“The Queen has been drinking. She holds a drinking horn in her left hand, while her right palm supports her face as she slumps miserably on her throne. This is a tremendously vivid portrait, or caricature, full of life – yet it’s part of a hoard of chess pieces made for playing with, not looking at. There are no other medieval chess pieces as fine as these. Discovered in Uig on the Isle of Lewis in 1831, they were probably carved in the recently Christianised Norse regions and abandoned by a merchant ship. This masterpiece of medieval art is also an emblem of emotion. The Queen’s pose, with her face on her hand, was the symbol of the melancholy humour, seen too in Renaissance art and even Munch’s painting Melancholy. Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown.”
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I - Roger Shattuck (1958)
“... His most famous book, in some ways his best, was also his first: The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1958), a quirky, seductive, utterly original romp through the work of Henri Rousseau, Alfred Jarry, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Roger made connections—made sense—out of themes and continuities that no one had sensed before but that now seem obvious. Roger’s mind was omnivorous, as at home in anthropology and moral philosophy as it was in literature. ...”
Filtration and forced deportation: Mariupol survivors on the lasting terrors of Russia’s assault
“On the final day of March, soldiers of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic entered the basement in Mariupol where Svitlana and Vitaly were sheltering. ‘You have 15 minutes to get ready and then you’re leaving,’ shouted one, waving an automatic rifle. It was, according to the Russian narrative of its Ukraine invasion, the day that Svitlana and Vitaly were liberated. But it did not feel much like that to them. Instead, it was merely the end of one ordeal and the start of another: a wearying and humiliating journey through so-called “filtration” procedures, followed by forced deportation to Russia. ...”
An explosion in an apartment building that came under fire from a Russian army tank.
The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers
“DONDON, Haiti — Adrienne Present steps into the thin forest beside her house and plucks the season’s first coffee cherries, shining like red marbles in her hands. The harvest has begun. Each morning, she lights a coal fire on the floor of her home in the dark. Electricity has never come to her patch of northern Haiti. She sets out a pot of water, fetched from the nearest source — a mountain spring sputtering into a farmer’s field. Then she adds the coffee she has dried, winnowed, roasted and pounded into powder with a large mortar called a pilon, the way she was taught as a child. ...”
In 1791, enslaved Haitians did the seemingly impossible. They ousted their French masters and founded a nation.
Premier League winners and losers: set pieces, sprinting, nutmegging and fouling
“Manchester City are champions, Tottenham Hotspur grabbed the final Champions League spot and Mohamed Salah and Son Heung-min share the golden boot trophy. The main prizes have now been handed out, but take a look under the bonnet and there are plenty of alternative awards to be handed out to players and teams. Some of them are insightful, some of them are utterly pointless. All of them are fun. Here we go… ”
A doomed river crossing shows the perils of entrapment in the war’s east
“... Out on the riverbank, the scene of mayhem unfolded under a baking spring sun: blown up tanks, the detritus of pontoon bridges, heaps of branches shorn off by explosions and the bodies of Russian soldiers, some half buried in the mud. In the forest, a short, eerie walk revealed bits of torn Russian military uniforms hanging from trees. The failed river crossing that took place at this spot over several days in early May was one of the most lethal engagements of the war for the Russian army. Its forces had sought to surround Ukrainian soldiers in the nearby town of Sievierodonetsk — but instead became surrounded themselves, boxed in by the river and a Ukrainian frontline. ...”
Ukrainian civilian volunteers fill sandbags with Black Sea sand, along a tourist beach, for use in defensive positions in the city before an expected Russian assault in Odessa, Ukraine, on March 5.
