Deep Art Nature

Bucha massacre

Photo of Bucha civilians reportedly killed by Russian soldiers.

“The Bucha massacre was a series of Russian war crimes involving the killing of civilians, committed in areas controlled by the Russian Armed Forces in the Ukrainian city of Bucha during the Battle of Bucha, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photographic and video evidence of the massacre emerged on 1 April 2022 after Russian forces withdrew from the city. According to the mayor more than 300 inhabitants of the city were found dead in the aftermath. Ukraine has requested the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate what had happened in Bucha. Russian authorities denied any wrongdoing and described footage and photographs of dead bodies as a provocation or a staged performance by Ukrainian authorities. These denials have been refuted by Bellingcat, The Economist, BBC, and The New York Times. ...”

Wikipedia (Video)

NY Times: The War Moves East, as Putin Looks for a Victory

Aljazeera - Bucha victim: ‘Russian troops beat me, doused me in diesel fuel’

GRID - Ukraine war in photos, April 4: Horrors in Bucha — and one moment of hope

NY Times: Satellite images show bodies lay in Bucha for weeks, despite Russian claims. (Video)

A man evacuating on Monday from a residential area in Kharkiv that has been under continued bombing. Smoke from fires caused by recent artillery strikes can be seen in the background.

All Espresso Drinks Explained: Cappuccino, Latte, Macchiato & Beyond

“What separates the Cappuccino from the Latte, and the Macchiato from the Double Espresso? These are some important questions–questions that demand answers. And European Coffee Trip–a YouTube channel run by two Czech guys with a love for specialty coffee–has answers. Above, they break it all down for you. Find timestamps for the different variations below. 0:58 Single Espresso 1:35 Double Espresso 1:55 Americano 2:18 Lungo 2:37 Filter coffee (no espresso!) 3:16 Cappuccino 3:46 Espresso Macchiato 4:07 Cortado/Piccolo 4:30 Flat White 4:54 Caffé LatteIf you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2010 September: Espresso, 2013 April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard, 2021 July: The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, August 2021: The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented, 2021 October: Brew: A Brief History of Coffee, 2021 November: Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship, 2022 January: The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way

Fela's stories: Confusion Break Bone

“Abidjan, 2001: I receive an unlikely offer. I’m invited to stage the play Le Fou du Carrefour [’the crossroads’ madman’] in Lagos, Nigeria, under the title Madness Junction. This urban fable was penned by the great Ivorian playwright Hyacinthe Kakou in 1994, and depicts a frenetic African city invaded by garbage and other toxic waste originating from industrialized countries. The city’s arteries are blocked. Vehicles can no longer move freely, workers can no longer get to their respective occupations… The people grumble. The cops beat them down. The economy is blocked, the country is suffocated. Everyone complains, but no one does anything. ...”

Pan African Music (Video)

Casualty of war in Ukraine: The global food supply

“Ever since the war in Ukraine began, the global cost has been measured largely in terms of casualties, refugees, the need for humanitarian aid, and — when it comes to the global economy — the rise in the price of oil and gas. Far less attention has been paid to other commodities that have less to do with energy and everything to do with feeding hundreds of millions of people all around the world. Russia and Ukraine are both powerhouse producers and exporters of basic food staples — wheat, barley, corn and sunflower oil in particular. Taken together, the two countries have accounted for roughly 25 percent of exports of those staples to the rest of the world. ...”

GRID

Aljazeera - ‘Now or never’ to avoid climate catastrophe: UN (Video)

W - Russian oligarchs

YouTube: Ukraine war: International condemnation over Bucha killings (Al Jazeera)

NY Times: In a Kyiv Suburb,‘They Shot Everyone They Saw’

Crushed civilian cars on the main road leading out of Bucha on Sunday.

A colorful mural on a tenement wall honors the immigrants who built Yorkville

“German bakeries and bars no longer line the streets, German language newspapers aren’t readily available at newsstands, and the smell of beer wafting from local breweries vanished after the last brewer closed its doors in 1965, according to an AMNY article from 2018. But one tenement on York Avenue continues to pay homage to the German immigrants and their descendants who made East 86th Street a hub of culture and energy through much of the late 19th and 20th centuries. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Finding Utopias Where We Can: On Hopeful Living as Resistance

“In May of 2021—in what I thought, naively, might be the waning days of the pandemic—I moved out of a three-bedroom apartment, where I’d been living with Craigslist roommates for the last six years, and into a house. My friend Sarah, also single and in her mid-thirties, was joining me there; our friend Maurene, her husband, and their baby would be our next-door neighbors. Immediately, the adults did what all modern adults do when we know we’ll need to get ahold of one another regularly: we started a group chat, which we jokingly named The Commune. Of course, what were doing was hardly communal living in any radical or interesting sense. ...”

