​JMW Turner: Dark Waters review – death and despair in a prison of Arctic ice

"'Hurrah for the whaler Erebus! Another fish!’ That’s the cry that comes from a crowd of ecstatic men in boats on a mirror-still sea, captured in Turner’s 1846 masterpiece that takes its title from their exclamation. You look for the fish and see the huge grey head of a whale suspended against yellow light, under the partly furled sails of a ghostly vessel. But something is wrong. The hysterical celebration is desperate. The water is becalmed, the air frozen and dead. These whalers are trapped in pack ice, still slaughtering their prey when they may never escape their remote prison. Dark Waters is an exhibition of nautical ghost stories, a collection of sinister shanties and tales told by old salts in dockside pubs. ...”

Guardian

Tate: How to Paint Like Turner (Video)

November 2007: J. M. W. Turner, 2009 April: Turner & Italy, 2011 June: J. M. W. Turner - 1, 2014 June: In Which We Find His Theory Of Color Implausible, 2014 September: The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free, 2015 May: Mr. Turner (2014), 2018 November: The Slave Ship (1840), 2018 December: Turner and Constable: The Inhabited Landscape, 2020 September: The Fighting Temeraire -  (1838)

Something is wrong. The hysterical celebration is desperate … Hurrah! for the Whaler Erebus! Another Fish! (1846)

​Ukrainian forces perform victory dance after liberating eastern city of Lyman

"Russia suffered a humiliating military defeat on Saturday when Ukrainian troops liberated the key eastern city of Lyman, with videos showing them raising a blue and yellow national flag and performing a victory dance. In a severe embarrassment for Vladimir Putin, Russia’s ministry of defence admitted its soldiers had retreated. They had been ‘withdrawn to more advantageous lines’, the ministry said, after their encirclement by Ukrainian forces. The debacle came hours after Putin announced on Friday that the city, which is a part of the Donetsk region, was Russia’s ‘for ever’. In a ceremony in the Kremlin he announced the province’s annexation, together with the territories of Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. ...”

Guardian (Video)

NY Times: Panic, Bribes, Ditched Cars and a Dash on Foot: Portraits of Flight From Russia

NY Times: Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman - Putin Is Trying to Outcrazy the West

NY Times: With Bluster and Threats, Putin Casts the West as the Enemy (Video)

New Yorker: What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia?

YouTube: Russia forces ‘encircled’ in Lyman, Ukraine's nuclear plant director detained

We’re Still Living in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

“’I want to immerse myself,’ says one character in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, ‘in American magic and dread.’ Plenty of novels capture American dread, but few understand its relationship to American magic as well as White Noise. Ahead of Netflix’s adaptation of the novel, it’s worth revisiting DeLillo’s masterpiece, which remains one of our most perceptive visions of contemporary America and the desperate illusions of consumer society. ... White Noise confronts the problem faced by every novelist who tries to depict the United States: the strangeness of our society defies the conventions of literary realism. ...”

Jacobin

2021 May: Don DeLillo

​Eight Essential Releases by Detroit Producer Apollo Brown

"In order to master the art of sampling, an artist has to employ a variety of skill sets. In addition to the technical ability required to chop, loop, and filter the source material, they also need the deep knowledge of records that can only be acquired from years of crate-digging, as well as a hefty amount of imagination and taste required for creative sampling. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, veteran hip-hop producer Apollo Brown cut his teeth in Detroit’s storied hip-hop scene. Today, Brown is part of a vanguard of underground hip-hop producers who make samples from old records soar. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Putin Frames Illegal Annexation as Part of Existential Battle With West

Putin’s speech on annexation paints a stark picture of a face-off with the West: “President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday asserted that Russia would take control of four Ukrainian regions and decried the United States for ‘Satanism’ in a speech that marked an escalation in Moscow’s war against Ukraine and positioned Russia, in starkly confrontational terms, as fighting an existential battle with Western elites he deemed ‘the enemy.’ Speaking to hundreds of Russian lawmakers and governors in a grand Kremlin hall, Mr. Putin said that the residents of the four regions — which are still partially controlled by Ukrainian forces — would become Russia’s citizens ‘forever.’ He then held a signing ceremony with the Russian-installed heads of those regions to start the official annexation process, before clasping hands with them and chanting ‘Russia! Russia!’ ...”

NY Times (Video)

Guardian: Putin’s annexation speech: more angry taxi driver than head of state (Video)

Putin Compounds His Bad Decisions

****NY Times - Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

BBC - Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia

​Deep Emotion, Plain Speech: Camus’s The Plague

“The Plague was not an easy book to write. Camus was ill when he began it, then trapped by the borders keeping him in Nazi-occupied France. Aside from these difficulties, there was the pressure of authentically speaking up about the violence of World War II without falling into the nationalist heroics he deplored. Like with most problems in art, the solution was to address it directly: in one of the most revelatory sections of the novel, the character Tarrou blurs the line between fancy rhetoric and violence. ...”

