“KYIV, Ukraine — There are fields instead of city streets, farmsteads instead of apartment buildings. Open highways stretch to the horizon. The battles in the north that Ukraine won over the past seven weeks raged in towns and densely populated suburbs around the capital, Kyiv, but the war is about to take a hard turn to the southeast and into a vast expanse of wide-open flatland, fundamentally changing the nature of the combat, the weapons at play and the strategies that might bring victory. Military analysts, Ukrainian commanders, soldiers and even Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin acknowledge that a wider war that began with a failed attempt to capture the capital will now be waged in the eastern Donbas region. ...”
Putin’s Ukraine Gamble Pivots to a Very Different Battlefield
Lightning Struck Itself: Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’ in Eight Phases
2013 October: See No Evil, 2014 October: Dreamtime (1981), 2014 November: Marquee Moon (1977), January: Adventure (1978), 2015 October: Tom Verlaine (1979)
Announcing New Brooklyn Underground Subway Tour!
War Brings New Iron Curtain Down on Russia’s Storied Ballet Stages
“AMSTERDAM — Just days after the invasion of Ukraine, Olga Smirnova, one of Russia’s most important ballerinas, posted an emotional statement on Telegram, the messaging app. ‘I am against war with all the fibers of my soul,’ she wrote. “I never thought I would be ashamed of Russia, but now I feel that a line has been drawn that separates the before and the after.’ That’s certainly been true for Ms. Smirnova, 30. As the war got worse, and dissent in Russia was ruthlessly quashed, Ms. Smirnova, who had gone to Dubai to recover from a knee injury, realized that she could no longer return home. ‘If I were to go back to Russia, I would have to completely change my opinion, the way I felt about the war,’ Ms. Smirnova said in a recent interview in Amsterdam, adding that returning would be, ‘quite frankly, dangerous.’ ...”
New Journalism
“New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, however, the journalist is ‘invisible’; facts are reported objectively. The term was codified with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe in a 1973 collection of journalism articles he published as The New Journalism, which included works by himself, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Terry Southern, Robert Christgau, Gay Talese and others. ...”
Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco (1956)
Hiding in Plain Sight, a Soviet-Era Air Defense System Arrives in Ukraine
“DOBRA, Slovakia — Driving back to his village near the Ukrainian border last Thursday, the mayor had to stop to let a train pass, and assumed he wouldn’t have to wait long. But the flatbed wagons, stacked high with military equipment, just kept coming. He waited for nearly half an hour. ‘It was a very long train, much longer than usual,’ recalled Mikolas Csoma, the mayor of Dobra, a previously sleepy village in eastern Slovakia that, over the past month, has become a key artery funneling weapons and ammunition into Ukraine by rail from the West. The train that delayed Mr. Csoma’s drive home was not only unusually long but also signaled a singular escalation in Western efforts to help Ukraine defend itself. ...”
Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman
The Passages of Walter Benjamin - Judith Weschler (2014)
2015 September: In praise of dirty, sexy cities: the urban world according to Walter Benjamin, 2020 September: On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre), 2020 November: When Waking Begins, 2021 May: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1969)
Russian Tech Industry Faces ‘Brain Drain’ as Workers Flee
“In early March, days after Russia invaded Ukraine and began cracking down on dissent at home, Konstantin Siniushin, a venture capitalist in Riga, Latvia, helped charter two planes out of Russia to help people flee. Both planes departed from Moscow, carrying tech workers from the Russian capital as well as St. Petersburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg and other cities. Together, the planes moved about 300 software developers, entrepreneurs and other technology specialists out of the country, including 30 Russian workers from start-ups backed by Mr. Siniushin. The planes flew south past the Black Sea to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where thousands of other Russian tech workers fled in the weeks after the invasion. ...”
The Intercept_: Russian TV Is Filled With Images of Bucha’s Dead, Stamped With the Word “Fake” (Video)
Key to a Kingdom: Ronda’s Secret Water Mine
“Approaching the region of the SerranÃa de Ronda, just inland from the Mediterranean’s Costa del Sol, one passes through mountains and rugged surroundings that have challenged settlers, merchants, travelers and invaders for thousands of years. Over the last ridges, a broad valley opens, circled around by hills and hazy massifs. Near its center, set like a jewel in this natural crown, a small tableland rises some 200 sheer meters above the fields: Ronda, spectacularly cleft by its famous Tajo, a narrow, nearly vertical gorge cut over five million years ago by the river GuadalevÃn, a name that comes from the Arabic wadi al-laban (valley of milk), after the prosperity its waters brought to the grazing lands below. ...”
How Lucinda Williams Wore Her Pain On Her Sleeve With ‘World Without Tears’
2008 January: Lucinda Williams, 2010 May: Lucinda Williams - 1, 2011 March: Blessed, 2011 November: Austin, Texas, 1989, 2012 May: World Without Tears, 2012 October: Honky Tonk Women: The Changing Role of Women, 2013 January: "Can`t Let Go", "Pineola", "Changed the Locks", 2013 June: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, 2013 August: Essence (2001), 2015 November: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, 2016 February: The Ghosts of Highway 20 (2016), 2017 February: "Passionate Kisses" (1988)
No More ‘Have a Nice Day’: Lviv Learns to Live With War
“LVIV, Ukraine — When war came to Ukraine in February, Helen Polishchuk made some adjustments in the six-story bar she manages in central Lviv.The Mad Bars House in Lviv’s historic central square stayed open, but served coffee and hot food instead of alcoholic drinks. They turned off the rock music. And as displaced Ukrainians began pouring into the city from places devastated by Russian attacks hundreds of miles away, she had instructions for the wait staff. ... Now, instead of tourists, there are displaced Ukrainians fleeing the war-torn east of the country. ...”
Are These the Most Distant Galaxies Yet Seen?
“Astronomers may have found the most distant galaxies ever seen. In two papers posted to the arXiv preprint server, Yuichi Harikane (University of Tokyo) and an international team report the detection of two sources that appear to blaze at us from a mere 330 million years after the Big Bang. In astronomers’ lingo, that corresponds to a redshift of 13. The studies have been submitted for publication but are not yet peer-reviewed. Observers have previously found a handful of galaxies in the universe’s first few hundred million years. ...”
Made To Measure
2014 November: Aksak Maboul, 2017 July: Made to Measure, Vol. 1 (1984), 2018 February: Before And After Bandits: Marc Hollander Of Aksak Maboul & Crammed Discs, 2020 March: Tout a une fin / Blaue Bleistift (2020), 2020 August: Aksak Maboul – Figures (2020), 2020 September: From Aksak Maboul to Crammed Discs, Marc Hollander Envisions a Musical Melting Pot
Bucha’s Month of Terror
“BUCHA, Ukraine — A mother killed by a sniper while walking with her family to fetch a thermos of tea. A woman held as a sex slave, naked except for a fur coat and locked in a potato cellar before being executed. Two sisters dead in their home, their bodies left slumped on the floor for weeks. Bucha is a landscape of horrors. From the first day of the war, Feb. 24, civilians bore the brunt of the Russian assault on Bucha, a few miles west of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Russian special forces approaching on foot through the woods shot at cars on the road, and a column of armored vehicles fired on and killed a woman in her garden as they drove into the suburb. But those early cruelties paled in comparison to what came after. ...”
Jules Bastien-Lepage
“Jules Bastien-Lepage was a French painter noted for his sentimental genre painting of rural life. Despite growing up during the era of Impressionism, his style of plein air painting was closer to the naturalism of the Realism art movement than the light-oriented art of Claude Monet (1840-1926). Ironically, a number of Impressionist painters - in Scotland, Holland, America and Australia - preferred to adopt his style of naturalist realist painting rather than Impressionism proper. The French realist writer Emile Zola, who described Bastien-Lepage as ‘the grandson of Courbet and of Millet’, later charactized his painting as: ‘Impressionism corrected, sweetened and adapted to suit the taste of the masses.’ ...”
2020 January: A Cultural History of the Potato as Earth Apple
A midcentury printmaker celebrates machine age New York City
“As the machine age took hold in the United States in the early 20th century, some artists took a darker view of the mechanization of urban society—seeing isolation and alienation amid skyscrapers, automobiles, and steel bridges. Painter and printmaker Louis Lozowick, however, found something to celebrate. Lozowick isn’t a household name, but his backstory will sound familiar. Born in Ukraine in 1892, he immigrated to New York City in the early 1900s, according to Artnet. ...”
In Mariupol’s Drama Theater, a Cry for ‘Mama!’ That Offered Brief Relief
“LVIV, Ukraine — ... Ms. [Viktoria] Dubovitskaya, interviewed last month at a shelter in Lviv, in western Ukraine, said she and her two young children were among the many civilians sheltering in Mariupol’s Drama Theater on March 16 when it was devastated by a Russian airstrike. A wall fell onto her 2-year-old daughter, Nastya, and in those horrific first moments, Ms. Dubovitskaya recalled, she did not know if the girl had survived.Finally, she heard it: “Mama!” Nastya screamed. A mattress that had been propped up against the wall fell against her daughter, cushioning the blows. Under the shattered masonry, Nastya was alive, but the place where they had taken refuge for 11 days, along with hundreds of others, was destroyed. ...”
The Intercept_ - Zelenskyy Is Absolutely Right: The U.N. Must Be Reformed. But It Never Will Be. (Video)
2022 Winter Music Preview ~ Ambient and Drone
Virginia bluebells
‘The City Lives’: With Russian Forces Gone, Kyiv Starts to Revive
“KYIV, Ukraine — On Feb. 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Kolya Rybytva gathered his grandmother and younger sister and left Kyiv ‘quickly and without unnecessary sentiments,’ he said, heading west. His parents and brother stayed behind to help in the war effort. ... At the time, Mr. Rybytva, 24, understood that he might never return. But two weeks ago, he did, re-entering Kyiv, the capital, just as Ukrainian forces were starting to push Russian troops out of the suburbs and, eventually, into a full retreat. After a month of artillery attacks that ravaged buildings and had Kyiv residents seeking shelter in the subway stations, a sense of relative calm is being restored. ...”
GRID - GlobalUkraine mystery: Why have so many Russian generals been killed?
Smithsonian: The 20th-Century History Behind Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine (March 4, 2022), Nazi collaborator monuments in Ukraine (Jan. 2021)
Union vs. Hertha: why is the Berlin derby such a special fixture?
Six Definitive Songs: The ultimate beginner's guide to Husker Du
He Is a Child of War’: Giving Birth Amid Chaos in Ukraine
“KYIV, Ukraine — Before the war, Alina Shynkar’s gynecologist advised her to avoid stress during her pregnancy, suggesting she spend time ‘just watching cartoons and being silly.’ It was simple enough advice, but not so easy to follow after air-raid sirens wailed, artillery booms rattled windows and vicious street fighting broke out a few miles away from her maternity hospital. Then, keeping calm for her baby became Ms. Shynkar’s quiet, personal battle in the Ukraine war. She checked into Maternity Hospital No. 5 in the capital, Kyiv, before the war began in late February for bed rest because of a risk of preterm labor, only to witness the hospital unravel into a chaotic, panicked state weeks later. ...”