​The Battle for the Mural — and the Future of Belarus

 
Aug. 31, 2020 The Square of Change in Minsk, Belarus. A protest-themed mural appeared in the courtyard amid the protests that month after a disputed presidential election.

“As his family slept, the man spent his nights planning. There were about 40 security cameras among the three buildings in central Minsk, maybe even more. He had long ago calculated their blind spots. He knew there was only one place in the shared courtyard they didn’t see. It took him a day to map out the best approach. The group had decided that they would act in the evening, when there would be enough people on the street so that their actions would not arouse suspicion but not so many that someone would be likely to report them to the police. He wasn’t afraid for himself as much as for the rest of them. If they got caught, it would be his fault. They positioned their spotters to watch for the Belarusian security services, the siloviki. They agreed on a plan to create an emergency diversion if they arrived. ...”

 
“The Romans in Their Decadence,” by Thomas Couture, 1847.

Sonologyst – Interdimensional (2022)

 
“The term ‘interdimensional’ can be used both in a speculative scientific sense as well as to refer to popular elements of science fiction and horror. Here, Sonologyst (a stage name of sound sculptor Raffaele Pezzella) explores the former while necessarily eliciting the latter.  Inspired by the writings of string-theorist / futurist Michio Kaku, these six tracks are heavily based on long, moody drones, controlled reverb, and delay.  Each has a different set of characteristics and qualities, in terms of duration, periodicity, and texture. Pezzella combines these synthesized aspects along with samples and effects to generate dense atmospheres. While often suffocating or claustrophobic in their haziness, metallic foreground elements vibrate, rub, rattle, and squeak to form unconventional melodies. ...”

​What the horrors of Syria and Chechnya can tell us about Russia’s tactics in Ukraine

“... The family stayed together through the punishing bombardment of what was once Syria’s largest city by the Syrian military and its most powerful ally — Russia. Alhamdo, an English teacher who gained a global social media following with his video reports during Syria’s civil war, now lives in the rebel-held city of Idlib. Speaking with Grid by phone, he said he’s been glued to coverage of the war in Ukraine, particularly the heavy bombardment of the southeastern city of Mariupol. ... Shocking as they are, the scenes the world is now watching in Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities are not without precedent. ...”

 
Yulia Beley, center, with her daughter and friends from Mariupol at a shelter in Lviv, western Ukraine.


Hania Rani ~ Music for Film and Theatre (2021)

 
“Hania Rani announces ‘Music for Film and Theatre’ a personal selection of recent compositions for film, theatre and other projects. Writing music for film and theatre has always been a big part of Hania Rani’s musical world. It is also a part of the creative process that can be tantalisingly out of reach for listeners, either the project doesn’t come to fruition or the music simply isn’t available away from the film or play. From early collaborations with friends, to last year’s two scores for full length films (xAbo: Father Boniecki directed by Aleksandra Potoczek and I Never Cry directed by Piotr Domalewski‘) Rani has been involved in many such projects, each representing an important step in her artistic development and life as a composer and artist. ...”

2021 April: Live from Studio S2 (2021), 2022 January: Hania Rani

​Chelsea and the Stamford Bridge dilemma facing any new owners

 
“It was apparently Roman Abramovich who, early in his discussions with Raine Group — which is sourcing a sale of Chelsea — stipulated the conundrum that is Stamford Bridge must not be ignored. Any party interested in acquiring the club had to boast an intent to upgrade the stadium and complete the transformation the oligarch had once aspired to oversee himself. For Abramovich, that would serve as a demonstration of a new owner’s commitment as well as long-term ambition. …”

​When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained

 
The Moscow headquarters of the F.S.B. intelligence service, which uses a surveillance network that Nokia helped run smoothly.

Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network. The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia.For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. ...”

 
Tanya, who asked that her identity be obscured, in western Ukraine.

​J.R.R. Tolkien Tolkien Estate

 
‘The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the Water’

Explore Rarely-Seen Art by J. R. R. Tolkien in a New Web Site Created by the Tolkien Estate: “J. R. R. Tolkien managed to write the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which ought to be accomplishment enough for one mortal. But he also wrote the The Hobbit, the gateway for generations of children into his major work, as well as a host of other works of fiction, poetry, and scholarship, many of them not published until after his death in 1973. And those are only his writings: a lifelong artist, Tolkien also produced a great many drawings and paintings, book-cover designs, and pictures meant to delight his own children as well as the children of others. ...”

