“Bob Dylan was said to have had a mind like a sponge in the late 1950s and early ’60s as he soaked up all he could from live gigs and borrowed records. All the while, a filing cabinet with his beloved folk forebears’ chord patterns and lyrics would begin to manifest itself in the hardwiring of his marvellous brain. Dylan’s particular interest in Woody Guthrie would draw him from Minneapolis to New York in the early 1960s. During his early months of couch surfing and gig wrangling, Dylan managed to meet and befriend his idol in the final years of his life. He would sit at Guthrie’s bedside, where he was tragically dying from Huntington’s disease, and play some of his songs to him. One of these was the touching tribute, ‘Song to Woody’, which based its core structure on Guthrie’s song, ‘1939 Massacre’. ...”
Russians believe they can win the war. Here are 3 reasons why.
“Ukraine’s recent military offensives have upended many people’s expectations of how Russia’s invasion will end. Western supporters have been pleasantly surprised by Ukraine’s successes east of Kharkiv. That is nothing, however, compared to the complete surprise of Russian observers. As Ukraine recaptured more territory in two weeks than Russia had gained in six months, Russian television was littered with analysts attempting to cope in real time with the cognitive dissonance of failure. Russian shock at the country’s reversals on the battlefield is unsurprising. Russian experts have inculcated a fair number of myths about the war and the broader state of the world in the seven months since the start of war. As Columbia political scientist Jack Snyder noted in his book Myths of Empire, self-serving nationalist stories that make territorial conquest sound easy are common in regimes that mix elements of autocracy and democracy. ...”
People walk past billboards displaying Russian soldiers with a slogan reading “Glory to the Heroes of Russia” on a street in Moscow on August 24, 2022.
Sátántangó - Béla Tarr (1994)
J. Hoberman: “Like a science-fiction time traveler or the radio character Chandu the Magician, Satantango is an entity with multiple—or at least two—coequal manifestations, a monument of late-twentieth-century cinema and a modern Hungarian literary classic. There is Satantango the mind-boggling seven-and-a-half-hour movie by director Béla Tarr, and there is Satantango the legendary novel by the movie’s screenwriter László Krasznahorkai, published in 1985 but only now translated into English. How does one distinguish between these entities—and should one dare? Let’s begin by acknowledging the unique creative partnership forged by Tarr and Krasznahorkai in the last decade of goulash communism, a period during which even party apparatchiks were pleased to joke that Hungary was the merriest bunker in the camp, and also note that, mocking the futility of collective enterprise and the vanity of Great Works, each Tango is an exemplary exercise in anti-Socialist dirty Realism. ...”
Pharoah Sanders, Jazz Saxophonist Great, Has Passed Away At The Age of 81
“Pharoah Sanders, the jazz saxophonist who worked closely with John Coltrane and was a pioneer of the avant-garde movement, has died. He was 81 years old. No one played the tenor saxophone quite like Pharoah Sanders. When he blew his horn, it was as if he was a dragon breathing fire. He played it so loudly and with such a fierce intensity that what came out of his horn was a startlingly eerie howl, like a hurricane crossed with a flame-thrower; a sound that had a brawny and burning physical presence and yet oozed a sense of deep spirituality. ...”
2015 December: Maleem Mahmoud Ghania With Pharaoh Sanders - The Trance Of Seven Colors (1994), 2016 January: Ptah, The El Daoud - Alice Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders (1970), 2016 November: Tauhid (1967), 2017 May: The Pharoah Sanders Story: In the Beginning 1963-1964, 2017 November: Let Us Now Praise Pharoah Sanders, Master of Sax, 2018 February: Anthology: You've Got to Have Freedom - Pharoah Sanders (2005), 2018 February: James Blood Ulmer & Pharoah Sanders - Live 2003, 2018 May: How Pharoah Sanders Brought Jazz to Its Spiritual Peak with His Impulse! Albums, 2019 January: Africa (1987), 2021 December: Promises - Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, 2022 January: Live In Paris (1975) (Lost ORTF Recordings)
Ukraine war: Russia reveals exemptions as men flee call-up
“Russia's defence ministry has revealed a host of occupations it says will be exempted from conscription aimed at boosting its war effort in Ukraine. IT workers, bankers and journalists working for state media will escape the ‘partial mobilisation’ announced by President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. Around 300,000 citizens face being called up as part of the drive. The move has prompted a rush towards borders as young men attempt to flee to evade the draft. Announcing the exemptions on Friday, Russia defence ministry said employers must compile a list of workers who meet the criteria and submit it to its offices. But it accepted some sectors had to be excluded to ‘ensure the work of specific high-tech industries, as well as Russia's financial system’. ...”
Ukrainian soldiers at an entrenched position this month near the Kherson front.
