William Parker Quartets: Meditation / Resurrection (2017)

 

“Bassist William Parker's Quartets (note the plural) presented here are, of course just a fraction of the ensembles he is currently organizing and working in. It is these 2 quartets that manifest the Yin and Yang that is Parker. The question might be, is his Quartet of trumpeter Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, alto saxophonist Rob Brown, and drummer Hamid Drake,  the Yang, or positive/active/male principal in nature, and his In Order To Survive quartet with pianist Cooper-Moore switching with Nelson the Yin, or negative/passive/female force? These two discs, Meditation / Resurrection, recorded on the same day with two differing approaches, exemplify the spiraling flow of Parker's music. ...”

All About Jazz (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

amazon

YouTube: In Order To Survive - Sunrise In East Harlem

2022 January: A Guide to William Parker, 2022 February: Raining On The Moon – Corn Meal Dance (2007)

Russia’s Brutality in Ukraine Has Roots in Earlier Conflicts

 Ukrainian emergency workers at a maternity hospital damaged by shelling in Mariupol last week.

“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. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: The Battle for Kyiv Looms as a Long and Bloody Conflict

VOX: Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, explained in six charts and one map

PBS - Zelenskyy: The Man Who Took On Putin (Video)  25:40

The Intercept_: Why Are There So Few Marina Ovsyannikovas - In Russia and Everywhere Else? (Video)

Aïda Gómez Sculpts Housing for Squirrels and Birds in Roma Verde MXCD

 

 

“An earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 reduced much of the Roma neighborhood to rubble, the remaining structures largely empty even now because of their unsafe condition. ‘Everywhere there are people living on the street while houses stand empty,’ says Spanish artist Aïda Gómez, ‘This is something I cannot understand. I believe that we are doing something wrong here.’ During her art residency in the neighborhood at Huerto Roma Verde at the end of last year, Gómez decided to draw attention to the housing problem in the public sphere using her education in sculpting at Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin; She built a series of multispecies houses that serve to provide shelter from the elements. ...”

Brooklyn Street Art

 

“Multispecies real state”. Huerto Roma Verde Residency. Roma, Mexico City.

Laurent Bardainne & Tigre d’Eau Douce — Hymne au Soleil

 

“Paris-based composer, bandleader and tenor saxophonist Laurent Bardainne returns with his quintet project Tigre d’eau Douce, following the group’s impressive 2020 debut Love Is Everywhere, with a brilliant new cosmic jazz album on Heavenly Sweetness, titled Hymne au Soleil. Building off the core music elements of Love Is Everywhere, this superb new 11-track recording blends together Bardainne’s soaring saxophone lines with soulful B3 organ melodies, spacey synths, funky bass grooves, and layered percussion rhythms. The album ranges from spiritual and meditative-like astral jazz to tracks geared up for the dancefloor. ...”

beat caffeine (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Laurent Bardainne & Tigre d'Eau Douce - Hymne au Soleil  1 / 16

​Citizens of Kyiv

 

Kateryna Hryshchenko 

“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. ...”

NY Times

Chomsky: Peace Talks in Ukraine “Will Get Nowhere” If US Keeps Refusing to Join

Voice: Fear and Loathing – the View From Moscow

e-flux: A T T E N T I O N !  Air  Raid  Sirens  in  Kyiv!

NY Times: Opinion | Why You Haven’t Heard About the Secret Cyberwar in Ukraine

Sky & Telescope: Russia-Ukraine War: Impacts on Space (Updates)

 

до війни—do viyny—before the war

Copyright is colonialism - Boima Tucker

 

“Africa Is a Country Radio continues its literary theme for its third season on Worldwide FM. The fourth installment takes a look at the politics of copyright, and the long history of resistance (or indifference) to that regime from the global margins. Larisa Mann aka DJ Ripley takes a look at the specific case of Jamaica in her book Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power. This episode is essential for anyone who has an interest in music industry futures, from NFTs to streaming and beyond. We open the show with a selection of (colonial/copyright) resistance music, and DJ Ripley takes us out with a selection of classic jungle and dancehall tunes that inspired her work as a musician and academic. Listen below, or on Worldwide FM and follow us on Mixcloud.“

Africa Is a Country (Audio)

George Inness - Green Landscape (1886)

 

“While working on this landscape, Inness shifted the female figure, originally positioned in the middle of the canvas, farther to the left. In the finished work, the shepherdess and grazing calf are perfectly balanced on either side of the vertical line of the central tree. This subtle adjustment typifies the care Inness took to enhance what he called the ‘great spiritual principle of harmony’ in his compositions.“

The Clark Art Institute

2009 August: George Inness, 2008 August: Hudson River School

​Russia Is Destroying Kharkiv

 

And the university gym was destroyed.

