on nuclear plants in Ukraine is urgently needed, the U.N. nuclear agency says. (Video)
The teens who found splendor on the gritty East Side docks of the 1940s
Leaving Kharkiv with children, suitcases and trauma.
“LVIV, Ukraine — Passengers streaming off the train from Kharkiv looked shellshocked, their faces drawn with tiredness. They clutched children with big, staring eyes. ‘From Kharkiv,’ said Olena Tuliakova, dragging a wheeled suitcase and holding her 3-year-old son, Ilya, by the hand. ‘I left my parents there,’ she added, breaking into tears. She said she planned to travel across Europe to Spain, where her husband was working. She had taped a label to Ilya’s jacket with his name and the family’s phone numbers in case he got lost in the crush or worse. ...”