​Allan Molho on Keeping the Memory of Robert Janz Alive

 
“In late fall, the fiercely independent and inventive multimedia artist Robert Janz died at the age of 88. Since moving to Tribeca several decades ago, he had transformed his neighboring streets into an unconventional open air gallery. Intent on enriching our awareness and appreciation of the ephemeral with his artworks and poems, he quietly raged against consumerism, greed, egotism and human defilement of the environment. Earlier this year, photographer and artist Allan Molho graced Duane Street — just several steps from where Robert Janz had lived — with the installation pictured above in his honor. What follows is an interview with Allan, along with photos of Robert Janz‘s work that Allan Molho had captured. ...”

​Document the War Crimes in Ukraine

 
“The apocalyptic images of bodies sprawled in the mud among twisted tanks, charred walls and splintered trees in Bucha and other Ukrainian cities speak to the brutality of the war that Vladimir Putin started. The knowledge that more such horrors, many more, will be revealed as Russian troops retreat cries out for a reckoning. President Biden called for a war crime trial, and President Emmanuel Macron of France declared there were ‘clear’ indications of war crimes. Human Rights Watch reported documented cases of rape and summary executions. Ukrainian and international investigators have already begun collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses. It is imperative that this work be done promptly and scrupulously. ...”

Carl Stone – Mom's (1992)

 
“‘Carl Stone was one of the first contemporary composers to take a serious look at sampling technology, and Mom’s is his masterpiece’: So begins the All Music Guide review for Carl Stone’s great 1991 album, Mom’s. (Look for the link to the review in the comments.) To be more specific, the title track is a jubilant, kinetic symphony of ecstatic international samples, with brief bits of sounds from perhaps Mali, Haiti, Korea, and Poland cut into slivers and sculpted into a piece for contemporary dance. It’s like several hours of travel shows in 11 minutes. Listen.”

BIG EARS - Listen: Carl Stone’s Great Album, Mom’s  (Video)

Men Are Dogs: Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen on Titian’s Poesie for Philip II

 
Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1556–59

Few faces to meet the public spotlight in recent years have more to tell about the mental mechanisms of male shame, impunity, and self-absolution than that of the furry brown-and-white-spotted Spanish pointer staring out of Titian’s Diana and Callisto, 1556–59. This dog has been a bad dog, as he seems to know. (I say “he” since, according to the visual logic of gender organizing the suite of pictures of which Diana and Callisto forms one-sixth, Titian’s ‘big dog’ simply can’t be a bitch.) ...”

 
“Titian: Women, Myth & Power,” 2021–22, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

Siege of Mariupol

 
"The Siege of Mariupol is an ongoing military engagement between Russia and Ukraine which began on 24 February 2022, during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, as part of the Eastern Ukraine offensive. The city of Mariupol is located in the Donetsk Oblast in Ukraine, and is claimed by the Russian-backed separatist Donetsk People's Republic. The Red Cross described the situation as "apocalyptic", and Ukrainian authorities have accused Russia of engineering a major humanitarian crisis in the city, with city officials reporting that over 5,000 civilians have been killed, as of 28 March. ...”

​Created Space: A Case for John Ashbery's Chelsea Apartment

 
Chelsea: Ashbery's domestic environment is an organic, mutable living-quarters-cum-laboratory. Office. 

“In 1891, after nearly thirteen years of construction and seemingly endless modifications, Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church’s 250-acre Persian-fantasy estate, Olana, was finally completed. ... Much like Olana, poet John Ashbery’s domestic environments—consisting of his house in Hudson, New York, and his apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City—are stand-alone works of art conceived and composed with the same level of conscious artistry that informs his poetry. For Ashbery, the domestic urge, the operation of homebuilding, operates in tandem with the work that is conventionally recognized as his creative output. ...”

 
Chelsea: The glass is a permeable membrane, the site of a truce between the flux of life outside and the controlled experience within. Living room.

The Upsetter: The Life & Music Of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (2009)

 
“Dub fans rejoice, a documentary about the legendary Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is available to watch online. The Upsetter: The Life & Music Of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is one of the instalments of the Roots & Revolution: Reggae On Film series, dedicated to tracking the genre’s worldwide impact.Originally Released back in 2009, the film is narrated by Benicio del Toro and stars Perry himself alongside a cast of famous faces, including Paul McCartney, whose post-Beatles band, Wings, worked in Perry’s Black Ark studio in the 1970s. The documentary arrives six months after the death of the reggae pioneer in August 2021. ...”

2021 September: Lee “Scratch” Perry, 2022 February: Battle Of Armagideon (1986)

​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. ...”

 
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. ...”

​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. ...”

​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. ...”

 
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. ...”

​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. ...”

​‘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. ...”

 
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. ...”

 
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! …”

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. ...”

​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. ...”

 
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. ...”

​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. ...”

 
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. ...”

​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. ...”

 
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. ...”

 
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. ...”

​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.