The Paris Review

2011 October: Albert Camus on Nihilism, 2014 November: Albert Camus: Soccer Goalie, 2015 May: LISTEN: New Cave And Ellis Soundtrack, 2016 April: Anarchism and Friedrich Nietzsche, 2016 April: Algerian Chronicles (2013), 2017 November: The Stranger (1942), 2018 July: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960), 2019 September: Les Pieds-Noirs: Algeria’s Forgotten Footballers, 2020 March: The Plague (1947), 2020 September: An Animated Introduction to Albert Camus’ Existentialism, a Philosophy Making a Comeback in Our Dysfunctional Times, 2021 October: Albert Camus on the Responsibility of the Artist: To “Create Dangerously” (1957), 2022 May: Albert Camus: The philosopher who resisted despair

Mur de la Peste, Lagnes.

 

Reds - Warren Beatty (1981)

"Reds is a 1981 American epic historical drama film, co-written, produced, and directed by Warren Beatty, about the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who chronicled the October Revolution in Russia in his 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World. Beatty stars in the lead role alongside Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill. The supporting cast includes Edward Herrmann, Jerzy Kosiński, Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton, Gene Hackman, Ramon Bieri, Nicolas Coster, and M. Emmet Walsh. The film also features, as ‘witnesses’, interviews with the 98-year-old radical educator and peace activist Scott Nearing, author Dorothy Frooks, reporter and author George Seldes, civil liberties advocate Roger Baldwin, and the American writer Henry Miller, among others. ...”

Wikipedia

Jacobin: Forty Years Later, Reds Is Still One of the Best Films Ever Made About Revolutionary Politics

Guardian: Reds wins votes left, right and centre

amazon

YouTube: Reds (1981) Trailer

Russia to formally annex four more areas of Ukraine

“Russia's Vladimir Putin will hold a signing ceremony on Friday to annex four more areas of Ukraine after self-styled referendums condemned by Ukraine and the West as a sham. Russian-backed officials had earlier claimed the five-day exercise secured almost total popular support. So-called votes were held in Luhansk and Donetsk in the east, and in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south. The Russian president will make a major speech at the Kremlin. A stage has already been set up in Moscow's Red Square, with billboards proclaiming the four regions as part of Russia and a concert planned for the evening. ...”

BBC

Guardian: Putin’s annexation of parts of Ukraine is a critical moment for the world

Aljazeera: New York Times reveals details of Russian soldiers’ calls (Video)

NY Times: Pentagon Plans to Set Up a New Command to Arm Ukraine, Officials Say

Four Ukrainian regions under Russian occupation are being annexed: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson

​All of Aaron Judge’s Homers, From 1 to 61

“Aaron Judge matched Babe Ruth’s 1927 season by hitting his 60th home run of the season on Sept. 20. After seven long games without going deep, he tied Roger Maris’s American League record by hitting his 61st homer of the season on Wednesday against the Blue Jays at Rogers Centre in Toronto. ... After a stretch of seven games without a home run, Judge finally did it, crushing a ball into the left field bullpen at Rogers Centre in Toronto to tie Roger Maris’s American League record, set in 1961. ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times: 61 Homers! Aaron Judge Ties Roger Maris With Another Monster Blast. (Video)

NY Times: Maris Would Be ‘Tickled to Death’ to Be Matched by Judge

NY Times: ‘It’s the Stuff You Dream About. It’s Not Even Real.

 

​The Bronze Age Collapse - Mediterranean Apocalypse

“Around the year 1100 BC, a wave of destruction washed over the Eastern Mediterranean. It wiped whole civilizations off the map, and left only ash and ruin in its wake. This catastrophe, known as ‘the Late Bronze Age Collapse’, has become one of the enduring puzzles of history. I want to explore how so many societies could collapse all at once, and seemingly without warning, as well as examine the lessons it might teach us in our increasingly globalised and interconnected world.”

Soundcloud (Audio)

2020 September: Roman Britain - The Work of Giants Crumbled

​The Nord Stream pipeline leak was an act of ‘sabotage’: Who might have done it, why, and what happens next?

“It’s a mystery worthy of a Cold War-era spy novel: A pair of critical natural gas supply lines linking Russia to Europe are hit by unexplained underwater explosions in the Baltic Sea. The culprit is unknown, as is the precise cause. There are accusations of sabotage and fears for the environment, as the ruptures send giant bubbles of methane to the surface of waters off the Danish and Swedish coasts. Theories abound about who might have done it and why, as do fears about what the explosions could mean for Europe and for Russia. Except this isn’t fiction. Late on Monday, seismic stations in Sweden, Norway and Finland detected the detonations in the Baltic; it soon became clear that two pipelines that bring Russian natural gas supplies to Europe had been damaged. Known as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, the pipelines run from Russia to Germany. ...”