Chuito & The Latin Uniques - From The Street (1968)
“... Indemand and rare Latin Soul Boogalo LP on the New York 'Speed' label. Killer streetwise latin soul bombs on this stunning LP. 'Spanish Maiden' is even popular with the Northern Soul crowd. The Speed label out of NYC released quite a few gems in its day, in different styles. This one from 1968 is a Latin Soul / Boogaloo LP of some merit. It is mainly famous for the track ‘Spanish Maiden’ as sung by Tony Middleton who features on the LP as a singer. ... This is a special record. What makes it special are the singers Danny Agosto, Norberto Carrasquillo, and Tony Middleton; they lay down some of the most soulful and moving vocals I’ve ever heard on a Latin soul record. ...”
The Philosophers' Football Match
"’International Philosophy’, commonly referred to as the Philosophers' Football Match, is a Monty Python sketch depicting a football match in the Munich Olympiastadion between philosophers representing Greece and Germany. Starring in the sketch are Archimedes (John Cleese), Socrates (Eric Idle), Hegel (Graham Chapman), Nietzsche (Michael Palin), Marx (Terry Jones), and Kant (Terry Gilliam). Palin also provides the match television commentary. ... Confucius is the referee and keeps times with an hourglass. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine (sporting haloes) serve as linesmen. The German manager is Martin Luther. ...”
Ukraine destruction: how the Guardian documented Russia’s use of illegal weapons
“At about midnight on 1 March 2022, a Russian air force jet dropped a series of 250kg Soviet-era explosives over Borodyanka, north of Kyiv. They were powerful FAB-250 bombs, designed to hit military targets such as enemy fortifications and bunkers. There were no such structures, however, in this quiet town of 13,000 people. The bombs fell on at least five residential buildings, splitting them in two. Dozens of bodies were found under the rubble when the Russians withdrew from the Kyiv region in early April, leaving in their path a gigantic crime scene that Ukrainian prosecutors investigating alleged war crimes by Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, have been working on for weeks. ...”
W -Flechette “... Fléchettes were used during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where samples of the projectiles were recovered in the mass graves in Bucha ...”
Travelling on the trail of 'True Detective' season one
“For many of us, the first season of True Detective is one of the best pieces of television we’ve ever seen. The inaugural edition of Nic Pizzolatto’s anthology crime drama premiered in January 2014 via the home of pretty much every great TV show, HBO. Coming with a bumper cast that features Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in career-defining roles, as well as Michelle Monaghan, Michael Potts and Tory Kittles, the acting in the show is so exquisite that the following two seasons had a hard time replicating it, regardless of the fact that they too are of very high quality....”
2015 January: True Detective (2014)
Eugène Deslaw - Les nuits électriques (1928)
"In 1927, Eugène Deslaw, an experimental filmmaker of Ukrainian origin, produced a film-poem on the neo-Baudelairian theme of city lights. Against a backdrop of the night sky, he focuses the film on windows, streetlights and illuminated signs in Paris, Berlin, London and Prague. ‘The film's actors,’ Deslaw wrote, ‘absolutely do not tempt me. I think the modern night, populated by strange an singing lights, doesn't really resemble any other night in history. It is as photogenic if not more than a beautiful woman's face.’”
Russia using ‘scorched earth’ tactics in Donbas, Ukraine says
“Heavy fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces has continued in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, as Moscow’s troops pressed on with their advance on Severodonetsk, where local officials accused Russia of using ‘scorched-earth’ tactics. Severodonetsk and its twin city of Lysychansk form the eastern part of a Ukrainian-held pocket that Russia has been trying to capture since mid-April, when it shifted focus to the south and east after abandoning its offensive to take Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. ...”
No spring break in Ukraine.
Priceless Sculptures Are ‘Literally Being Chipped Away’
“Among the more than 33,000 residents of Parkchester, the sprawling 1940s Bronx apartment complex, the most exuberant characters tend to hang out at the buildings’ entrances and corners: folk singers and firefighters, accordion players and harlequins, steelworkers and mermaids. There are exotic fauna as well, not typically found in such urban environs: gazelles, puffins, kangaroos and bears. Vivid and three-dimensional, these neighborhood fixtures are whimsically crafted terra-cotta sculptures — more than a thousand of them, many colorfully glazed — embedded in the facades of Parkchester’s red brick apartment blocks. ...”