A painter captures the humanity amid the dirt and darkness of a New York alley

 
“Canada-born Impressionist artist Ernest Lawson made his name at the turn of the 20th century as a landscape painter—often depicting the still-rural Washington Heights neighborhood where he lived from roughly 1898 to 1908. Yet when he turned his eye to the grit of city streets, he captured something equally evocative. The 1910 painting he called ’New York Street Scene’ reveals the dirt and darkness of a narrow lane or alley, the discolored backs of buildings made uglier by the fire escapes hanging off them.But we also see horse-pulled carts, vendor stalls, and vague figures on the sidewalk on the left—bits and pieces of humanity in the hidden pockets of the urban, industrial city. ...”

Lessons Learned from a Tyrant’s Unspeakable War on Ukraine

 
CRKSHNK Jaime Rojo

Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. ... Big lessons out of the war in Ukraine about ‘how the world really works’ are showing up on the ground, not in theory class. They’re what you can learn just by watching. Example: it’s almost a rule now that invasions don’t work—not Putin’s in next-door Ukraine any more than Americans landing on faraway Afghanistan or Iraq. Second, that economic sanctions can work like poison when they take Russia’s central bank out of play and tie up trillions in Russian assets overseas. Third, specially for Americans, it appears that a great power can strengthen its hand by declaring it does not have a vital strategic interest in the fight and will not be sending its troops into battle. ...”

​Burnside: ‘It’s Not Much Over Here’

 

The Burnside neighborhood in March 2022. 

“It only makes sense to arrive in Burnside by train, at the Metra Electric’s Chesterfield stop, on 91st Street. Burnside is defined by railroads: the Illinois Central to the west, the Rock Island Line to the south, the New York Central to the east. They form a triangle of tracks so compact that Burnside is the smallest of Chicago’s 77 community areas: 970 acres in size, with a population of 2,000. ... St. Mark’s copper dome is topped with a Ukrainian cross, two straight cross beams, one crooked. A cornerstone on the church’s addition is marked with another such cross, and the date 1962. The church was built in 1913, as Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Church, to minister to immigrants from Dobra, Ukraine, who arrived in Chicago to labor on the Illinois Central. ...”

Crossing Paths with the Spirit of Sylvia Plath – Helen Humphreys

 
“... Before I went to Britain, I had devoured Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Ariel. I especially loved the poetry, with its sharpness and candor, and so, when Plath’s Collected Poems were first published, I skipped writing for the day and made the one-hour train journey to London to buy a copy. I read the poems slowly and often out loud, saying the words over and over again, like a spell, to ward off the four p.m. darkness, the winter, the acute loneliness. I came to know the poems intimately. The words drilled their way into my brain, and even now, I can quote large sections of them from memory. I finished Plath’s book and my own. ...”

Bide denounces Russian invasion, casting it as part of a decades-long attempt to crush democracies.

 
Aljazeera: Two rockets fired in the first attack injured five people, according to Lviv's governor

“WARSAW — President Biden delivered a forceful denunciation of Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on Saturday, declaring ‘for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power’ and casting the military clash in Europe as the ‘test of all time’ in a decades-long battle to defend democracy. In a speech from a castle that served for centuries as a home for Polish monarchs, Mr. Biden described the face-off with Mr. Putin as a moment he has long warned about: a clash of competing global ideologies, of liberty versus oppression. ‘Russia’s choice of war is an example one of the oldest human impulses — using brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control,’ he declared before a crowd of hundreds of people in the courtyard of the Royal Castle and several thousand more outside its stone walls, watching on a large screen. ...”

****ARTFORUM: Letters from Kyiv - A wartime diary by Yevgenia Belorusets, KYLV: THE WAR DIARY

 
Germany’s vice chancellor and economic minister estimated that Germany could be independent of Russian gas by the middle of 2024.

Exiles - Max Richter (2021)

 “The pianist has spent his career reflecting on many of the senseless tragedies taking place in the world. The Kosovo War, the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq War, the 7/7 bombings, and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp are all issues he’s grappled within his music. His latest album, Exiles, which features a 33-minute title track composed as the score to Sol León and Paul Lightfoot’s ballet Singulière Odyssée, tackles the refugee crisis. ‘I was trying to get away from the political, the language of conflict, finger-pointing, and name-calling to get to the heart of the emotional question, which is really a basic human matter of compassion,’ says the 55-year-old musician. ...”