GRID

Nord Stream: were gas pipeline 1 and 2 leaks sabotage, is Russia to blame, map - and explosions explained

NY Times - ‘Putin Is a Fool’: Intercepted Calls Reveal Russian Army in Disarray  (Audio)

BBC - Ukraine war: Inside Bakhmut, the battered Donbas city holding off Putin's troops

Chano Pozo – El Tambor De Cuba (2001)

“It is a truism that the African elements in jazz's rhythmic language are often delivered with a Hispanic accent. In New Orleans, regarded by many as the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean, as well as in Cuba, slaves and former slaves from West Africa maintained their percussion traditions, mixing ritual drumming with other elements from Spanish music. ... But no event was more significant, or more fruitful, for jazz's Latin tinge than Dizzy Gillespie's hiring, in 1947, of the great Cuban conga drummer Luciano (Chano) Pozo, a fiery, electrifying performer and composer who was, arguably, more responsible than any other musician for establishing the playing field for Afro-Cuban jazz and, later, what became known as salsa. ... Now a three-CD set, ''Chano Pozo: El Tambor de Cuba'' (Tumbao Cuban Classics TCD 305), charts the career of the elusive Pozo and, along the way, illustrates the connection between American jazz, African rhythms and Cuban music in fascinating detail and with undeniable authority. ...”

NY Times: From a Fiery Conga Player, Jazz's Latin Tinge

Blue Sounds (Audio)

Discogs, amazon

YouTube: Luciano Chano Pozo - Nagüe (Rumba afro), Cubana be - Cubana bop (Cubop)

​Camera Lucida – Roland Barthes (1980)

“Camera Lucida (French: La chambre claire) is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes’ late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the ‘spectrum’). In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. ...”

Wikipedia

Roland Barthes: excerpts from ‘Camera Lucida’, 1980

Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida: Photography and Modernism

amazom

2010 March: Roland Barthes, 2014 March: Semiotext(e), 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2016 December: Can We Criticize Foucault?, 2017 June: The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left, 2017 November: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977), 2022 June: Mythologies (1957)

​World in Photos: Russians stand up to Putin over Ukraine mobilization – ‘Stop the war!’

“It’s been less than a week since Vladimir Putin made his bombshell announcement of a ‘partial mobilization’ of Russians to enlist for the fight in Ukraine. But these five days have already sparked more unrest than Russia saw in the seven months prior, since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Today’s photos capture some of the fury — from Moscow to St. Petersburg to the southwestern city of Voronezh. There have also been protests in farther-flung regions of Russia — in Dagestan in particular, where more than 100 people were arrested in the regional capital Makhachkala, according to the monitor group OVD-Info, and where some people have charged the Kremlin with singling out ethnic minorities. Dagestan is a largely Muslim region that has already seen a higher rate of casualties in Ukraine than any other. In one village Sunday, women protested against the call-up. ...”

GRID

NY Times: For a Deaf Family in Ukraine, the Bombs Came Without Warning

Aljazeera - Nord Stream pipeline leaks: What happened, what’s the impact? (Video)

Aljazeera: Russians flock to Georgia, again, as Putin escalates war (Video)

NY Times: Opinion | Russians Are Terrified and Have Nowhere to Turn

An activist participates in an unsanctioned protest Sept. 21 on Arbat Street in Moscow. The sign, playing off the word mobilization, translates to 'No burialization.'

​Ghosts of New York’s Glamorous Past Haunt an Empty Pub

“There’s an old Irish pub in Manhattan’s financial district, Jim Brady’s, that closed at the start of the pandemic and has been sitting empty ever since. The stockbrokers and construction workers who once drank there now walk past with indifference. But peer through the sooty windows and you’ll see a relic of glamorous midcentury New York — a mahogany bar adorned with floral carvings that is said to have belonged to the Stork Club, a fabled nightspot whose customers included Grace Kelly, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, J. Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe and members of the Roosevelt and Kennedy families. ...”

NY Times

W - Stork Club

​Has Henry James Put Me in This Mood?

“Ted Berrigan was the first in the circle of poets around the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church to ask me to design an announcement mailer for one of his readings. He encouraged others to do the same. In the late sixties, I designed a number of flyers and covers for mimeographed poetry books. These gave me the first public exposure for my work. Ted and I saw one another off and on for about five years. In the spring of 1970, we lived together on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, until June, when Ted went to teach a course in Buffalo. I moved into the artists Rudy Burckhardt and Yvonne Jacquette’s loft on East Fourteenth Street while they summered in Maine. ...”

