These Dancers Escaped the War. Their Journeys Are Just Beginning.

 

Victoria Glazunova, Kate Myklukha and Polina Loshchylina of the Dutch National Ballet.

“AMSTERDAM — Kate Myklukha pushed herself up onto the tip of her left foot, then stretched her arms out in front of her as if hugging a tree.As a pianist at the Dutch National Ballet here played a jaunty tune, several of Myklukha’s classmates wobbled from side to side, struggling to hold the delicate pose. But Myklukha held her balance, then spun around and dipped into a knee bend, before gracefully waving an arm skyward.During that short sequence last month, Myklukha, 17, looked as if she had been a member of the ballet’s junior company for years. Yet, she had arrived in Amsterdam only two and a half weeks before, having escaped the war in Ukraine. ...”

NY Times

W - Kyiv National Academic Molodyy Theatre, W - Kyiv Modern-Ballet

The Quietus - Bloody Ground, Fertile Soil 1: Making Music Under Fire In Ukraine (Audio)

 

“When my aunt gave her passport to the russian he asked, 'Why are your hands shaking?'"

Flight Paths - Omar El Akkad

“1. 2010. The word for invoice is the same in Arabic and Italian: fattura. We learned this, my mother and I, on the outskirts of a cemetery in Naples, as we tried to navigate the final arrangements for the transfer of my father’s body. It was a beautiful day, sunny, the sky Riviera-blue, and somewhere in the periphery of my vision, focused on this undertaker in his ill-fitting suit, there was a family mourning their own newly dead. They were of this place. We were not. ...”

The Paris Review

Wire Reveal Official Release Of Old Bootleg, 'Not About To Die'

 

“An old bootleg release by Wire is getting an official release four decades on from its initial circulation.No Time To Die initially emerged in the early '80s via Amnesia Records, and contained some demos that Wire recorded for their second and third albums, Chairs Missing and 154. The band had recorded the demos for their label at the time, EMI, and while the cassettes were intended to be circulated among an inner circle of people, low-quality recordings of the material on the tapes were eventually leaked out collectively under the name No Time To Die. ...”

The Quietus (Video)

Discogs (Video)

2009 January: Wire, 2012 January: On the Box 1979, 2013 September: Chairs Missing (1978), 2014 June: 154 (1979), 2014 July: Document And Eyewitness (1979-1980), 2015 April: The Ideal Copies: Graham Lewis Of Wire's Favourite Albums, 2015 July: Pink Flag (1977), 2015 December: The Peel Sessions Album (1989), “Dot Dash”, "Options R" (1978), 2017 June: Outdoor Miner / Practice Makes Perfect (1979), 2017 November: Live at the Roxy, London, 2018 June: Wire at Maxwell's (06-12-1987), 2021 May: 60 minutes of music that sum up art-punk pioneers Wire

Once Best Friends, Bulgaria Takes a Stand Against Russia

 

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia this month.

“SHIPKA, Bulgaria — A week after Russia invaded Ukraine, Moscow’s ambassador to Bulgaria climbed a snowy mountain pass to honor czarist-era Russian soldiers who died there fighting for Bulgarian independence in the 19th century. Present day concerns, however, quickly eclipsed the effort to remind Bulgaria of the debt it owed Russia. That same day, Bulgaria expelled two of the ambassador’s underlings for espionage and announced the arrest of a senior military officer on charges of spying for Russia. ...”

NY Times

Aljazeera - A room of their own: The lives of Ukrainian women refugees (Video)

The Intercept_: U.S. Demands Russian War Crime Prosecution While Neglecting Its Own Accountability

The Russian War on Ukraine Has Always Been a War on Its Language

GRID - Ukraine war in photos: Battle for the east

 

A man stands in his destroyed house in Vilkhivka, Ukraine, on Monday.

​Rainer Ganahl

 

“2009, 4 min, color, sound. As I have done with Sigmund Freud, Lenin and Handke (his goal keeper book), I I'm kicking the book of Karl Marx to its full destruction. I don't do that out of hatred for the authors but out of a reminder that books were destroyed in the past (particular those of the firsts 3 authors). I do that also because it is quite an intense act of expression that transcends reading. The relationship between violence, destruction and (re)creation is quite challenging and provokes interesting questions that go beyond my pure will to ‘just make art.’ ...”

