​Russia turns to trucks and big wages to woo volunteer soldiers

“The Russian army, seeking contract soldiers for what it calls the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, is using mobile recruiting trucks to attract volunteers, offering nearly $2,700 a month as an incentive. A special unit stationed one such truck in a central park in the southern Russian city of Rostov on Saturday and removed the sides to reveal a mobile office. Soldiers in camouflage and black masks showed their guns to interested passersby and handed out colour brochures titled ‘Military service on a contract – the choice of a real man’. Neither Russia nor Ukraine discloses their military losses, which Western intelligence agencies estimate at tens of thousands on both sides.Moscow has not updated the official death toll since March 25, when it said 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed and 3,825 wounded. The Kremlin said last week there was no discussion of a nationwide mobilisation to bolster its forces. ...”

Aljazeera

NBC News: Dead bodies still lie on the battlefield near the Russian border (Video)

New Republic: The West May Get a Second Chance to Nurture a New Russia

The Nation: The Russian Military’s Ineptitude Almost Rivals Our Own

BBC: Putin failing on all his strategic military objectives, says defence chiefPutin failing on all his strategic military objectives, says defence chief (Video)

Soldiers in camouflage and black masks showed their guns to interested passersby and handed out colour brochures titled 'Military service on a contract - the choice of a real man”

​On Malcolm Lowry’s Yearslong, Fruitless Attempt to Adapt Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night for Film

“In the winter of 1949, after a year-long trip to Europe, Malcolm Lowry and his wife, Margerie, returned to their home, a squatter’s shack on the ocean north of Vancouver. Lowry was two years removed from the publication of Under the Volcano, and its surprise success had made him a literary star. The ensuing pressure of being a public figure and the need to produce something else of value exacerbated his already excessive drinking; by his own count, he was up to two liters of rum a day, ‘to say nothing of the other drinks at bars.’ He had not written anything in two years. ...”

LitHub

2018 November: Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry (John Huston - 1984), 2020 August: Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano (1947)

2015 November: The Crack-Up (1945), 2017 December: Living Well Is the Best Revenge By Calvin Tomkins, 2019 August: Three Letters from Switzerland By Zelda Fitzgeralds, 2020 November: A Few Words about F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Pretenders - Pretenders (1979)

“Pretenders is the debut studio album by British-American band The Pretenders, released in 1979. A combination of rock and roll, punk and new wave music, this album made the band famous. The album features the singles ‘Stop Your Sobbing’, ‘Kid‘ and ‘Brass in Pocket’. Nick Lowe produced the Pretenders' first single, ‘Stop Your Sobbing’, but decided not to work with them again as he thought the band was ‘not going anywhere’. Chris Thomas took over on the subsequent recording sessions....”

W - Pretenders (album), W - “Stop Your Sobbing”, W - “Kid” (Pretenders song)

Rolling Stone: Chrissie Hynde Without Tears

YouTube: Kid, Stop Your Sobbing

YouTube: Pretenders (Full Album) 48:08

​The ‘Wild Field’ Where Putin Sowed the Seeds of War

“CHASIV YAR, Ukraine — On a clear spring morning eight years ago, Oleksandr Khainus stepped outside his house to go to work at the town factory when he spotted new graffiti scrawled across his fence. ‘Glory to Russia,’ vandals had written in angry black spray paint. ‘Putin,’ another message said. Mr. Khainus was perplexed. It was true that Chasiv Yar, the Rust Belt-like town where he has spent his entire life in a region called the Donbas, had long contained many conflicting opinions on its identity. Geographically, the Donbas was part of Ukraine, no question, but it was so close to Russia and so tied to it historically that many maintained that their true home really lay eastward. ...”

NY Times

BBC - Ukraine war: Russian retreat exposes military weaknesses

VOX: Ukraine wants more weapons. But can Europe provide?

Aljazeera: How Ukraine makes Putin’s regional project crumble (Video)

A road outside Chasiv Yar with mountains of slag visible on the horizon.