A Hugh Jass Oral History of ‘Flaming Moe’s,’ Everyone’s Favorite ‘Simpson’s’ Episode
“After a hit-and-miss first season and a second season that was still finding its way, The Simpsons really hit its stride in Season Three. The season delivered classic episode after classic episode, and while the Simpson family had been pretty much figured out by this time, it was during the third season that the writers dove deeper into the city of Springfield and its countless bizarre and hilarious characters. Krusty the Clown reunited with his Rabbi father, Milhouse fell in love, Otto moved in with the Simpsons, Ned Flanders opened the Leftorium and Moe Szyslak, Springfield’s bad-tempered barkeep, hit it big with a drink called ‘The Flaming Moe.’ ...”
Leo Tolstoy Square, Street, and Metro Station
May 14, 2022: “Pushkin Street is located one kilometer from the Drama Theater in Mariupol where 1,000 civilians hid and an estimated 300 died after Russians dropped a bomb on it. In Kharkiv, it’s the same distance from the bombed-out central square of the city to the Pushkinska metro station. Pushkin’s streets can be found throughout war-torn Chernihiv, Kyiv, Sumy, Mykolayiv, and Kherson. There are even Pushkin streets in Bucha and Kramatorsk. The President of PEN Germany recently declared that ‘the enemy is Putin, not Pushkin,’ relying on word games to protest against the idea of a ‘blanket boycott’ of Russian culture. ...”
Kharkiv
Unsettling the Score: Sasha Frere-Jones on the art of Éliane Radigue
“’I only have one trick,’ Éliane Radigue told me a few years ago. ‘It is the cross-fade!’ She pulled her fingers apart as if stretching taffy and laughed. She was sitting on the couch in her apartment on rue Liancourt in Paris. Athena, con una Espada (Athena, as a Sword), a bronze sculpture by the late artist Arman, to whom Radigue was married from the 1950s until the late ’60s, stood by the wall. For decades, Athena shared the premises with an ARP 2500 synthesizer and a pair of huge Altec Voice of the Theatre speakers. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, though, they were packed away. What Radigue did before she divested herself of this equipment is exactly what she does now: listen. ...”
2018 May: Trilogie de la Mort (1988-1993), 2018 October: The Deeply Meditative Electronic Music of Avant-Garde Composer Eliane Radigue, 2019 February: Adnos I-III, 2019 May: Occam Ocean, Vol. 1 (2017), 2022 February: Éliane Radigue: For a Composer at 90, There’s Nothing but Time
Nice, France, ca. 1950s.
Matisse: The Red Studio
“For many years after its creation, Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911)—which depicts the artist’s work space in the Parisian suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux—was met with bafflement or indifference. Today it is known as a foundational work of modern art and a landmark in the centuries-long tradition of studio painting. Matisse: The Red Studio will reunite this work with the surviving six paintings, three sculptures, and one ceramic by Matisse depicted on its six-foot-tall-by-seven-foot-wide canvas. This will be the first reunion of these objects since they were together in Matisse’s studio at the time The Red Studio was made. ...”
2012 May: Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia, 2015 April: Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: The Art of the Flower, 2016 April: Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, 2017 May: Matisse in the Studio, 2018 August: The apartment rooftop that hosted Henri Matisse
Ukraine endgames 2.0: Can either side ‘win’ this war?
“One week after the war in Ukraine began, Grid laid out five scenarios for how it might end. It was already apparent then that the war would not be the quick and decisive Russian rout that many had expected, but two months later, it’s clear that the article still gave the Russian military too much credit. Two of those scenarios — a complete Russian takeover of Ukraine and a division of the country in two, with a new border along the Dnieper River — are now off the table. Before the war, many predicted the Ukrainian resistance to transform into an underground insurgency against a Russian occupation. Instead, Ukraine’s military is intact and still fighting a conventional war. ...”