​‘Like a Weapon’: Ukrainians Use Social Media to Stir Resistance

 
Empty strollers were placed in Lviv, Ukraine, last week to represent the children who had been killed during Russia’s invasion.

“KRAKOW, Poland — A peace activist in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv rolled 109 baby strollers into a square last week to represent the children who had been killed in the war with Russia. Hours later, the image was available to millions on their phones. A little girl sheltering in a basement in Kyiv sang a haunting rendition of ‘Let it Go,’ from the movie ‘Frozen,’ and the clip sped around the world. A cellist performed a somber Bach suite on a street in Kharkiv, with debris and the windowless facade of a damaged building serving as his backdrop, and thousands watched. These heart-wrenching glimpses of life in Ukraine since the Russian invasion have become powerful ammunition in an information war playing out on social media. For some, the messaging has become a crucial battleground complementing the Ukrainian military’s performance on the physical front lines, as images and information ripple out on Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and TikTok. ...”

 
Odesa Monument to the Duke de Richelieu.

Ahmed Abdul-Malik pioneering Arabic jazz

[Ahmed] Pays Tribute to a Titan of Islamic Jazz: “An eruption of cyclic motifs, pounding clusters, and insistent grooves, [Ahmed]’s Nights On Saturn is an inspired reimagining of Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s pioneering Arabic jazz. It’s the third album from the Anglo-French quartet, which consists of pianist Pat Thomas, alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, bassist Joel Grip, and drummer Antonin Gerbal, and their first for American label Astral Spirits—timely recognition for one of the most adventurous groups in contemporary music. A singular musician, the Oxford-based Thomas has been active since the 1980s, bringing his avant-garde pianism and wild electronics to collaborations with Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill, Orphy Robinson and Irreversible Entanglements, whose bassist Luke Stewart provides the sleeve notes to Nights On Saturn. ...”

​Russia’s Attacks on Civilian Targets Have Obliterated Everyday Life in Ukraine

 
“In the weeks since Russia began its invasion, at least 1,500 civilian buildings, structures and vehicles in Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed. More than 953 civilians have been killed, including at least 78 children, according to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, who noted that the real toll was likely to be considerably higher. The map above shows some of the buildings and other civilian infrastructure attacked in the first weeks of the war. This devastation, identified and cataloged by The New York Times, included at least 23 hospitals and other health-care infrastructure, 330 schools, 27 cultural buildings, 98 commercial buildings, including at least 11 related to food or agriculture, and 900 houses and apartment buildings. ...”

Hegemony Changes Everything

 
Marco Borrelli - Antonio Gramsci

“... The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) would argue that it was precisely through the proliferation of such norms in our culture—wherein the inequalities of capitalism appear natural, as ‘senso comune‘ (common sense)—that the ruling classes stay as such. This concept would become known as ‘cultural hegemony.’ In his early writings for socialist newspapers like Avanti! and later in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci analyzed folklore, serialized novels, theater, devotional literature—anything he could get his hands on in the prison library—to search for the ways that capitalist logic appeared as a self-evident truth (not some secret hiding in a remodeled bathroom). ...”

The History of Venus in Air, Rock, and Water

 
“Presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference usually focus on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and comets. But at this year’s symposium, an entire day’s worth of talks were dedicated instead to Venus. Why is Earth’s “evil twin” so hot right now?The unofficial end of NASA’s Venus program, following the completion of the Magellan mission, was part reactionary disappointment, part practicality. Instead of a primordial jungle teeming with alien life, we had found an impassable, barren hellscape. Departments all over the world shifted their focus to Mars, because although it’s further off, it’s a much easier planet to visit and study. ...”

As Russia Stalls in Ukraine, Dissent Brews Over Putin’s Leadership

 
A satellite image showing a Ukrainian strike on Russian equipment at an airport in Kherson, Ukraine, last week.

“In January, the head of a group of serving and retired Russian military officers declared that invading Ukraine would be ‘pointless and extremely dangerous.’ It would kill thousands, he said, make Russians and Ukrainians enemies for life, risk a war with NATO and threaten ‘the existence of Russia itself as a state.’ To many Russians, that seemed like a far-fetched scenario, since few imagined that an invasion of Ukraine was really possible. But two months later, as Russia’s advance stalls in Ukraine, the prophecy looms large. ...”