LitHub

‘This Is True Barbarity’: Life and Death Under Russian Occupation

Trostyanets, in Ukraine’s northeast, was supposed to be a mere speed bump for the Russian military, which occupied it for roughly 30 days before the Ukrainian military retook it on March 26.

“TROSTYANETS, Ukraine — The last three Russian soldiers in this Ukrainian town are in the morgue, their uniforms bloodied and torn. The first one’s face is frozen in pain. The second has his wooden pipe in his lap. The third is stuffed in his sleeping bag.These dead are not all that was left behind in Trostyanets, a strategically located town in the country’s northeast, where Russian forces fled several days ago in the face of an orchestrated Ukrainian assault. A monthlong Russian occupation reduced much of the town to rubble, a decimated landscape of mangled tank hulks, snapped trees and rattled but resilient survivors. ...”

NYTimes

VOX: Aid organizations try again to evacuate besieged Mariupol

NY Times: With Ukraine Invasion, Hungary’s Leader Softens His Embrace of Russia.

NY Times: For Putin, Invasion Is the Latest in a Long String of Failures in Ukraine

POLITICO: How They Fled: 7 Ukrainian Refugees on Escaping Russia’s War

Vadym takes a selfie with his wife Irina and three sons Oleg, 13, Boris, 8, and Anton, 2, in Prague on March 26. The most valuable thing Vadym says he brought with him is a portable charger — to help stay connected.

Luigi Russolo’s Cacophonous Futures

1912 photograph of Futurists in front of Le Figaro‘s Paris offices. From left to right: Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Gino Severini — Source.

“Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) was well into a successful painting career when he turned to music in his 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises (L’arte dei rumori). Announcing an intention to ‘enlarge and enrich the field of sound’, the Futurist polymath waxed poetic about the modern city’s sonic landscape — ‘the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons’, and ‘the shrieks of mechanical saws’. For Russolo, the noisy nature of everyday, industrializing Europe offered new ways of perceiving the acoustic world and a means of shaking concert music loose from its stagnant orchestral roots. ...”

Public Domain Review (Audio)

UbuWeb: Luigi Russolo - The Art of Noises, Sound (Audio)

Open Culture - The Original Noise Artist: Hear the Strange Experimental Sounds & Instruments of Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo (1913) (Video)

W - Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo’s 1914 patent for a class of intonarumori — Source.

The 2022 World Cup draw analysed: ‘The Group of Dark Arts’, favourites France and that song

“Cringe-inducing cartoon meant to engage with no youngster we have ever met? Check. Song-and-dance routine combing local colour with avant-garde twist? Check. A massive advert for the official ball (the fastest ever, no less)? Yep, we had that, too, and several speeches, a first performance of the first song from the official Qatar 2022 album and a very contrived moment with France manager Didier Deschamps and a young lad who was in the crowd in Moscow four years ago. The 47 minutes of preamble before the draw for the 2022 World Cup at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Centre flew by! …”

The Athletic (Video)

NY Times – World Cup Draw Highlights: Matchups Let Teams Look Ahead to November

Guardian – World Cup draw: group-by-group analysis for Qatar 2022 – Jonathan Wilson

NY Times: World Cup Draw Brings Certainty. Now Comes the Hard Part.

The Athletic: With a marquee World Cup meeting vs. England, USMNT has a chance to change its perception writ large

BBC – Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022: What are the draw highlights? (Video)

How Kyiv Has Withstood Russia’s Attacks

“Kyiv is the ultimate prize for Russia: the heart of Ukraine, and the seat of a government it has sought to replace. For weeks, Russian troops have pressed in on the city from both sides of the Dnipro River. But the bigger the city, the more difficult it is to seize. And Kyiv is enormous — larger in land area than New York City, and five times the size of Mariupol, which Russian troops have been trying to capture for weeks. Russia vastly underestimated Ukrainians’ resolve to defend their homeland. And a Russian military trained for open spaces has also struggled with basic realities of urban warfare. Even a finely orchestrated military would be challenged by the block-to-block fighting required to secure Kyiv. The Russian army has failed to even surround it. ...”