Carnac - Eugène Guillevic (1999)
“One of France’s most important contemporary poets, Eugène Guillevic (1907-97) was born in Carnac in Brittany, and although he never learned the Breton language, his personality is deeply marked by his feeling of oneness with his homeland. His poetry has a remarkable unity, driven by his desire to use words to bridge a tragic gulf between man and a harsh and often apparently hostile natural environment. For Guillevic, the purpose of poetry is to arouse the sense of Being. ...”
2014 September: Eugène Guillevic, 2021 August: Guillevic: Selected Poems - Eugene Guillevic, Denise Levertov (1969)
Stuart Dempster – Underground Overlays From The Cistern Chapel (1995)
“... Every so often I have arranged one of the trombone master classes to take place in the cistern at Fort Worden, Port Townsend, the infamous two million gallon 186 foot diameter water tank about 70 miles northwest of Seattle. The most recent time, on 18 June 1994, consisted of nine current and former students, ten trombones in all including me. This excursion turned into a recording session that served the purpose of making this CD as well as providing sources for the Meet the Composer commission through their Composer/Choreographer project for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. ...”
Surviving the Siege of Kharkiv
“The residents of Kharkiv were required by emergency decree to darken their homes at night, so as not to provide Russian planes or artillerists with targets. If they had to keep a light on — if they were lucky enough to have electricity — they covered their windows with blankets or plastic tarps or shards of broken furniture. Though Kharkivites may have known to do this anyway, without the decree, and not only because the war had knocked out their windowpanes, along with their power, and heating, and water. They just seemed to have an instinct for how to act under siege. So when the rocket struck Lesia Serdiuka Street after sunset, in the last week of March, a month into the war, the sky above the city was not like an urban night sky, but more rural, the ambient light absent. The starlight was obscured by the sodden cloud cover of early spring. The rocket hit a gas main, and the blast reverberated through the city. It shook the panes of my hotel-room windows two miles away. The flames rose and were reflected in the clouds, turning the sky a hellish scarlet. ...”
Near the rocket strike on Serdiuka Street in the Saltivka neighborhood of Kharkiv.
How U.S. Soccer and Its Players Solved the Equal Pay Puzzle
“The new collective bargaining agreements approved this week by the United States Soccer Federation and its men’s and women’s national teams will, at last, bring an end to a decades-long, emotionally exhausting and wildly expensive fight over equal pay. For the first time, the women’s team, which has won the last two Women’s World Cups and four overall, will be paid at the same rate for game appearances and tournament victories as the men’s team, which has historically (and persistently) failed to even sniff that kind of success. In addition to those new (and higher) per-game payments, the new contracts also include an unprecedented redistribution of the millions of dollars in World Cup prize money the men’s and women’s teams can earn by playing in the tournament every four years. …”
William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary
“Few artists have anticipated, or precipitated, the fragmented, heroically individualist, and purposefully oppositional art of modernity as William Blake, a man to whom the cliché ahead of his time can be applied with perfect accuracy. Blake strenuously opposed the rationalist Deism and Neoclassical artistic values of his contemporaries, not only in principle, but in nearly every part of his artistic practice. His politics were correspondingly radical: in opposition to empire, racism, poverty, patriarchy, Christian dogma, and the emerging global capitalism of his time. ...”
2009 April: William Blake, 2010 December: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 2011 June: The Ghost of a Flea, 2012 August: Isaac Newton (1795), 2015 November: America a Prophecy (1793), 2019 May: The Notebook of William Blake, 2019 October: ‘To Particularize Is the Alone Distinction of Merit’: Blake’s Visionary Imagination, 2021 September: William Blake’s 102 Illustrations of The Divine Comedy Collected in a Beautiful Book from Taschen
In Russia, as Prices Soar, the Outlook for Its Economy Grows ‘Especially Gloomy’
“LONDON — After sanctions hobbled production at its assembly plant in Kaliningrad, the Russian automaker Avtotor announced a lottery for free 10-acre plots of land — and the chance to buy seed potatoes — so employees could grow their own food in the westernmost fringe of the Russian empire during ‘the difficult economic situation.’ In Moscow, shoppers complained that a kilogram of bananas had shot up to 100 rubles from 60, while in Irkutsk, an industrial city in Siberia, the price of tampons at a store doubled to $7. Banks have shortened receipts in response to a paper shortage. Clothing manufacturers said they were running out of buttons. ...”