​Architect Breaks Down Five of the Most Iconic New York City Apartments

“Real estate is a perennially hot topic in New York City, as is gentrification. Above, architect Michael Wyetzner, breaks down the defining features of several typical NYC apartments. You’re on your own to truffle up the sort of rent a 340 square feet studio commands in an East Village tenement these days. The ancestors would be shocked, for sure. My late mother-in-law never tired of causing young jaws to drop by revealing how she once paid $27/month for a 1 bedroom on Sheridan Square…and her mother, who immigrated at the turn of the century, couldn’t wait to put the Lower East Side behind her. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

​How to win the World Cup - Chris Evans (2022)

The art of international football management – by those who’ve done it: "The pinnacle of the game. A job reserved only for the very best. That was how an international manager’s role was viewed for decades. The World Cup was where the globe’s top coaches would meet in the dugout, just as the best players were doing so on the pitch. While the growing importance of domestic leagues and the Champions League has curbed international football’s reputation in the 21st century, there remains a special enchantment to leading a national team to glory. No other job in football gives a manager the chance to bring such unbridled joy to so many people. ..."

Guardian

amazon

 

​Ukraine war: Hundreds of graves found in liberated Izyum city - officials

“Ukraine says hundreds of graves have been found outside Izyum, days after it was re-taken from Russia. Wooden crosses, most of them marked with numbers, were discovered in a forest outside the city by advancing Ukrainian forces. Authorities said they would start exhuming some of the graves on Friday.It is not yet clear what happened to the victims, but early accounts suggest some may have died from shelling and a lack of access to healthcare.Speaking on Friday, the head of Ukraine's national police service said most of the bodies belonged to civilians. Ihor Klymenko told a news conference that although soldiers were also believed to be buried there, there was so far no confirmation. Earlier, Ukrainian authorities told the BBC more than 400 bodies were thought to be buried at the site. ...”

BBC

Guardian - ‘Some hanged themselves’: the work to find answers amid Izium’s mass grave

Failing in the Field, Russia Targets Ukraine’s Civilian Infrastructure

NY Times: Fire and Fear in South Ukraine

 

​Jane Bowles: Collected Writings

“In a brilliant handful of works, Jane Bowles (1917–1973) fashioned an uninhibited avant-garde style, a dazzling compound of spare prose and vivid dialogue that has enjoyed an outsized literary influence. Tennessee Williams called her ‘the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters’; Truman Capote said she was a ‘modern legend’; and for John Ashbery she was ‘one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language.’ The modernist classic Two Serious Ladies (1943), a novel inspired by the author’s honeymoon in Mexico with her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, follows two bourgeois American women in Panama as they jettison sexual and cultural norms in search of happiness and liberation: newlywed Frieda Copperfield, who seeks love and comfort in the arms of a young Panamanian girl, and Christina Goering, a wealthy spinster whose unorthodox pursuit of salvation leads her into a world of shiftless men and seedy bars. ...”

Library of America – Jane Bowles: Collected Writings

Library of America – A Stick of Green Candy, Library of America – East Side: North Africa

amazon

2019 September: Jane Bowles

 

 

The artist who fills potholes with mosaics – in pictures

“Em Emem is an anonymous, Lyon-based artist. ‘But I’m just a sidewalk poet, a son of bitumen,’ he says. His work involves filling potholes and cracked walls on city streets with beautiful mosaic designs, a process he calls ‘flacking‘ – a play on the French word flaque, meaning puddle or patch. He started in 2016, after becoming ‘hypnotised’ by the scarred surfaces of the old alley that housed his first workshop. ‘My work is the story of the city, where cobblestones have been displaced; a truck from the vegetable market tore off a piece of asphalt,’ he says. ‘Each becomes a flack.’ ...”

Guardian

W - Ememem

A street artist is converting potholes and broken pavements into intricate pieces of art

Guardian - France’s answer to Banksy: the anonymous street artist filling potholes with colourful mosaics

​The Ukraine War: How Does It End?

“The stunning success of Ukraine’s counteroffensive east of Kharkiv and the accelerating progress made toward Kherson in the south has, to astute observers, brought to mind a famous line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Drinking with his buddies, the character Mike Campbell—a kind of ‘proto-bro’—is asked how he became bankrupt. ... As Lawrence Freedman notes, the sort of collapse we’re seeing from Russia’s forces is familiar to military historians. ... Freedman analogizes Russia’s current conundrum to that of the Afghan National Army last year, but the story of the German Imperial Army in late 1918 is also worth pondering. After imposing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on Trotsky, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks in 1917, German General Erich Ludendorff turned westward to try to defeat the Allies before American reinforcements could arrive in Europe in large numbers....”

