“A set of rare records owned by the legendary DJ and champion of new music, John Peel, are to be sold at an auction in London in June. Peel passed away in 2004, but before his death, he had managed to amass a collection of 26,000 LPs, 40,000 7″ singles and countless CDs. Now, it has been announced that a selection of this extensive collection, including pieces of other memorabilia, will be put up for auction at Bonham’s in Knightsbridge on June 14th. ...”
Russian, Ukrainian troops fight block by block in key city
“KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Russian troops pushed farther into a key eastern Ukrainian city and fought street by street with Kyiv’s forces Monday in a battle the mayor said has left the city “completely ruined” and driven tens of thousands from their homes. Military analysts painted the battle as part of a race against time for the Kremlin, which they said wants to complete its capture of the industrial Donbas region before more Western arms arrive to bolster Ukraine’s defenses. Weapons from the West have already helped Kyiv’s forces thwart a Russian advance on the capital in the early weeks of the war. ...”
Piles of rubble are seen next to a heavily damaged apartment building on May 28 in Chernihiv, Ukraine.
The Men Lost to 20 Bruckner Boulevard
“Two laborers board an elevator at the top of a five-story building under renovation in the Bronx. They wear construction helmets, reflective vests and face masks, none of which will do them any good. The older man, a supervisor, rarely talks about anything beyond what needs to be done at this work site at 20 Bruckner Boulevard. But he and his younger co-worker have become friends through a morning ritual: One buys the coffee and the other, the doughnuts. ... The floor seems to vanish beneath the men’s work boots. They scream as they plummet. A crash. Then stillness, save for clouds of disturbed dust. ...”
Lauro MartÃnez at the tomb of his son, Marco, who at 18 emigrated from Ecuador and was soon working in construction in New York City.
A People’s History of Baseball
“Seventy-five years ago this spring, Brooklyn Dodgers second baseman Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier. Most baseball fans probably know the story, which has been told numerous times in books and film. But do they know about Robinson’s civil rights activism off the field? How about the attempts to integrate prior to Robinson or the many struggles against labor exploitation before free agency was finally established in the 1970s? ... Jacobin contributor Michael Arria spoke to Peter Dreier about the books and how America’s pastime has been shaped by rebels and radicals. ...”
2017 April: Baseball color line, 2017 May: Racist taunts stir up ancient pains in Boston
Curt Flood of the Saint Louis Cardinals, May 1966. Flood challenged Major League Baseball’s “reserve clause” barring players from changing teams.
For Russian-Speaking Ukrainians, Language Clubs Offer Way to Defy Invaders
“LVIV, Ukraine — The teacher sounded her words slowly, careful to show which syllable to stress: Eyebrow. Cheekbones. Hair. The students, arranged in a semicircle around her, parroted them back. But they were not there to learn a foreign tongue: Aged 11 to 70, they were Ukrainians, in Ukraine, trying to master the official language of their own country. Since Russia’s invasion, a number of language clubs have opened in cities in western Ukraine. Teachers and volunteers are reaching out to millions of displaced people who have fled to the relative safety of western cities like Lviv from the Russian-speaking east — encouraging them to practice and embrace Ukrainian as the language of their daily lives. ...”
A Yamova language class in progress at a library in Lviv on May 19.
Paris Dispatch 2 : C215 and the Guys on the Street
“We return today to the streets of Paris for Dispatch 2 with Norwegian photographer Tor Staale Moen, who tells us that the streets are alive with stencils and aerosol paintings as much as ever. Our first Paris report a couple of days ago focused on the presentation of the female form and energy by street artist in this city. Today, it’s time for the guys. Here we begin with one of the country’s most well-known stencil masters, C215. His portraits of unknown street dwellers, as well as important historical figures, have graced walls, mailboxes… even national postal stamps. ...”
13bis
Mario Batkovic - Introspection (2021)
“Mario Batkovic plays the accordion. Sounds straightforward enough. Except he plays the accordion in the manner of Steve Reich or Terry Riley if they were entranced by the carnivalesque dancing of a youthful Alejandro Jodorowsky, their nimble fingers reenacting the exuberant choreography upon compressed keys. And Batkovic’s fingers work overtime, like Lubomyr Melnyk transported to a squeezebox. ... Instead, we’re treated to mantle-deep bellows, glistening twinkles, and squelchy, fuzz-caked riffage akin to the guitar work of Muse but with ideas beyond basic pageantry. This is music for classicists. ...”
Ukraine pleads for weapons as Russian onslaught threatens to turn the tide
“Ukraine is in a race against time to save the eastern Donbas region as relentless Russian artillery and air strikes threaten to turn the tide of the war, and support for Kyiv’s continued defiance among some west European allies appears to be slipping. Ukrainian officials say they urgently need advanced US-made mobile multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS) to halt Russian advances in Luhansk and Donetsk. The rockets would be capable of striking Russian firing positions, military bases, air strips and supply lines at a range of up to 300km (185 miles). ...”
Valentyn, 6, poses in the trench that he and his friend Andrii have dug at their makeshift checkpoint next to a school crossing on Friday in Stoyanka, Ukraine.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty (14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the world. ...”
“Jamaica Has A Magic To It”: An Interview With Chris Blackwell
“In a landscape where there were scant possibilities for subcultures to coalesce, long before it was possible to say you were a ‘gamer’, that you followed a particular influencer, or that you only wore a certain brand of trainers, music was everything. From the late 60s through to the 1980s, better than any other label, Island records plotted all the available coordinates. In a music industry temporarily torn asunder by The Beatles, Chris Blackwell, the label’s effortlessly charismatic founder, steered the imprint to unimaginable pre-eminence. Island, alongside Virgin, Chrysalis and A&M, was the sexiest of a new breed of massive independent labels. It represented a time when it was possible to be both revolutionary in intent and reach a huge global audience. ...”
How Does It End? Fissures Emerge Over What Constitutes Victory in Ukraine
“WASHINGTON — Three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America and its allies are quietly debating the inevitable question: How does this end? ... In the past few days alone there has been an Italian proposal for a cease-fire, a vow from Ukraine’s leadership to push Russia back to the borders that existed before the invasion was launched on Feb. 24, and renewed discussion by administration officials about a ‘strategic defeat’ for President Vladimir V. Putin — one that would assure that he is incapable of mounting a similar attack again. ...”
Ukrainian flags fly above graves at the military cemetery in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Queen from The Lewis Chessmen (Probably made in Scandinavia, circa 1150-1175)
“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.
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