Empty shelves in a supermarket in Moscow in March. Food prices have shot up, especially for items like imported fruit.
Cornufolkia: A Hidden History of Psychedelic-Folk from the British & Emerald Isles
“... Audio Archives label offers a special double CD containing 43 ultra rare underground psychedelic-folk gems and medieval sounds from the British & Emerald Isles. The tracks here a ultra rare sound sources from folk bands recorded in recorded in England/Scotland/Wales/Ireland during the 1960s and 1970s. Rare tracks , such as acid folk, psychedelic folk, and trad folk and includes works never before on CD, and from sound sources released only at the time. Comes with large poster sleeve crammed full of rare memorabilia and artifacts together with detailed info on each artist. This is one of the best ever folk offerings celebrating the rich history of alternative psych-folk rarely heard. ...”
A painter’s mystery scene on the Sixth Avenue elevated after midnight
“Elevated trains were the fastest mode of mass transit in the late 19th century. Lurching and groaning high above the sidewalks along almost all of New York’s avenues, they whisked people to work, to school, to the theater, to Central Park, to department store shopping—all for a nickel per ride. At night, the elevated invited intrigue. Everett Shinn, former newspaper illustrator best known as a member of the Ashcan School of social realism painting, captures a moment at one end of a poorly lit all-male car in his 1899 work, ‘Sixth Avenue Elevated After Midnight.’”
2017 January: 34th Street (1903), 2019 September: The fantasy of window shopping in New York City, 2020 December: A food vendor’s Christmas on 14th Street in 1904
Why Germany is hooked on Russian gas
“Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU has sanctioned much of Russia’s economy, but Russia’s natural gas trade remains untouched. The EU gets nearly a quarter of its energy from natural gas, and almost half of that comes from Russia, the world’s largest gas exporter. As the EU’s largest economy, Germany is Russia’s biggest customer, paying Russia’s state-owned gas company 200 million euros. So while Germany has even sent Ukraine weapons, in a historic shift of military policy, through its gas supply Germany is helping to pay for the war it’s trying to stop. ... Today, as the world tries to punish Russia through sanctions, that dependence is getting in the way. ...”
Three Tales - Gustave Flaubert (1877)
“I’ve got the old 1961 Penguin translation by Robert Baldick. It has no notes but a handy nine-page introduction in which Baldick places the Tales in the context of Flaubert’s life and work. Born in 1821, Flaubert spent his whole adult life living off a small private income in the remote Normandy village of Croisset and devoting his life to literature. But he was far from successful. ... In other words the mid-1870s found Flaubert at a financial, emotional and artistic low point. And yet he not only wrote these three short tales relatively quickly but, when they were published, the volume turned out to be his most critically acclaimed and popular book. In fact, it turned out to be the last book he published during his lifetime. ...”
2012 August: On Cataloguing Flaubert, 2013 March: Sentimental Education - 1(1869), 2017 August: The Sentimental Education (1869), 2018 May: In Which Our Tragic Effects Remain Purely Professional, 2019 March: The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1911), 2021 November: Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading - Anjali Joseph, 2021 December: In Which a Direct Line is Drawn From Flaubert’s Unfinished Novel
Sun Ra House in Philadelphia Is Now a Historic Landmark
“Sun Ra House, the three-story Philadelphia building that has been a cradle for Sun Ra’s evolving Arkestra outfit since the 1960s, has been listed as a historic landmark in the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places. The building at 5626 Morton Street, also known as the Arkestral Institute of Sun Ra, reportedly still houses a number of Arkestra members, including current bandleader Marshall Allen. Allen had lived in the house since 1968. In 2021, he reported that the building had partially collapsed. On May 13, the Philadelphia Historical Commission unanimously voted to grant the protected status, a representative for the register said. ...”