The Bulwark

Aljazeera: How Ukrainians ‘de-Russify’ themselves (Video)

Guardian: Zelenskiy condemns ‘vile Russian act’ after strike on dam floods his home city (Video)

Aljazeera - ‘They ran away’: Ukrainians recount hasty Russian withdrawal (Video)

A monument to the Ukrainian-born Russian writer Isaak Babel in Odesa.

​Rescuing an Off Off Broadway Theater With a Storied Past

“When Edith O’Hara, the mother hen and indefatigable leader of the eclectic 13th Street Repertory Company for nearly half a century, died last fall at age 103, the future became decidedly shaky for one of Off Off Broadway’s longest-operating stages. In an effort to ensure that it’s not the end of the run as well for the antebellum brick house where both the theater and Ms. O’Hara made their homes, preservationists are urging the city to grant landmark protection to the three-story Greek Revival structure. ...”

NY Times

W - 13th Street Repertory Theatre

13th Street Repertory Theatre, 50 West 13th Street in Greenwich Village

The Jacob Day House - 50 West 13th Street

New research shows that the 1840s rowhouse at 50 West 13th Street was owned by Jacob Day, an abolitionist businessman, who was one of the wealthiest Black residents of 19th-century New York City.

​Joseph Kamaru a.k.a KMRU

“... Following our launch with Laraaji to coincide with World Mental Health day, we welcome Nairobi-based producer Joseph Kamaru a.k.a KMRU. With a proclivity for drones and field recordings, Joseph’s sounds is warm and enveloping, maximal in its textured simplicity. Based in a city whose musical identity is vibrant and multi-faceted, KMRU is an outlier of sorts, but his authenticity is tantamount to his success; a quality instilled by his grandfather of the same name, whose work as a benga musician and political activists has made him a Kenyan hero. ...”

Reduced by KMRU (Audio)

The ambient year (Audio)

KMRU – Peel (Editions Mego) / opaquer (Dagoretti Records) (Audio)

Bandcamp: Peel by KMRU (Audio)

U.S. Military Aid to Ukraine Grows to Historic Proportions — Along With Risks

“Since Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February, the U.S. government has pumped more money and weapons into supporting the Ukrainian military than it sent in 2020 to Afghanistan, Israel, and Egypt combined — surpassing in a matter of months three of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in history. Keeping track of the numbers is challenging. Since the war started, U.S. officials have announced a flurry of initiatives aimed at supporting Ukrainian defense efforts while keeping short of a more direct involvement in the conflict. On Thursday, on a surprise visit to Kyiv, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a new $675 million package of U.S. military equipment as well as a $2.2 billion ‘long-term’ investment to bolster the security of Ukraine and 17 of its neighbor countries. ...”

The_intercept

Aljazeera: Kharkiv triumph raises Ukrainian spirits – and victory hopes (Video)

Guardian: Ukrainians are joyful as the Russian occupiers flee, but we must be wary of an ambush

NY Times: Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman - Putin Will Make People Choose Between Heating or Eating This Winter

​Nancy Kay Turner

“... Nancy Kay Turner’s two and three -dimensional mixed –media works incorporate text and image while exploring the intersection of memory and identity. The work– which mediates between past, present and future, examines the mysterious way objects retain remembrance, how fragments can suggest an entire story, and how we have a fickle relationship to our own history.She grew up in an apartment in the Bronx. Deprived of an attic and family objects of historical or emotional importance, she has had to look through others actual and metaphorical ‘attics.’ Her mixed-media work has been written about in ‘Crossing Over: Feminism and the Art of Social Concern’ by Arlene Raven, and ‘The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970’s, History and Impact’ edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard. ...“

Nancy Kay Turner: Biography

An Artist at Work, An Artist in Life: Studio Visits with Nancy Kay Turner

Meet Nancy Kay Turner: visual artist and art critic

YouTube: STUDIO VISIT

”SEANCE” 2020

Spray Nation: 1980s NYC Graffiti Photos - Martha Cooper (2022)

“... Page after page of golden NYC hits from the Martha Cooper archive; this new hardcover tome expands the galaxy for fans and academics of that amber-soaked period when it seemed like New York was leading a Spray Nation of graffiti for cities across the country. Known for her ability to capture graffiti writers’ work in its original urban context, Ms. Cooper once again proves that her reputation as the documentarian of an underground/overground aesthetics scene is no joke. With an academics’ respect for the work, the practice, and the practitioners, Cooper recorded volumes of images methodically for history – and your appreciation. ...”