UbuWeb (Video)

W - Rainer Ganahl

Syrian Cassette Archives

 

“... For these reasons, tapes were widely popular in many parts of the world, Syria being one potent example. Syrian Cassette Archives, a new website created by a team led by Iraqi-American musician and collector Mark Gergis and Damascus-born DJ and community organizer Yamen Makdad, offers a window into the country’s rich musical history through tapes. Gergis grew up hearing pop by the likes of legendary Egyptian vocalist Umm Kulthoum and famed Lebanese diva Fairuz before making his first of many trips to Syria in 1997, where he began amassing mountains of cassettes as he immersed himself in the local music. ...”

4columns

Cassette tape collection captures music of Syria lost to years of bloodshed (Audio)

Syrian Cassette Archives (Audio)

​I Spent Weeks on Ukraine’s Front Lines. Everything Has Changed.

 

Sheltering in a basement shelter near Russian positions that were only a few miles away in the Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine.

“First the whiz and then the explosion a second later. One after another. One after another. I was hiding in an underground dugout — it would be difficult to call it a bunker: no solid entrance door, no proper stash of food and water. The walls were wooden and there were two sort-of beds, a couple of rugs and some wooden chairs. The place was untidy with phone chargers and military clothing — helmets, flak jackets. There were a few cookies and some chocolate bars. Home for Ukrainian soldiers on the front line. ...”

NY Times: Opinion

VOX: Why a strip of land in Moldova revived fears of a Ukraine war spillover

BBC - Ukraine war in maps: Tracking the Russian invasion

NY Times: How much of Ukraine does Russia hold?

​Witness a Total Lunar Eclipse on Sunday, May 15–16

 

“You can't do better for an astronomical event than a total lunar eclipse. It's visible to city and rural residents alike across half the planet, requires no special equipment, lasts for hours and is guaranteed to happen. How many other celestial shows offer this kind of ease and certainty? About the only thing that can get in the way are clouds. And for that, you can check current cloud maps to find the nearest clear skies. More about that in a moment. ...”

Sky & Telescope

​Locus Solus (journal)

 

“Now to look at Locus Solus, a magazine of poetry and prose edited by John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler from 1961–’62, and published by Harry Mathews in Lans-en-Vercors, France. All five issues of the publication are part of The Little Magazine Collection at DU. To me, the most compelling issue of Locus Solus is ‘New Poetry,’ a double issue (III–IV) edited by John Ashbery, published in Winter 1962. Within New Poetry one finds poetry by (among many others) Ashbery, Joseph Ceravolo, Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler — writing crucial to the body of work that evolved from many of the aforementioned poets. ...”

Jacket2

RealityStudio: Locus Solus

On Five Years of Locus Solus

W – Locus Solus (journal)

Ukrainians unearth horrors near Kyiv, a month after Russian retreat

Mourners gather for a memorial service at the home of Dmytro Luchynya's family in Kolonshchyna village on May 6, 2022. 

“KOLONSHCHYNA, Ukraine — It wasn’t relief or calm that washed over the constellation of towns and villages west of Kyiv when the Russians withdrew after their monthlong occupation. It was horror and unnerving silence. Residents emerged from their cellars to discover their neighborhoods flattened and bodies dotting the streets. They cautiously inspected what was left and began searching for those who were lost. Vira Tyshchenko spent weeks poring over thousands of images of mutilated corpses, bloody clothing and personal items. She thought that among the remains and detritus she might recognize her younger brother or at least something that belonged to him. But she also hoped to find nothing at all, because she wanted to believe he was somehow still alive. ...”

POLITICO

Guardian: Italy launches inquiry into Kremlin disinformation

VOX: The EU can’t quite get it together on a Russian oil embargo

New Yorker: The Turkish Drone That Changed the Nature of Warfare (Audio) 31:06

BBC - Ukraine war: Civilians now out of Azovstal plant in Mariupol

BBC: Putin says Russia fighting for motherland in Ukraine in Victory Day speech (Video)

 

The operation was co-ordinated by the UN and the Red Cross.

​A Messy Table, a Map of the World

 

“Jason Farago of the New York Times has published another close reading of a Dutch masterpiece. Over the last few years Farago has released a number of art essays which look closely at famous works of arts. Each of these art critiques owe a lot to the navigation and presentation techniques developed for online interactive maps. As you progress through one of his close readings an accompanying interactive zooms and pans around an image of the discussed painting to help illustrate Farago's observations of the artist's work. In his latest close reading A Messy Table, A Map of the World Farago examines a still life by the 17th Century Dutch artist Willem Claesz Heda. ...”

Maps Mania

NY Times: A Messy Table, a Map of the World

The amazing survival story of the last 3 single-family row houses on Central Park West

 

“If you find yourself facing the corner of Central Park West at 85th Street, you’ll see three stunning row houses, each with different Queen Anne-style touches. They’re charming, confection-like holdouts from the Gilded Age, dwarfed (but not outshined) by their Art Deco apartment tower neighbor. But before 1930, these three beauties were part of a row of nine spanning the entire block. While their sister buildings met the wrecking ball, they managed to survive—and now are thought to be the last remaining single-family row houses on all of Central Park West. ...”