The World Cup’s Carnival Comes at a Cost
"The good news is that it’s a yes from the gigantic, fire-breathing spider. It is hard, after all, to imagine a World Cup without its finest tradition: 50 tons of decommissioned crane arranged into the shape of a monstrous arachnid, pumped full of highly flammable fuel and then stocked with hopefully less flammable D.J.s. The spider will form the centerpiece of one of the cultural highlights of this winter’s World Cup in Qatar: a monthlong electronic music festival called the Arcadia Spectacular, staged just south of Doha and boasting what the promotional material calls an 'electrifying atmosphere, extraordinary sculpted stages and the most immersive shows on earth.' ..."
Mario Vargas Llosa on Looking Back, a Novel of Never-Ending War That Resists Easy Answers
By Mario Vargas Llosa: “The novel, Looking Back by Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vázquez, which has won a major literary prize in Mexico, will have many readers. It is one of the great novels to have been written in Spanish and its author tells us that the events it portrays also occurred in real life, making its writing challenging. No more nor less challenging than a made-up tale, I believe, since telling ‘true’ stories, as many novels do, neither increases nor lessens the effort required to write them.The challenge is to tell them so that they seem like fiction, which is what readers always ask of novels. ...”
U.N. experts find that war crimes have been committed in Ukraine.
“GENEVA — Russian soldiers have raped and tortured children in Ukraine, a United Nations-appointed panel of independent legal experts said in a damning statement on Friday that concluded war crimes had been committed in the conflict. A three-person Commission of Inquiry set up in April to investigate the conduct of hostilities in four areas of Ukraine laid out the graphic allegations in an unusually hard-hitting, 11-minute statement to the U.N Human Rights Council in Geneva. ‘The commission has documented cases in which children have been raped, tortured, and unlawfully confined,’ the panel’s chairman, Erik Mose, told the council. ‘Children have also been killed and injured in indiscriminate attacks with explosive weapons. The exposure to repeated explosions, crimes, forced displacement and separation from family members deeply affected their well-being and mental health.’ ...”
NBC News: Russian-occupied regions in Ukraine begin staged votes as the Kremlin denies reports of men fleeing partial mobilization (Video)
A United Nations-appointed panel of independent legal experts said Russian soldiers raped and tortured children, executed civilians and attacked without distinguishing between civilians and combatants.
Abiodun Oyewole – One of the First Last Poets – Talks About Legacy, and Hip Hop
"A founding member of the American music and spoken-word group The Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole is also known as a founding father of hip hop. ... Samples of 'On the Subway,' from the same album, have been used by Digable Planets. The list goes on. Oyewole was born Charles Davis, in Cincinnati, but grew up in Queens and regularly attended church in Harlem, a place of congregation, inspiration, and social measurement. His mother encouraged him to recite The Lord’s Prayer at such volume that he could be heard throughout the family home. ...”
Duet Emmo – Or So It Seems (1982)
“... This issue of art versus commerce is especially pertinent to Or So It Seems because the members of Duet Emmo have pedigrees that should concern any fan of modern, post-punk music. Graham Lewis and Bruce Gilbert were from the seminal post-punk innovators Wire. In 1982, Wire were in the midst of an indefinite hiatus brought on by a lack of commercial success and the loss of their record deal, and Lewis and Gilbert were recording under the name Dome. ...”
YouTube: Or So It Seems 1 / 9
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, 2022 May: Wire Reveal Official Release Of Old Bootleg, 'Not About To Die'
‘They Are Watching’: Inside Russia’s Vast Surveillance State
"Four days into the war in Ukraine, Russia’s expansive surveillance and censorship apparatus was already hard at work. Roughly 800 miles east of Moscow, authorities in the Republic of Bashkortostan, one of Russia’s 85 regions, were busy tabulating the mood of comments in social media messages. They marked down YouTube posts that they said criticized the Russian government. They noted the reaction to a local protest. Then they compiled their findings. One report about the ‘destabilization of Russian society’ pointed to an editorial from a news site deemed ‘oppositional’ to the government that said President Vladimir V. Putin was pursuing his own self-interest by invading Ukraine. A dossier elsewhere on file detailed who owned the site and where they lived. ...”
New York attorney general files civil fraud lawsuit against Trump, some of his children and his business
“The New York state attorney general filed a sweeping lawsuit Wednesday against former President Donald Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they were involved in an expansive fraud lasting over a decade that the former President used to enrich himself. In the more than 200-page lawsuit, Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, alleges the fraud touched all aspects of the Trump business, including its properties and golf courses. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organization deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the value of his properties using misleading appraisals. ...”