“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. ...”

NY Times

VOX: The biggest funder of anti-nuclear war programs is taking its money away

The Nation: Stop the Fighting in Ukraine

NY Times: As Russia Digs In, What’s the Risk of Nuclear War? ‘It’s Not Zero.’

POLITCO: Biden will talk to Xi Friday amid Russian war in Ukraine

 

This was a kindergarten classroom.

​Using Thoreau’s Notebooks to Understand Climate Change

 

Site of Thoreau's Hut, Concord, Mass

“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. ...”

JSTOR Daily

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

 

Thoreau’s 1846 map of Walden Pond

Ghetto-ology Dub -- Sugar Minott (1979/2000

 

“... His roots side is most visible on the Ghetto-o-logy, Black Roots and African Soldier LP's. Ghetto-o-logy came out in 1979 and established his name in the reggae world. The musicianship is faultless, but the album is still outstanding today for the quality of the lyrics in songs like ‘Man Hungry,’ ‘The People Ought to Know,’ ‘Dreader Than Dread’ and of course the title-track which makes the claim that to Minott the ghetto was a university from which he graduated in ‘ghetto-ology’ whereas other people majored in science or biology. The jazz-like arrangements on tracks like ‘Walking Through the Ghetto’ distinguished the album from many other roots albums of the day and Minott's singing was full of passion. ...”

Holland Tunnel Dive

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Ghetto-Ology + Dub (2000) Roots Reggae   1 / 10

​Zelensky Evokes U.S. History in Appeal to Congress

 

President Volodomyr Zelensky

"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.’ ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Putin’s War on Ukraine Is About Ethnicity and Empire

Jacobin: It’s Time to Cancel Ukraine’s Foreign Debt

Jacobin: The War in Ukraine Shows That Europe Could Help Refugees if It Really Wanted To

The Intercept_: As U.S. Focuses on Ukraine, Yemen Starves

 

Residents leave the badly damaged residential building that was hit by a Russian shell.

Bernadette Mayer / Vito Acconci: 0 To 9

 

“Bernadette Mayer is one of the most acclaimed poets of the ‘New York School’ of poetry. Her avant garde and exquisitely rendered final pieces are a result of adventurous journal keeping and writing experiments, some of which will be evident September 13 when the Walker and Rain Taxi Review of Books co-present Bernadette Mayer along with poets Jennifer Karmin and Philip Good, an evening of collaborative literary mayhem. Mayer’s life as a literary artist has been well pronounced in the world of visual art. In the late 1960s, she — along with artist Vito Acconci — edited the groundbreaking mimeographed magazine 0 to 9, which brought together the era’s leading figures of experimental poetry and conceptual art. ...”

WALKER

Look inside ‘0-9,’ the radically experimental magazine that broke all the rules of language

from a secret location

0 to 9, nos. 1–6 plus Street Works supplement to no. 6. 1967–1969.

The Billion-Dollar Brackets of March Madness

 

“One in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That’s over nine quintillion, for those of you who gave up after the fourth comma. Those are the odds of a coin-flipping novice filling out a perfect March Madness bracket, calculated by realizing the two possible outcomes for every game in every round, expressed 2^63. The astronomical odds dwarf the likelihood of death by a vending machine falling on you (roughly 1 in 127 million) or winning Powerball (1 in 292 million). In fact, with the CDC stating the odds of being hit by lightning are 1 in 500,000 in any given year, you’re more likely to be zapped 18 trillion times before predicting the outcome of every match in the famed college basketball tournament, which explains why nobody ever has since the tradition was born back in 1977 within the walls of a Staten Island bar called Jody’s Club Forest. ...”

Voice

FiveThirtyEight: The Favorites To Watch And Upsets To Pick In The 2022 Men’s NCAA Tournament

The Ringer: 2022 NCAA Men’s Tournament Breakdown: The Best Picks and Biggest Questions for Each Region

2022 NCAA Bracket Predictions: Best Picks for Every Matchup

NY Times: Picking an N.C.A.A. Tournament Bracket? Read This First.