NY Times

Aljazeera: Zelenskyy says Russia making ‘slow but noticeable’ withdrawal (Video)

The Intercept_: The U.S. Has Its Own Agenda Against Russia

NY Times: Opinion | Putin Knows What He’s Doing With Ukraine’s Refugees. This Is the World’s Big Test.

The Exodus From Ukraine: A Visual Diary by Peter Turnley

Harold Rosenberg

“A self-declared outsider, the renowned essayist and art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) rose to prominence in the 20th century to become one of the most essential voices in the discourse of American art. … This period would mark the evolution of Rosenberg’s theses regarding modernism, the rise of abstraction, and the very act of creation. Later, he would coin the term ‘action painting,’ embraced by Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Mark Rothko. In the seminal essay ‘The American Action Painters,’ published in ARTnews in 1952, Rosenberg championed the very act of painting. ...”

“Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life”

What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

W – Harold Rosenberg

BOOKFORUM: Creation Myths – Debra Bricker Balken

Stud Sterkel (Audio)

Saul Steinberg’s “Portrait of Harold Rosenberg,” 1972, watercolor and crayon, Yale University Art Gallery.

'Prince And The Revolution: Live' Set For Multi-Format Reissue

“The Prince Estate is giving Prince And The Revolution: Live a multi-format reissue.The original performance was captured in March 1985 in Syracuse, New York, during the Purple Rain tour. It was broadcast live to millions via satellite and later released as the concert film Prince And The Revolution: Live, and now the visuals and audio from the film have been remastered and digitally enhanced for this new reissue. You can watch a video of 'Let's Go Crazy', lifted from the film, above. The new edition of Prince And The Revolution: Live will see it made available across CD, vinyl and Blu-ray formats for the first time, while it will also be released digitally too. ...”

The Quietus (Video)

W - Prince And The Revolution: Live

Rough Trade: Prince And The Revolution: Live (CD/Vinyl/Blu-ray)

Discogs (Video)

2020 September: Prince's Sign O' The Times: An oral history

What is behind Putin’s demand for Russian gas be paid in roubles?

Russia says it will enforce rouble payments for gas from Friday

“President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree requiring buyers of Russian gas from countries deemed hostile to pay in roubles from Friday using a special account at a Russian bank, or see their contracts halted.His move was rejected by European governments, with Germany – Europe’s industrial powerhouse – calling it ‘political blackmail’. ... Putin’s order is in retaliation to unprecedented Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow says are akin to an economic war. ... The rouble plunged to historic lows after Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24 as the United States and its allies moved to remove Russia from global payment systems, cut off its central bank from capital markets and froze hundreds of billions of dollars of its reserves. ...”

Aljazeera (Video)

NY Times: Shaken at First, Many Russians Now Rally Behind Putin’s Invasion

‘A gruesome way of accounting’: The politics of body counts in Ukraine

VOX: What diplomatic solution might end the war in Ukraine?

ARTFORUM: War After War - Sergei Loznitsa’s unflinching visions of Ukraine in flames

Sergei Loznitsa, Babi Yar: Context, 2021, color and black-and-white, sound, 121 minute

Canaletto's Venice Revisited

Regatta on Grand Canal by Canaletto

“Canaletto’s Venice Revisited is now open at the National Maritime Museum.This major exhibition displays the complete set of 24 Venetian views painted by Canaletto in the 1730s. The works, from the world famous collection at Woburn Abbey, form the largest single commission the Italian artist ever received.Canaletto’s Venice Revisited reassesses Canaletto at the height of his career, looking beyond the broad views he is famous for to also closely examine the features that bring his Venice to life. ...”

National Maritime Museum (Video)

NMM: Who was Canaletto?

Guardian: Canaletto’s Venice Revisited review – pre-tourist masterpieces resist the climate crisis narrative

2017 August: On the Trail of a Lover Boy in the Age of Enlightenment

A Nation of Spy-Catchers: Fear of Saboteurs Has Ukrainians on Edge

Ballet dancers from several cities around Ukraine performed at the Lviv National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater for a video advocating a no-fly zone.