All of Aaron Judge’s Homers, From 1 to 60
“After hitting his 60th home run of the season on Tuesday, Aaron Judge went for 61 at home on Wednesday in a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates. He didn’t go deep, but he did double twice and he scored two runs in a blowout win. As Judge pursues the Yankees’ single-season home run record — every non-Yankee who has hit at least 60 home runs has been connected to performance-enhancing drugs — we are tracking his progress against where Roger Maris was at in 1961 (when he hit 61) and where Babe Ruth was at in 1927 (when he hit 60). ...”
Ukraine at UN: We need a Nuremberg-style war crimes trial
“NEW YORK — As world leaders gather for the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Ukraine’s government hopes to use the event to press its case for a special tribunal to prosecute war crimes. With the war in Ukraine set to dominate proceedings, and new evidence of mass killings emerging in recent days, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration sees a window of opportunity to turn global diplomatic opinion. It wants backing for a Nuremberg-style trial to be established to investigate atrocities committed by Russian troops. The discovery of more than 450 bodies in mass graves in Izium in the East of the country last week as Ukrainian forces moved in on Russian-held territory has bolstered Ukraine’s case. Zelenskyy has said there is evidence of torture, branding Russia a ‘state sponsor of terrorism,’ with Oleg Synegubov, head of Kharkiv’s regional administration, stating that bodies were found with hands tied behind their backs. Several news agencies confirmed the reports during a visit to the site organized by Ukrainian authorities on Friday. ...”
United Nations
54 Dance Programs, Festivals and More Coming This Fall
“Compared to the strange, transformative exhilaration of last fall’s return to live performance, this season’s dance calendar feels both more abundant and more introspective. Many presenters are back to their pre-shutdown schedules and are once again able to welcome an array of international performers; many dance artists are only beginning to reckon with the fallout of the pandemic and other global crises, exploring themes of grief and upheaval. ...”
The choreographer Yvonne Rainer, here in 1982, says that her new dance, which will have its premiere at New York Live Arts in October, will be her last.
Terrance Hayes’s Soundtracks for Most Any Occasion
“When we asked Terrance Hayes to make a playlist for you, our readers, he wrote us a poem. Of course he did. As Hayes told Hilton Als in his Art of Poetry interview in our new Fall issue, formal constraints offer him ‘a way to get free.’ Many of Hayes’s poems derive their titles from song names and lyrics; others are influenced by the mood of a particular album or track. Music, he tells Als, ‘changes the air in the room.’ This particular playlist-poem has a track for almost any kind of air—or room—you might find yourself in this week. Read and listen to ‘Occasional Soundtracks’ below. ...”
Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Forces Face Mobilized Inmates and Drones
“BAKHMUT, Ukraine — In battlefields in the rolling hills of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, and near the Black Sea in the south, Ukrainian troops have stubbornly tried to inch forward without losing control of territory, facing an opponent whose forces have been bolstered by inmates-turned-fighters and by Iranian drones. ’Perhaps it seems to someone now that after a series of victories we have a certain lull,’ President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his nightly address Sunday. ‘But this is not a lull. This is preparation for the next sequence.’ Over the weekend, Ukraine’s Army built up the pressure in the country’s south, with forces striking Russian military strongholds and targeting sites used by local officials loyal to the Kremlin. They are also continuing to hit the supply lines for thousands of Russian soldiers on the western bank of the Dnipro River. Ukraine’s strikes in the important Russian-held city of Kherson seemed to rattle security there, with firefights and broad disorder reported. ...”
Guardian: Footage released by Ukraine purports to show shelling at nuclear plant in Pivdennoukrainsk (Video)
A Ukrainian soldier in front of a hotel in Kramatorsk on Sunday. It was struck by a Russian missile overnight.
Floridita - Havana, Cuba
“Floridita or El Floridita is a historic fish restaurant and cocktail bar in the older part of Havana (La Habana Vieja), Cuba. It lies at the end of Calle Obispo (Bishop Street), across Monserrate Street from the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana (Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana). The establishment is famous for its daiquiris and for having been one of the favourite hangouts of Ernest Hemingway in Havana. ... The establishment was frequented by many generations of Cuban and foreign intellectuals and artists. Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, and Graham Greene, the British novelist who wrote Our Man in Havana, were also frequent customers. ...”
The roses in the window guards outside an East 51st Street townhouse
“Sometimes you come across a New York row house with enchanting, floral-inspired window guards and railings, like the Art Nouveau iron grilles outside this Riverside Drive townhouse. There’s also the iron blooms on the balconies of the Chelsea Hotel, and the tangle of vines that make up the iron railings outside the front windows of J.P. Morgan’s former mansion in Murray Hill. But equally beautiful are the wrought-iron roses and rose leafs decorating the oval window guards on the ground floor of 331 East 51st Street (above, top)—a five-story elegant townhouse between First and Second Avenues in Turtle Bay. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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....”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ..."
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. ...”
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. ...”
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.’ ...”
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....”
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. ...”
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.