​The Iconic Doomsday Clock Now Says It’s 100 Seconds to Midnight, Following Putin’s Nuclear Threats

 

“Last year, the fates handed the New York Times‘ Maria Cramer an enviably striking lede: ‘Humanity is 100 seconds away from total annihilation. Again.’ That we all know immediately what she was writing about speaks to the power of graphic design. Specifically, it speaks to the power of graphic design as practiced by Martyl Langsdorf, who happened to be married to ex-Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf. This connection got her the gig of creating a cover for the June 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She came up with a simple image: the upper-left corner of a clock, its hands at seven minutes to midnight. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

POLITICO: ‘Either we win or we die.’ Ukrainians join resistance to fight Putin (Audio)

NY Times: Impunity for War Crimes in Syria Casts a Grim Shadow Over Ukraine

NY Times: Lithuania, a Vulnerable NATO Link, Readies for Putin, YouTube: Lithuania...

 

Protest signs against the invasion of Ukraine left outside the Russian embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Belfast - Kenneth Branagh (2021)

 

“Romanticism reigns in ‘Belfast,’ Kenneth Branagh’s cinematic memoir of his childhood in a turbulent Northern Ireland. From the lustrous, mainly black-and-white photography to the cozy camaraderie of its working-class setting, the movie softens edges and hearts alike. The family at its center might have health issues, money worries and an outdoor toilet, but this is no Ken Loach-style deprivation: In these streets, grit and glamour stroll hand-in-hand. So when Ma (Caitriona Balfe) sits in her doorway to peel potatoes for dinner, what we notice is the soft afternoon light dancing on her luminous skin and brunette curls. And when Pa (Jamie Dornan), square of jaw and shoulder, strides toward home after a spell working in England, the camera shoots him like a returning hero. ...”

NY Times (Video)

Guardian: ‘I grew up with Branagh in Belfast: our childhoods haunt his new film’

W - Belfast (film)

YouTube: Belfast Trailer #1

​Leaked Chats Show Russian Ransomware Gang Discussing Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine

 

“Internal chat logs leaked from the notorious Russian ransomware gang Conti reveal unfiltered conversations between ultranationalist hackers in which they repeat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s conspiratorial lies about Ukraine, discuss the impact of early Western sanctions against their country, and make antisemitic comments about Ukraine’s Jewish president. The logs were leaked late last month, reportedly by a Ukrainian security researcher, after Conti publicly announced its support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and threatened to retaliate against any cyber warfare targeted at the Russian-speaking world. The logs span two years and multiple chat services and were released alongside training documentation, hacking tools, and source code. ...”

The Intercept_

Crypto Frauds And Ransomware, The New Arsenal In Ukraine Russian War

NY Times: ‘Things Will Only Get Worse.’ Putin’s War Sends Russians Into Exile. (Istanbul)

NY Times: Booms, Smoke and Fire Signal Horror of Russian Attack on Base

POLITICO: Zelenskyy to address Congress on Wednesday

 

Tens of thousands of Russians have fled to Istanbul, but tens of thousands more have gone to Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, which are better known as sources of migration to Russia.

​The road well travelled: 100 years of Jack Kerouac

 

“Jack Kerouac – anti-establishment icon, revolutionary author of the American classic On the Road, pioneer of the Beat Generation and, perhaps most of all, enduring symbol of cool.If a dog-eared paperback of On the Road slung in your back pocket was once the ultimate avant-garde accessory, 100 years after his birth, a Kerouac namecheck has become something of a trope on dating apps. New analysis by OkCupid has shown that mentions of the Beat poets and On the Road in profiles (more often on those belonging to men) have increased more than threefold in the past five years. With their themes of travelling, male friendship and flight from the nine-to-five to explore a world of sex, drugs and art, it’s easy to see why men want to align themselves with Kerouac’s books. ...”

Guardian

Guardian: The 100 best novels: No 76 – On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

Open Culture: Hear Jack Kerouac Read from On The Road on the 100th Anniversary of His Birth (Video)

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?

“As Russia’s war in Ukraine looks increasingly disastrous, speculation has mounted that President Vladimir Putin’s misstep could prove to be his downfall. A litany of pundits and experts have predicted that frustration with the war’s costs and crushing economic sanctions could lead to the collapse of his regime. ‘Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine will result in the downfall of him and his friends,’ David Rothkopf declared in the Daily Beast. ‘If history is any guide, his overreach and his miscalculations, his weaknesses as a strategist, and the flaws in his character will undo him.’ But what events could actually bring down Putin? And how likely might they be in the foreseeable future?The best research on how authoritarians fall points to two possible scenarios: a military coup or a popular uprising. ...”