The staggering amount of US military aid to Ukraine, explained in one chart
“American weapons are pouring into Ukraine. President Joe Biden requested that Congress send $33 billion of emergency aid to the country at war with Russia, and the US House increased the pot to $40 billion, with about 60 percent going toward security assistance in some form or another. A bipartisan majority in the Senate is expected to approve it this week. It’s an unprecedented ramp-up that builds on the rapid transfer of billions’ worth of weapons already sent. ...”
NY Times: On a Russian talk show, a retired colonel stuns his colleagues by pointing out that the invasion isn’t going well. (Video)
Smoke rises from the steel works in Mariupol on May 5, 2022. The steel plant has a maze of more than 30 bunkers and tunnels.
An Architect Breaks Down the Design Details of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel
“Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel features many notable players: Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, and presiding above all, Ralph Fiennes as celebrated concierge Monsieur Gustave H. But it is Gustave’s domain, the titular alpine health resort, that figures most prominently in the film, transcending place, time, and political regime. Such an establishment could only exist within Anderson’s cinematic imagination, which dictates the manner in which he introduces it to his viewers. ...”
2013 November: Wes Anderson Honors Fellini in a Delightful New Short Film, 2013 November: Rushmore (1998), 2013 Decemher: Hotel Chevalier (2007), 2014 March: Wes Anderson Collection, 2014 April: The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies, 2014 July: The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), 2014 August: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), 2014 December: Welcome to Union Glacier (2013), 2015 January: Inhabiting Wes Anderson’s Universe, 2015 July: Books in the Films of Wes Anderson: A Supercut for Bibliophiles, 2015 November: Moonrise Kingdom (2012), 2015 December: Chapter 8: "The Grand Budapest Hotel", 2016 June: Here's pretty much every song used in a Wes Anderson film, 2016 November: Watch Come Together, Wes Anderson’s New Short Film...., 2018 September: Isle of Dogs (2018), 2020 May: Honest Trailers - Every Wes Anderson Movie, 2020 July: Exploring Wes Anderson’s wonderful cinematic commercials, 2020 September: Steal Like Wes Anderson..., 2021 October: In the Company of Wes Anderson
Quartering Jerusalem
“Maps of Jerusalem show the Old City divided into four: top left Christian Quarter, top right Muslim Quarter, bottom left Armenian Quarter and bottom center Jewish Quarter. Such neat divisions. Nearly all modern maps do this. Many are even color coded, with blocks of shading for each quarter and precise borders marking frontiers from one quarter to the next. But it’s no surprise to learn that in reality no city functions like this. The busiest of Jerusalem’s lanes is Suq Khan al-Zeit. ...”
Following its introduction by Williams in 1849, the idea of “four quarters” took hold in outsiders’ imaginations, and it became a standard feature of maps of the city up to our own time, including this poster-size illustrated map for sale in the city to tourists.
Can Ukraine hold Russia accountable for environmental crimes?
“As forensic investigators in Ukraine uncover evidence of killings that may amount to war crimes, experts of a different kind are at work to document the effect of Russia’s war on the environment.Ukraine’s ministry in charge of environmental protection said in a briefing last month that destroyed military equipment and ammunition, as well as exploded missiles and air bombs, pollute the soil and groundwater with chemicals, including heavy metals. Nickolai Denisov, deputy director of the Geneva-based Zoï Environmental Network, is part of a team mapping incidents of war-related damage or disruption. By the end of April, the group had reported 3,300 incidents in some 600 settlements, including cities, towns and villages. ...”
A local resident stands next to unexploded mortar shells left during Russia's invasion, in the village of Yahidne, Ukraine, on April 20. While there is little published research on contamination from munitions, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says the First and Second World Wars have left soils in some parts of Europe contaminated for decades.