Brooklyn Street Art Martha Cooper and Roger Gastman Release “Spray Nation”: “Subway Art” on Steroids

Brooklyn Street Art - “Spray Nation”: Unseen 1980’s NYC Graffiti  by Cooper and Gastman

amazon

​Ukraine’s wins turn focus back on Europe’s waning military aid

“Ukraine’s swift battlefield advances are forcing European governments to once again confront an uncomfortable question: Will they significantly boost weapons deliveries? It’s a touchy subject in many European capitals, where the energy crisis and cost-of-living woes have dominated public attention over the past weeks, prompting warnings of war fatigue. But Ukraine’s counteroffensive against Russia in recent days has changed the narrative — at least for the moment — giving a new opening to those wanting European governments to step up their arms deliveries. First among them is the Ukrainian government itself. ...”

POLITICO (Audio)

BBC - Ukraine war: What will Russia's losses mean for Putin? (Video)

NY Times: The Critical Moment Behind Ukraine’s Rapid Advance

GRID - World in Photos: What Ukraine’s lightning Kharkiv offensive looked like — up close

A Russian soldier, taken prisoner, stays on a tank with Ukrainian soldiers after the city was recaptured from Russian forces on Sunday in Izyum, Ukraine.

​Jean-Luc Godard, Daring Director Who Shaped the French New Wave, Dies at 91

“Jean-Luc Godard, the daringly innovative director and provocateur whose unconventional camera work, disjointed narrative style and penchant for radical politics changed the course of filmmaking in the 1960s, leaving a lasting influence on it, died on Tuesday at his home in the district of Rolle, Switzerland. He was 91. His longtime legal adviser, Patrick Jeanneret, said Mr. Godard died by assisted suicide, having suffered from ‘multiple disabling pathologies.’ ... In practice he seldom scrambled the timeline of his films, preferring instead to leap forward through his narratives by means of the elliptical “jump cut,” which he did much to make into a widely accepted tool. ...”

NY Times

BBC - Jean-Luc Godard: Nine things about the man who remade cinema

Guardian - Jean-Luc Godard: a genius who tore up rule book without troubling to read it

Criterion: Jean-Luc Godard (Video)

Film Comment - Interview: Jean-Luc Godard

W - Jean-Luc Godard

YouTube: Top 10 JEAN-LUC GODARD Movies, The MOST BEAUTIFUL SHOTS of JEAN LUC GODARD

The First Transit Map: a Close Look at the Subway-Style Tabula Peutingeriana of the 5th-Century Roman Empire

“The first subway train, as we know such things today, entered service in 1890. Its path is now part of the Northern line of the London Underground, itself the first urban metro system. The success of the Tube, as it’s commonly known, didn’t come right away; the whole thing was on the brink of failure, in fact, before creations like 1914’s Wonderground Map of London Town aided its public understanding and bolstered its public image. At the time, Britain still commanded a great empire with London as its capital; the Wonderground Map placed the London Underground in the context of the city, making legible the still fairly novel concept of an underground train system with copious whimsical detail. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

A close-up of the Tabula Peutingeriana.

Ukraine’s surprising counteroffensive forces Russian troops to flee

“A surprise counteroffensive over the weekend saw Ukrainian troops push into areas around Kharkiv in the northeast, liberating villages and cities, and catching Russian troops flat-footed. The swift maneuvers threatened to encircle a portion of the Russian army and led them to rapidly abandon positions and military hardware as Ukrainian troops closed in. The counteroffensive has recaptured around 1,160 square miles of territory since it began in earnest earlier this month, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyy told the Associated Press Sunday. The eastward push caught Russian forces off-guard and forced several units to abandon their posts as Ukrainian troops took control of the strategic cities of Izyum, Balakliia, and Kupiansk — critical areas for the Russian supply and logistics line in the Donbas region. ...”