Worm Moon - Nina MacLaughlin

 
Vinternatt - Nikolai Astrup

“What is the moon? The moon is a natural satellite, and it reflects the light of the sun. The moon is 4.5 billion years old. The moon is, on average, 240,000 miles away from this Earth. The moon is the fifth largest of the 210 that swing around the planets in this solar system, and the second densest, after Jupiter’s moon Io. The moon is made of iron and nickel at its heavy metal core; lighter crystals of solidified lava, like olivine and pyroxene, make up its mantle; and the lunar soil that makes up the surface crust is an even lighter mix of minerals and metals known as regolith, including anorthositic plagioclase feldspar, dusty and granular. Leave a footprint in it. ...”

2021 May: What Color Is the Sky?, 2021 June: Strawberry Moon, 2021 August: Sturgeon Moon, 2021 September: Harvest Moon

​The Smaller Bombs That Could Turn Ukraine Into a Nuclear War Zone

 
People examine the damage after shelling of a shopping center, in Kyiv, Ukraine, March 21, 2022. 

“In destructive power, the behemoths of the Cold War dwarfed the American atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Washington’s biggest test blast was 1,000 times as large. Moscow’s was 3,000 times. On both sides, the idea was to deter strikes with threats of vast retaliation — with mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The psychological bar was so high that nuclear strikes came to be seen as unthinkable.Today, both Russia and the United States have nuclear arms that are much less destructive — their power just fractions of the Hiroshima bomb’s force, their use perhaps less frightening and more thinkable. ...”

 
The Belchatow coal-fired power plant in Poland, run by PGE, is the largest of its kind in Europe.

​H-O-R-S-E

 
“The game of H-O-R-S-E is played by 2 or more players. The order of turns is established before the game starts. The player whose turn is first is given control, which means they must attempt to make a basket in a particular way of their choosing, explaining to the other players beforehand what the requirements of the shot are. If that player is successful, every subsequent player must attempt that same shot according to its requirements. If a player fails to duplicate the shot, they acquire a letter, starting with H and moving rightward through the word ‘Horse’. ...”

​How Surrealism Has Influenced the Animation Industry

 
Back Row, left to right: Man Ray, Jean Arp, Tanguy, Andre Breton. Front Row, left to right: Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dali, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel.

“The surrealism movement was founded in Paris by some writers and artist who wanted to use people’s subconscious minds to unlock their imagination. The movement was strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud. The surrealists themselves thought that the unconscious mind blocked people’s imaginations. By the surrealists basing their ideas on the power of the imagination, this indicated that they were influenced by the traditional Romanticism movement, whose key ideas were based on emotions and intuitions. However, the surrealists were radically different to the romantics because they had the theory that the revelations may be found to be on the streets and in everyday life. ...”

​How Russia’s mistakes and Ukrainian resistance altered Putin’s war

 
For millions of internally displaced people, Lviv is the gateway to safety, however fleeting, in the west.

“The snarled up 65km Russian convoy that was stuck for days outside Kyiv neatly illustrated Moscow’s misplaced belief that it could achieve a lightning-fast victory in Ukraine. Western military analysts say Russia’s leadership initially thought its ‘special military operation’ would reach the capital and other big Ukrainian cities in days, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to capitulate and allow a puppet administration to be installed. ‘It’s clear that Russia was pursuing regime change in Ukraine,’ said Michael Kofman, Russia studies director at CNA, a US think-tank. ‘Regime change operations are often derived of hubris and bad assumptions — and they usually go terribly wrong.’ ...”

This 1899 Gilded Age fairy-tale mansion on Fifth Avenue has had only 4 owners

 
“New Yorkers have always used real estate to showcase their wealth and position. But in Gilded Age Manhattan, the one-upmanship reached crazy new heights—with rich Fifth Avenoodles, as they were mockingly called by the general public, constantly outdoing their neighbors by building more ostentatious mansions fronting Central Park. ...”

​Truth Is Another Front in Putin’s War

 
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has tried to create an alternative reality. 

“In the tense weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian officials denied that it planned anything of the sort, denouncing the United States and its NATO allies for stoking panic and anti-Russian hatred. When it did invade, the officials denied it was at war. Since then, the Kremlin has cycled through a torrent of lies to explain why it had to wage a ‘special military operation’ against a sovereign neighbor. Drug-addled neo-Nazis. Genocide. American biological weapons factories. Birds and reptiles trained to carry pathogens into Russia. Ukrainian forces bombing their own cities, including theaters sheltering children. Disinformation in wartime is as old as war itself, but today war unfolds in the age of social media and digital diplomacy. ...”

 
Sophia, a medical student, helps as a paramedic in the volunteer army.