Ephemeral New York

On the Night Bus to Kyiv

 

Police inspect a destroyed trolley bus on the site of a Russian bombing attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Monday, March 14, 2022.

“Kyiv, Ukraine—After Russian attacks targeted infrastructure all across Ukraine earlier this week, damaging critical rail lines in the western part of the country, a bus bound for Kyiv was full when it departed from Warsaw an hour before midnight on Wednesday. With the more popular trains suffering cancellations and delays as long as 11 hours, and fuel shortages making personal car travel dicey, the bus emerged as perhaps the best way to get to Ukraine from the west. A crowd of about a hundred people formed at the platforms at Warsaw West station late Wednesday night, many destined for Lviv, Kyiv, or further east. ...”

The Nation

Aljazeera: Battles rage in Ukraine’s Luhansk as Russia targets main city (Video)

NY Times: Germany’s Military Industry Gears Up to Restock Its Own Forces

NY Times: Seizing an Oligarch’s Assets Is One Thing. Giving Them to Ukraine Is Another. (Video)

POLITICO: Biden administration braces for Putin’s Victory Day surprise

 

A Ukrainian national guard soldier walks into an underground bunker near a frontline position on May 07, 2022 in Zelenodolsk, Ukraine.

Paris France - Gertrude Stein (1940)

 

“Gertrude Stein’s Paris France is a book about Paris that tells many true things about the French but also gives a picture of Gertrude and her times that is about who Americans are and what Americans think when they are not in Paris at all. It is a picture of Paris by an American who thinks as Americans think, and we see America in the picture when she thinks she is showing us France. Yet because she is a fine and true writer she knows that she is showing us both things, and many truths about the French come out even though they are written the way an American must write them. ...”

New Yorker: Understanding Steinese

W - Paris France (novel)

amazon

2007 November: Gertrude Stein, 2011 July: The making of "Tender Buttons", 2012 March: The Steins Collect, 2012 May: Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the record straight, 2014 November: Lost Generation, 2015 January: The Making of an American by Edward White, 2020 December: Tender Buttons (1914), 2022 February: No no no, nonsense, never...

Hard to Be a God - Aleksei German (2013)

 

“Hard to Be a God ... is a 2013 Russian science fiction art film directed by Aleksei German, based on the 1964 novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A team of scientists travel to the planet Arkanar that is culturally and technologically centuries behind — progress is stuck way back in the Middle Ages. Anybody the inhabitants of the planet consider an intellectual is instantly executed. The scientists are ordered to not interfere and work undercover, but one of them, Rumata, wishes to stop the senseless murders of brilliant minds and is forced to at last pick a side. ...”

Wikipedia

Guardian: Hard to Be a God review – mud, blood and holy hell (Video)

Senses of Cinema

YouTube: Hard to be a God - Official Trailer, Don Rumata frees a slave who has been chained since he was 3, Don Rumata's heart is full of pity.

​Ukrainian tractors vs. Russian tanks: The hundred-year history behind the meme

 

An ironic banner in Dnipro, Ukraine reads: "Russian soldier, the sowing campaign has already begun" on April 16, in reference to the famous snapshots of Ukrainian tractors pulling abandoned Russian tanks during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, news outlets and social media have captured the magnitude of the destruction: Cities like Kharkiv, Kyiv, Mariupol, Chernihiv and Kherson surrounded by Russian tanks; shelling; children taking shelter in subway stations with relatives’ phone numbers written on their skin. But occasionally there have been more hopeful images, like those of the Ukrainian popular resistance. In the country’s small towns and villages, farmers driving humble tractors have hauled away Russian tanks. These photos and videos symbolize a popular narrative of Ukrainian heroes defending their homeland, risking their lives for the democratic world. In this narrative, farmers and, by extension, civilians, are not merely powerless victims of Russian aggression; they are people who just want to lead normal lives and are determined to fight back. ...”

GRID (Video)

Aljazeera - ‘Stand to the end’: Can diplomacy rescue Ukrainian defenders? (Video)

NY Times - Russia’s Grave Miscalculation: Ukrainians Would Collaborate

 

Oleksandr Vilkul of Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, in his office.

America Is Not Ready for the End of Roe v. Wade

 

“Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived.It seems an unthinkable scenario in 2022. That’s because in 1967 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that barring interracial marriage, as 16 states still did, violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. ...”