VOX

The Nation: At the Przemyśl Station

NY Times: Chaos of War in Ukraine Could Fuel New Covid Surge, Doctors Say

NY Times: Russian Scientists Face Isolation Following Invasion of Ukraine

 

A funeral for three Ukrainian soldiers on Friday in Lviv. Since the start of the war, for most Ukrainians the threat from Russia has far overshadowed that of the virus.

​Jóhann Jóhannsson ~ Drone Mass

 

“The long goodbye to Jóhann Jóhannsson continues with the release of Drone Mass, commissioned by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble in 2015 and premiered by ACME and Roomful of Teeth under Jóhannsson’s direction. Inspired by Nag Hammadi texts, the work is rife with vowels, a reflection of the text, which delves into repetition as mantra.  As such, the singing is percussive and ritualistic, although the music is often more modern composition than drone. ...”

a closer listen (Video)

NY Times: Johann Johannsson’s ‘Drone Mass’ Bridges Ancient and Modern at Temple of Dendur (March 2015)

vimeo: Drone Mass Krakow 18th Sept 2015 - Jóhann Jóhannsson

amazon

​Ukrainians in race to save cultural heritage

 

Cultural objects in Lviv secured in case of Russian shelling

“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. ...”

Guardian (Video)

BBC - Ukraine: The race to save the country's artistic treasures

CNN: Museums race against time to save Ukraine's cultural treasures (Video)

NY Times - An Urgent Mission for Literary Translators: Bringing Ukrainian Voices to the West

Inheriting bitcoin is harder than it sounds (Video)

NY Times: Opinion | The Price of Putin’s Belligerence

NY Times: President Zelensky Makes His Case for Ukraine to the Russian People

The Intercept_: Putin’s Endgame Is Not a Mystery. It’s Regime Survival.

Turner paintings not seen in UK for 100 years to go on show at National Gallery

 

Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening.

“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. ...”

Guardian

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

 

Harbour of Dieppe: Changement de Domicile.

Suffering goes on in encircled Mariupol as evacuation fails

 

People settle in a bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine, Sunday, March 6, 2022.

“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. ...”

POLITICO

NY Times: Europe’s Trains Take Fighters to Ukraine, and Bring Back Refugees

NY Times:Inside Ukraine Embattled Cities (Audio)

NY Times: The State of Fighting in Ukraine Over Its Cities

The Intercept_: U.S. and NATO’s Unprecedented Weapons Transfers to Ukraine Could Prolong the War

POLITICO: Foreign Fighters Are Heading to Ukraine. That’s A Moment for Worry

New Republic: Germany’s Fight to Replace Russian Gas With Renewables Has Huge Implications for Climate Change

 

The chimney and cooling towers of the Schkopau lignite coal-fired power plant give off steam behind a wind farm in Bad Lauchstädt, Germany.

Robert Fripp - Music For Quiet Moments (2021)

 

“When Robert Fripp’s Music For Quiet Moments started to appear with relatively little fanfare in May 2020, as a series of weekly uploads to YouTube and streaming services, their overall effect was one of balm. Moving through the digital ether, Fripp’s ambient soundscapes slowly drifted their way through a collective psychological environment grappling with the uncertainty of pandemic times. The series unfolded over a year, 52 weekly entries, each offering another aspect of an ever-changing same: Fripp performing live in various contexts, quietly testing out the possibilities afforded to him by music that drops the pretense of narrative and lets itself just be. ...”

Uncut

amazon

YouTube: Music For Quiet Moments | Robert Fripp   1 / 52

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

 

The Kremlin in Moscow last month. Russians have been cut off from many Western internet services in a matter of days.

“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

NY Times: Once Victims in Southeast Europe, Jews Come to Aid Fleeing Ukrainians

NY Times: An agreement on nuclear plants in Ukraine is urgently needed, the U.N. nuclear agency says. (Video)

POLITICO: In a matter of weeks, Vladimir Putin made them refugees

VOX: War in the time of crypto

WIRED: War Is Calling Crypto’s ‘Neutrality’ Into Question

War Won’t Stop Crypto. Here’s Why.

 

War Is Calling Crypto’s ‘Neutrality’ Into Question