“LVIV, Ukraine — Two weeks after Valeriy, an actor and amateur photographer, settled in western Ukraine after fleeing his home in Kyiv, he was stopped and questioned by the local police. Someone had reported him as he strolled around the city photographing its squares, churches and other landmarks — many now buttressed with sandbags. The police officers took him to their car and scrolled through the recent photos on his mobile phone, leafed through his sketchbook, and checked what channels he subscribed to on the social messaging app Telegram. ... With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine now into its second month, suspicion has settled like a fog over the country, joining anger and unity as the dominant emotions. ...”

NY Times

Voice: Russia’s Crimes in Ukraine Against Humanity – and Nature

Jacobin: Russia’s War Has Nothing to Do With “Denazifying” Ukraine

NY Times: Opinion - Will the Ukraine War Spell the End of Globalization?

YouTube: How Putin's Invasion is Changing Our World Forever 34:49

YouTube: Putin's New Ukraine Strategy: Is Russia Retreating? - TLDR News EU, Are Putin's Claims About Ukrainian Nazis Real? - TLDR News EU

Anti-tank hedgehogs on Grecheskaya Street in Odesa.

A Bookstore Revival Channels Nostalgia for Big Box Chains

A sprawling Barnes & Noble in Los Angeles in 2010, as it started to lose market share to Amazon.

“... Turnout for the same release today would be lower, because of Amazon.com Inc., because of dying malls, because of J.K. Rowling’s support for gender essentialism — and because there are simply fewer bookstores. Between 1991 and 2011, the U.S. lost 1,000 chain bookstores. A story in The Bulwark checking in on Borders locations 10 years after its 2011 bankruptcy revealed that some had become Books-A-Million, but many more of their ‘medium-box’ locations now sold food, furniture or clothes.Even so, that HuffPost story, now five years old, may have played taps for the chain bookstore too soon. ...”

Bloomberg CityLab

A Borders location before it closed in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, in 2011.

The Real Scandal at the Oscars Was When Celebrities Crossed a Picket Line

Workers and supporters picket outside the Chateau Marmont hotel on Oscars night.

“While the world reacted to movie star Will Smith’s altercation with comedian Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards ceremony Sunday night, a different Oscars controversy was brewing — one centering on the struggles of hospitality workers at a hotel that caters to Hollywood elites. Following the awards show in Los Angeles, rapper Jay‑Z hosted a party at the Chateau Marmont hotel, where workers with UNITE HERE Local 11 have been leading a boycott since February 2021 amid allegations of rampant sexual misconduct, racial discrimination and union busting. The billionaire hip hop mogul refused to respond to the union’s requests that he honor the boycott by moving his party to a different venue. ...”

In These Times

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. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101

The Nation: The Ongoing Russian Resistance to Putin’s War

VOX: 9 big questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, answered

NY Times: Putin and the Myths of Western Decadence

“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. ...”

Avant Music News (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

SoundCloud (Audio)

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. ...”

GRID

Aljazeera: European countries expel dozens of Russian envoys (Video)

Jacobin: Europe Is Replacing Energy Dependence on Russia With Reliance on North African Dictatorships

Open Culture - When Stalin Starved Ukraine: The Genocide That Russia Has Tried to Cover Up for Decades (Video)

NY Times: Once the Children Got Hungry, ‘the Fire Was Gone From Their Eyes’

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. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

a closer listen (Video/Audio)

amazon

YouTube: Music for Film and Theatre 38:45

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. …”

The Athletic

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. ...”

NY Times, Documents reveal how Russia taps phone companies for surveillance (2019)

The Intercept_: Google Ordered Russian Translators Not to Call War in Ukraine a War

Guardian - Sean Penn: I’ll smelt my Oscars if Academy doesn’t let Zelenskiy speak, Sean Penn Vows to Destroy His Oscars if Zelensky Doesn’t Speak at Academy Awards (Video)

VOX: What, exactly, is a “neutral” Ukraine?

NY Times: Tanya’s Sister Was Trapped in Mariupol. This Is Their Story.

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. ...”

Open Culture

J.R.R. Tolkien Tolkien Estate

2010 January: The Lord of the Rings, 2018 January: An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More, 2019 January: The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More, 2020 January: Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve, 2020 August: The Complete Guide to Middle-earth - Robert Foster (1971), 2021 September: When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings..., 2021 October: When J.R.R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford English Dictionary...

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. ...”

Ephemeral New York