NY Times: Opinion | The Editorial Board

Painter's Spring - William Parker Trio (2000)

 

“As the second release in the acclaimed Blue Series from Thirsty Ear Recordings, Painter's Spring by the William Parker Trio sustains the living bolt of energy infused in the free and avant-garde jazz genres by the debut of Matt Shipp's Pastoral Composure. Bassist William Parker wrote all of the compositions except the traditional ‘There Is a Balm in Gilead’ and ‘Come Sunday,’ and together with Daniel Carter on alto and tenor sax, flute, and clarinet and Hamid Drake on drums, the trio lifts the program to the listener's attention with the melding of individual talents into one powerful musical force. ...”

allmusic (Audio)

W - Painter's Spring

Discogs (Video)

2022 January: A Guide to William Parker, 2022 February: Raining On The Moon – Corn Meal Dance (2007), 2022 March: William Parker Quartets: Meditation / Resurrection (2017)

​One Village at a Time: The Grinding Artillery War in Ukraine

 

Oleg, a construction worker-turned-volunteer, walking by a burning house as he looked for residents to evacuate in Ruska Lozova, Ukraine.

“RUSKA LOZOVA, Ukraine — The Ukrainian major had a few tasks to complete as he made the rounds along his army battalion’s front line. One platoon commander needed anti-tank weapons. Another wanted to show off a new line of trenches that his forces had dug following a recent Ukrainian advance. But as he drove between positions in his camouflaged armored van near the town of Derhachi, the clock was ticking. A Russian surveillance drone hovered above, watching, sending back coordinates to Russian artillery units, the major said. About twenty minutes later, at least three shells rained down, forcing the major and his team to scramble. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: The War in Ukraine, as Seen on Russian TV (Video)

The Intercept_: The Left in Europe Confronts NATO’s Resurgence After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

ARTFORUM: Russian Forces Alleged to Have Looted Thousands of Artworks from Ukrainian Museums

Scott Nelson: The War in Ukraine is a War for Wheat and Corn (Audio)

Comicopera - Robert Wyatt (2007)

Wikipedia - "Comicopera is an album by Robert Wyatt released on 8 October 2007, available on both CD and double vinyl formats (the vinyl's fourth side contains no music and has a poem etched into its surface). It is Wyatt's first release on the Domino Records label. It features many other musicians, including Brian Eno, Paul Weller, Gilad Atzmon and Phil Manzanera, and was recorded in Wyatt's house and Manzanera's recording studio. The song Del Mondo is a cover from Ko de mondo, the debut album of Italian post-punk band Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti."

Wikipedia

Pitchfork

Guardian: Robert Wyatt, Comicopera

YouTube: Comicopera    1 / 16  

YouTube: Q & A, Purcell Room, London 15th Oct 2007 1:30:08

2010 November: Robert Wyatt, 2013 March: The Last Nightingale, 2013 September: Solar Flares Burn for You (2003), 2014 March: Cuckooland (2003), 2014 October: Robert Wyatt Story (BBC Four, 2001), 2014 December: Different Every Time (2014), 2016 March: Interviews (2014), 2016 June: Dondestan (Revisited)(1998), 2016 September: Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975), 2017 January: '68 (2013), 2017 May: Shleep (1997), 2020 January: Rock Bottom (1972), 2020 November: Nothing Can Stop Us (1982)

​Watch remarkable footage of Neil Young busking on the streets of Glasgow, 1976

 

“Neil Young has always been a man of the people, despite spending the majority of his career on a stage looking down on his audience, truthfully, he’d prefer to be right in there with them. In April 1976, after flying to Glasgow, Scotland, with his Crazy Horse band for a gig at The Apollo, Young headed out into the streets to meet the locals to prove it. He did so, as he did almost every other aspect of his life, with a smile on his face, a song in his heart and a guitar in his hands. ...”

FAR OUT (Video)

​U.S. Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill Russian Generals, Officials Say

 

A Russian tank stuck in the mud in Zavorychi, outside the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, in early April.

“WASHINGTON — The United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials. Ukrainian officials said they have killed approximately 12 generals on the front lines, a number that has astonished military analysts. The targeting help is part of a classified effort by the Biden administration to provide real-time battlefield intelligence to Ukraine. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Europe’s Quest to Replace Russian Gas Faces Plenty of Hurdles

GRID - Ukraine war in photos: Mariupol, then and now

 

A woman stands in the courtyard of a destroyed building in Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 29.