The Paris Review

2011 January: Ted Berrigan - Two prose poems, 2011 September: Public Access Poetry, 2011 November: Twenty-Four Sonnets (1971), 2012 June: Recovering "Memorial Day", 2014 January: In Which He Could Visit Her And Did Not Need To Write

Collage made as a proposed cover for “Memorial Day,” a long poem by Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan.

​Two Cities, Two Armies: Pivot Points in the Fight in Ukraine’s East

“DONETSK REGION, Ukraine—The Ukrainian soldier walked to the edge of the river, looked toward the sound of artillery in the distance and cast his fishing rod toward the murky green water below. His nonchalance on Ukraine’s front line close to the eastern city of Lyman was telling: His comrades nearby were winning. To the southeast, less than 30 miles away, a group of Ukrainian soldiers, rifles slung and helmets donned, moved cautiously to the wreckage of a destroyed bridge in the center of another city — Bakhmut. The high pitched whistle of a Russian artillery round, followed by a plume of dirt and smoke nearby, sent just as telling a signal: The Russians were pounding away, and getting close. The battle for the critical Donbas region in Ukraine’s east is now centered on these two strategically important cities; the fighting is fierce as both armies race to claim new ground before winter sets in. ...”

NY Times

NBC News: Gunman fires at draft office in Russia amid growing anger over Putin's mobilization (Video)

NBC News: U.S. warns Russia of 'catastrophic' consequences if it uses nuclear weapons (Video)

BBC - Ukraine war: Russia admits mobilisation errors, amid growing public opposition (Video)

The Russian authorities say 300,000 army reservists will be called - but media reports suggest the figure could be much higher

​Lester Bangs – Free Jazz / Punk Rock (1980)

“In a New York City nightclub, a skinny little Caucasian whose waterfall hairstyle and set of snout and lips make him look like a sullen anteater takes the stage, backed up by a couple of guitarists, bass, horn section, drummer and bongos. Most of his back-up is black, and they know their stuff: it's pure James Brown funk, with just enough atonal accents to throw you off. The trombone player, in fact, looks familiar, and sounds amazing: you look a bit closer, and of course, that's Joseph Bowie, bother of Lester, both of them avant-garde jazzmen of repute. ...”

Not Bored

2008 August: Lester Bangs, 2010 April: Creem, 2012 November: Astral Weeks by Lester Bangs, 2016 February: Mainlines, Blood Feasts, And Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader (2003)

​Isolated vocals from ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ by Bob Dylan

“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’. ...”

FAR OUT (Video)

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. ...”

VOX

The Russian Obscenity

Guardian - ‘A way to get rid of us’: Crimean Tatars decry Russia’s mobilisation

The Guardian view on pursuing crimes against humanity: a laborious yet urgent challenge | Editorial

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. ...”

BOOKFORUM

W - Sátántangó

Satantango Review

amazon

YouTube: Sátántangó | Trailer, Video Essay: "Orders of Time and Motion" | Béla Tarr's SÁTÁNTANGÓ  19:30

2012 January: The Man from London, 2012 January: The Turin Horse, 2022 September: Damnation (1988)

​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. ...”

udiscover (Video)

NY Times: Pharoah Sanders, Whose Saxophone Was a Force of Nature, Dies at 81

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’. ...”

BBC (Video)

Guardian: Russians occupying Kharkiv region demanded personal data in return for food

Aljazeera: What if Vladimir Putin used nuclear weapons in Ukraine? (Video)

NY Times: In Ukraine’s South, Fierce Fighting and Deadly Costs

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.' ..."

NY Times

Guardian: What do Qatar’s World Cup workers fear most? Being sent home

Guardian: Migrant workers in Qatar left in debt after being ordered home before World Cup starts

Athletes, Fans Demand Remedy for Migrant Worker Abuses in Qatar

​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. ...”

LitHub

W - Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Guardian - A life in writing: Juan Gabriel Vásquez

 

​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.’ ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times: Ukraine War Comes Home to Russians as Putin Imposes Draft (Video)

NY Times: On a Corpse’s Wrist, an Emblem of Ukrainian Fortitude

NBC News: Russian-occupied regions in Ukraine begin staged votes as the Kremlin denies reports of men fleeing partial mobilization (Video)

The Weakness of the Strongman

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. ...”

Voice

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. ...”

Duet Emmo’s ‘Or So It Seems’ Is a Testament to Analog Electronic Music (Audio)

W - Or So It Seems

Discogs (Video)

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. ...”

NY Times

Guardian: Putin flirts again with grim prospect of nuclear war – this time he might mean it

The Intercept_: Russians Return to Streets to Protest Widening of Putin’s War on Ukraine (Video)

NY Times: Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman - Three Paths Toward an Endgame for Putin’s War

NY Times: Can Ukraine Break Through Again?