Vox

Ukraine’s Momentum, Putin’s Fears

NBC News: Ukraine drove Russian forces back with a stunning offensive. What now for Putin's war? (Video)

Guardian: The Guardian view on Ukraine’s counteroffensive: a stunning breakthrough | Editorial

NY Times: Russia’s Retreat in Ukraine Pokes Holes in Putin’s Projection of Force

Ukrainian flag waves after Ukrainian army liberated the town of Balakliya in the southeastern Kharkiv oblast, Ukraine, on September 11, 2022.

​Read Your Way Through Mexico City

“Álvaro Pombo, a Spanish author, came to Mexico City in 2004. He’d written a novel that took place during the religious revolts of early 20th century Mexico, and wanted to know what the country he’d studied in books was like, he said. So he installed himself in a hotel in the city center and went for a walk. He saw the murals of the Palacio Nacional, the Aztec dancers outside the cathedral, the ruins of the Templo Mayor and the skulls alluding to human sacrifice. Later, he toured a street market filled with a baroque assortment of fruit, animals and Chinese goods. ...”

NY Times

“The Angels Rejoiced Last Night” - Gram Parsons / Emmylou Harris

“... Instead, he headed back to Los Angeles late in 1971, spending the rest of the year and the first half of 1972 writing material for an impending solo album. He met Emmylou Harris through Chris Hillman, and Gram Parsons asked her to join his backing band; she accepted. By the summer of 1972, he was prepared to enter the studio to record his first solo album. Parsons had assembled a band -- which included Harris, guitarist James Burton, bassist Rick Grech, Barry Tashian, Glen D. Hardin, and Ronnie Tutt -- and had asked Merle Haggard to produce the album. ...”

Gram Parsons & Emmylou-Harris

YouTube: “The Angels Rejoiced Last Night”

2008 March: Gram Parsons, 2011 March: Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris. Liberty Hall, Texas, 1973, 2012 May: Sweetheart of the Rodeo, 2013 January: Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel, 2013 September: Flying Burrito Brothers - Live At The Avalon Ballroom 1969, 2014 February: The Gilded Palace of Sin - The Flying Burrito Brothers (1969), 2014 March: Burrito Deluxe - The Flying Burrito Brothers (1970), 2014 May: GP (1973), 2014 September: Grievous Angel (1974), 2015 October: Top 10 Gram Parsons Songs, 2016 November: Death of Gram Parsons, 2017 March: Sleepless Nights (1976), 2017 April: The Complete Reprise Sessions (2006)

​Ukraine recaptures territory from Russian forces in Kharkiv

“Ukraine's armed forces have recaptured large swaths of territory and are making ‘significant gains’ against Russia's occupation of the northwest region of Kharkiv, the U.K.'s defense ministry said in an intelligence briefing Sunday. Russian forces have likely ‘withdrawn units from the area,’ but  fighting continues around the strategically important cities of Kupiansk and Izyum, it said in its daily update on the war in Ukraine, posted to Twitter. Ukraine's government claims Russia's retreat from Kharkiv is a major turning point in the six-month-old conflict, as thousands of Russian soldiers abandoned their weapons and ammunition stockpiles to flee the Ukrainian advance, they said....”

NBC News: Ukraine recaptures territory from Russian forces in Kharkiv (Video)

NY Times: Ukrainian Officials Drew on U.S. Intelligence to Plan Counteroffensive

NY Times: The Ukraine War’s Decisive Season | Opinion

NY Times: As Russians Retreat, Putin Is Criticized by Hawks Who Trumpeted His War

A destroyed Russian military vehicle in Balakliya, in the eastern Kharkiv region, on Saturday.

​History of the World Map by Map

“History of the World Map by Map proves that maps don't just show us where to go, but also where we've been. A stunning overview of all human history, side by side with 140 custom maps. This stunning visual reference book starts with the evolution and migration of our oldest ancestors out of Africa. You can then look up maps about the Greece and Persian War, the Mongol Conquests, Medieval Europe's trade routes, and the rise of the Ottomans. There are maps about the colonization of North America, the scientific revolution, Napoleon's advances, and Britain's control of India. There's more in later centuries, like the Age of Imperialism, the American Civil War, industrialized Europe, and the transformation of Japan. ...”

Smithsonian

amazon

YouTube: History of the World Map by Map

​Fall Music Preview ~ Experimental

“The world may often seem stagnant, but as long as there is art, there is hope.  In every field ~ art, music, cinema, literature and more ~ experimentalists test the boundaries of the expected, breaking through to unexplored territories.  Today’s experimental music may become tomorrow’s mainstream, or may not ~ the value is in the searching, striving and finding. Why play the note as it is written?  Why play the note at all?  Is music found only in instruments?  Can the random be considered composed?  These questions and more are tackled by this season’s roster. ...”

a closer listen (Audio/Video)

CLAP. AN ANATOMY OF APPLAUSE | various artists (Audio)

​Russians Retreat as Ukraine Presses Lightning Offensive

“KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces have scored the most significant battlefield gains since they routed Russia from the area around Kyiv in April by reclaiming territory in the northeast, according to Ukrainian officials, Western analysts and battlefield imagery. In his overnight address to the nation Thursday, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the Ukrainian military had captured scores of villages and large chunks of Russian-occupied territory across Ukraine since the offensive began. “In total, more than a thousand square kilometers of the territory of Ukraine have been liberated since the beginning of September,” he said. On Friday the Ukrainian military appeared to be moving rapidly to cut off the city of Izium, a critical logistical hub for Russian military operations. ...”

NY Times: Ukraine Attacks Russia Along Northern Front, Swiftly Making Gains

NY Times: Russia Holds First Elections Since Ukraine Invasion, but Opposition Is Mostly Absent

Aljazeera - Analysis: Russia caught out by Ukraine’s double offensive (Video)

NY Times - Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Is Aaron Judge Going to Banish that Asterisk for Good?

“Aaron Judge, like Hemingway’s definition of a great novelist, competes only with the dead. As we post this piece, Judge leads the league in Home Runs, Runs Batted In, Runs Scored, Total Bases, On-Base Percentage, Slugging Average, and a bunch of other categories that sound like they were invented by characters on The Big Bang Theory. Most spectacular, of course, is the Yankee outfielder’s 55-home-run mark, a whopping 19 dingers ahead of second-place Kyle Schwarber, of the Phillies. Judge is having the kind of season where any stat he’s not leading the league in doesn’t matter. ...”

Voice - Allen Barra

***All of Aaron Judge’s Homers, From 1 to __ : NY Times (Video)

Roger Maris has been immortalized for hitting 61 homers in ’61. Is Aaron Judge going to blast past that record – wait for it – 61 years later?

 

 

East Harlem “El Barrio”

“... Little Italy, Spanish Harlem, El Barrio. East Harlem runs from 96th St up to 143rd St from the east side of Fifth Avenue to the Harlem River. ... It was Manhattan’s first Little Italy and the political base for legendary New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. The Italian community largely moved on in the 1980s. The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Dancing of the Giglio are remnants of Italian East Harlem.  Part of East Harlem became ‘Spanish Harlem’ after World War 1 (1914-1918). ... Like most of New York City, El Barrio was a tough neighborhood in the 1970s. But it also birthed community movements as young people turned from running gangs to running social programs. ...”

East Harlem “El Barrio”

2011 November: Charlie Palmieri, 2014 October: Fania at Fifty, 2017 December: Nu Yorica: Culture Clash In New York City - Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77, 2018 December: Latin Underground Revolution: Swinging Boogaloo, Guaguanco, Salsa & Latin Funk from New York City 1967-1978, 2017 June: Eddie Palmieri - Unfinished Masterpiece (1976), 2018 July: The Soul Of Spanish Harlem / El Barrio: Sounds from the Spanish Harlem Streets, 2011 June: Mario Bauzá, 2017 June: Rhythm & Power: Salsa in New York, 2012 February: Rubén Blades, 2017 December: Carlos Vera: Barcelona's Boogaloo: Mixes and Mashups, 2019 April: An NYC Mambo, Boogaloo and Salsa Family Tree, 2021 February: Fania Records, 2022 January: East Harlem/Spanish Harlem/El Barrio

Mural in El Barrio East Harlem, NYC at 1645 Lexington at 104th St 

As Crises Mount, Europe Turns Once Again to Big Spending

“BRUSSELS — Nationalizations. Subsidies. Cash handouts. Price caps. Profit taxes. It’s back to 20th-century economics in Europe. Governments are resorting to old-school solutions, long dismissed as bad policy, throwing vast amounts of money at the energy crisis engulfing the region, in a bid to avert a political, social and economic meltdown. The standoff with Russia over Ukraine is upturning European economic orthodoxy at rapid speed with barely a peep of dissent at the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels, a bastion of neoliberalism that not so long ago imposed brutal austerity on its own members, most notably Greece, even after it became clear it was harmful. ...”

NY Times

Guardian: Russia sends reinforcements to Kharkiv to repel Ukraine counterattack

Aljazeera: Zelenskyy announces breakthrough in Ukraine’s east and south (Video)

GRID: Who will win the ammunition war in Ukraine? Russia is buying shells from North Korea; the U.S. is burning through its stockpile of weapons.

Ukrainian servicemen work inside a Polish 155 mm self-propelled tracked gun-howitzer Krab at a position on the front line in the Donetsk region on Aug. 29.

​Fishermen Carrying a Drowned Man by Jozef Israëls, 1861

“The crushed and hopeless forms of the people bringing home a fisherman drowned in his daily work are darkly framed against greyness in this compassionate scene of life and death by the North Sea. Dutch painter Israëls spent time living in Zandvoort, a fishing village near Haarlem in the Netherlands, before painting it in his Amsterdam studio. The closeness and common pain of the figures makes us feel the sorrow of an entire community. It is as if they have all drowned. The burden of grief won’t lift lightly. And beyond are the sea and sky, featureless, endless.”

National Gallery

The Slits – Typical Girls/I Heard It Through The Grapevine (1979)

“Following on from the more recent spiky, punky, dubby sound of MIA’s ‘Paper Planes’, we have this classic from proto riot girrrls The Slits. Their take on ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine‘ (Motown’s lament about ‘the rumor mill that swirls around a cheating lover‘) has been described as ‘the gold standard in violently recontextualized punk covers’ and ‘transcendent’. The song is memorable by virtue of it doing what all the best covers surely should: radically reinterpreting a song (a classic in its own right in this case, though I’d suggest it doesn’t have to be) and making it into something new. Apart from the genre shift, Ari’s vocal twists and ingenious insertion of ‘I heard it through the bassline’ at one point in the song give it a life of its own. Meanwhile, the lack of change in terms of heterosexist and standard gender appropriate alterations is refreshing. ...”

the f_word (Video)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Typical Girls, I Heard It Through The Grapevine, I've heard it through the Grapevine (Live)

2010 October: Ari Up (17 January 1962 – 20 October 2010), 2012 July: Subatomic Sound System meets Lee Scratch Perry & Ari Up of the Slits (7″ vinyl), 2014 September: Live in Cincinnati and San Francisco 1980, 2015 August: Return Of The Giant Slits (1981/2007), 2016 July: "Man Next Door" - Berlin 1981, 2021 April: Avant Gardening - New Age Steppers (2021)

​‘We have already lost’: far-right Russian bloggers slam military failures

“’The war in Ukraine will continue until the complete defeat of Russia,’ Igor Girkin, a far-right nationalist, grumbled in a video address to his 430,000 followers on Telegram on Monday. ‘We have already lost, the rest is just a matter of time.’ Girkin, a former Russian intelligence colonel who became a commander of the pro-Russian separatist forces in 2014, is arguably the most prominent voice within an increasingly loud and angry group of ultra-nationalist and pro-war bloggers who have taken to berating the Kremlin for its failure to achieve its tactical objectives as the fighting in Ukraine has entered its seventh month. ...”

Guardian

BBC: Zelensky hails 'good news' as settlements recaptured from Russia

NBC News: Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians forced to Russia, U.S. says (Video)

BBC - Nord Stream 1: How Russia is cutting gas supplies to Europe

Russia has cut the amount of gas it sends to Europe by shutting the key Nord Stream 1 pipeline for the second time in recent months, saying the closure is necessary to allow repairs.

 

​Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool have lost their identity

“A crestfallen Jurgen Klopp walked across to the travelling Kop inside Stadio Diego Armando Maradona after the final whistle and held his hands up apologetically. ... Liverpool have given their supporters so many memories to cherish with their European exploits during Klopp’s reign. Last season, they became the first club in Champions League history to win all six away matches en route to the final in Paris. Yet the contrast between the team that dug deep to fight for glory on all fronts and the one that was humiliated by the rampant Serie A side on Wednesday could hardly be greater. Rarely has a team fallen so far, so quickly. ...”

The Athletic