Samizdat

 

Russian samizdat and photo negatives of unofficial literature

“Samizdat (Russian: самиздат, lit. ‘self-publishing’) was a form of dissident activity across the socialist Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because most typewriters and printing devices required official registration and permission to access. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship. ... The Ukrainian language has a similar term: samvydav (самвидав), from sam, ‘self’, and vydavnytstvo, ‘publishing house’. …”

Wikipedia

NY Times: Samizdat Is Russia’ Underground Press (March 1970)

Samizdat: How did people in the Soviet Union circumvent state censorship

Russian Newspaper Turns To Samizdat To Reach Readers ‘Poisoned By Propaganda’

 

Typed copy of Bulgakov’s ‘Heart of a Dog’

Chestnut Trees - Hermann Hesse

 

“Everywhere we’ve lived takes on a certain shape in our memory only some time after we leave it. Then it becomes a picture that will remain unchanged. As long as we’re there, with the whole place before our eyes, we see the accidental and the essential emphasized almost equally; only later are secondary matters snuffed out, our memory preserving only what’s worth preserving. If that weren’t true, how could we look back over even a year of our life without vertigo and terror! Many things make up the picture a place leaves behind for us—waters, rocks, roofs, squares—but for me, it is most of all trees. ...”

The Paris Review

amazon: Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings

2012 August: Hermann Hesse

​A Crumbling Russian ‘Spyville’ Returns to Polish Hands

 

The abandoned former Soviet diplomatic housing complex in Warsaw. The city has seized the building and plans to turn it into accommodation for Ukrainian refugees.

“WARSAW — Soviet diplomats moved out of the hulking Warsaw housing compound more than 30 years ago. But some Russians stayed behind, sheltering until the early 2000s behind a fence topped with barbed wire from a city that, with the collapse of their empire, had suddenly become hostile territory — and an important intelligence target.A moldering, Russian pulp fiction paperback left behind inside the now derelict property, perhaps provides a clue to the preoccupations of the Russians who lived in the compound that was notorious since its heyday in the 1980s as a nest of spies: ‘Game on a Foreign Field.’ ...”

NY Times

VOX: Are sanctions against Russia working?

 

The complex, dubbed “Spyville,” was officially emptied of diplomats and their families when the Soviet empire crumbled in the late 1980s, but some Russians continued to live there until the early 2000s.

Why does this lady have a fly on her head?

 

“As we look at this portrait of a woman with an elaborate white headdress, one of the first things that grabs our attention is the fact that there's a fly on the painting ... but upon closer inspection, the fly is IN the painting, or rather, the artist painted the fly as part of the portrait.  What is going on here??? Share this page via: The official title of this painting is Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family, and it was painted around 1470 by an unknown artist from the ‘Swabian"’area of Europe.  Never heard of Swabia?  In the middle ages, it covered an area including southern Germany, part of Switzerland, and part of France. ...”

artsology

National Gallery (Video)

Soccer capitalism

 

“Soccer academies are springing up across Africa with remarkable speed, evidence of the immense popularity of the sport and the many aspirations it arouses. These academies—institutions that at their core combine a sportive and an educational system—first arrived in Africa from Europe in the late 1990s, following three interrelated processes: (1) the mistreatment by unscrupulous agents of young African players who migrated to Europe; (2) the Bosman ruling of 1995 that further increased the migration of African players to Europe; and (3) the introduction of new transfer regulations by FIFA in 2001 that aimed at curbing the abuse of young migrant players by making it harder for clubs to sign players under the age of 18. ...”

Africa Is a Country

A Long Way Home for Ukrainian Sailors

 

Despite the powerful engines, there was nowhere for the Ocean Force to go. 

“The Ukrainian crew was celebrating with cheesesteak sandwiches on board the cargo ship Ocean Force in late February. After more than a year on anchor in Delaware Bay and dockside in Philadelphia, repairs had been made, and the seven remaining crew members—the minimum required to maintain the cargo vessel while in port—had received long-overdue back pay. A new owner had taken over. They were going home. And then Russian bombs began falling on their homeland and Russian infantry poured across the border. It was Wednesday evening, February 23, in Philadelphia, already Thursday in Ukraine. ...”

Voice

NY Times: Russia Could Sell More Energy to Asia, but Has to Slash Prices

POLITICO: What the Kremlin’s rubles-for-gas threat is about (Audio)

NY Times: Opinion | Putin’s Failure to Hold on to the Educated Could Be the World’s Gain

​Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows

 

“The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO. The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. ‘Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,’ Alito writes. ...”

POLITICO

NY Times: A Supreme Court in Disarray After an Extraordinary Breach

NY Times: Opinion | This Supreme Court Is Out of Step With Most Americans

***NY Times: Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade