Gas Mask | The Left - Apollo Brown (2010)
"A new Detroit classic from producer Apollo Brown who composes a smokey, rust riddled trip through the soul of Detroit. A lush sonic cityscape that layers piano over haunting samples and pits Journalist 103s narrative word play against DJ SoKos cuts. The Left is the sound of Detroit and along for the ride are Guilty Simpson, Finale, MarvWon, Paradime, Invincible, Frank West and Mu. Welcome Back. ...”
Putin’s Crazy Days
"Every time you think the madness in Vladimir Putin’s Russia has reached its peak, it goes up another notch or two (or ten). The end of September and the start of October saw a dramatic escalation of insanity. First, Putin went on TV to declare that four occupied Ukrainian regions would immediately and irrevocably become a part of Russia after ‘referenda’ conducted quite literally at gunpoint—and to deliver an anti-Western rant that dramatically illustrated the horseshoe theory of politics by rattling off a list of Western crimes that included everything from colonialism and the slave trade to the bombing of Hiroshima to same-sex marriage (’Parent No. 1 and Parent No. 2′) and multiple genders. Then, Putin’s mad dream of Novorossiya triumphant crashed in less than 24 hours when one of its cities, Lyman, was recaptured by Ukrainian troops—and Ukrainian forces continued their forward march to reclaim the lands Putin had just proclaimed to be Russian forever. ...”
All of Aaron Judge’s Homers, From 1 to 62
"... Aaron Judge matched Babe Ruth’s 1927 season by hitting his 60th home run of the season on Sept. 20. He matched Roger Maris with his 61st homer of the season on Wednesday in Toronto. And he established a new American League record with his 62nd of the season in the second game of a doubleheader on Tuesday. ... Pitcher: Jesús Tinoco, TEX | Inning: 1 | Distance: 391 feet | With one more monstrous blast — this one on the road Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas — Judge stands alone, having passed Roger Maris for the A.L.’s single-season record. Pitchers had avoided throwing him strikes for days, but Tinoco made a mistake and Judge took advantage. ...”
Frantz Fanon unveiled
"As a child in the 1960s, my mother would routinely pass a secondary school on her way home in downtown Algiers named Lycée Frantz Fanon. To her, the name was quite peculiar, since all the other schools had newly Arabic names, alluding to different figures within the independence movement and Algerian history more broadly. She was perplexed as to why this school kept this seemingly white French name, only to learn much later in life—from her son, a particularly angsty postcolonial teen—that it was named for a black man from the Caribbean and that he had made contributions to Algeria’s independence movement. ...”
2017 October: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), 2021 January: Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask - Isaac Julien (1995), 2022 July: The Political Writings from Alienation and Freedom
Back in the Fight
"UTO, Sweden — The last time this famously neutral country went to war, Napoleon was on the back foot in France and Britain was preparing to burn Washington. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended 200 years of global pacifism for the children of the Vikings. And so it was that as President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia issued veiled threats late last month about unleashing nuclear war, the United States was holding military exercises with Sweden, one of NATO’s most recent applicants. While the war raged in Ukraine, hundreds of Marines joined their Swedish counterparts for maneuvers in the Baltic Sea, on and around some of Sweden’s 100,000 mostly uninhabited islands. In the cold rain and under heavy fire, they scrambled up slippery rocks, landed combat boats on shores and crawled on their bellies through forested ravines. ...”
Desolation Journal By Jack Kerouac
"Read any biography of Jack Kerouac and here’s essentially what you’ll learn: that in the summer of 1956 he spent two months in a mountaintop shack as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service in the North Cascades in Washington State, and nothing much happened. Mostly he was bored. Jack’s experience on Desolation Peak marked the climax of his involvement with Buddhism and of a decade of restless travel; it’s the high point of his journeying and spiritual seeking. A voracious reader, he nevertheless chose to go up the mountain without any books, only his personally typed copy of the Diamond Sutra, which he planned to read every day and transcribe yet again, this time in language more accessible to American readers, in order to achieve the enlightenment that he was certain would result. ... —Charles Shutterworth”
2009 November: Another Side of Kerouac: The Dharma Bum as Sports Nut, 2010 July: Kerouac's Copies of Floating Bear, 2011 March: Jack Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show, 2013 September: On the Road - Jack Kerouac, 2015 March: Pull My Daisy (1959), 2015 December: Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken, 2016 July: Mexico City Blues (1959), 2017 February: The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990), 2017 May: The Subterraneans (1958), 2017 June: The Town and the City (1950), 2018 January: Big Sur (1962), 2018 March: A Slightly Embarrassing Love for Jack Kerouac, 2019 March: Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Paintings:”..., 2020 April: Book of Dreams (1960), 2020 August: Camp Like Kerouac in a Fire Lookout Station, 2022 March: The road well travelled: 100 years of Jack Kerouac, 2022 July: Literary Tourism: Jack Kerouac’s New York
Holger Czukay - On The Way To The Peak Of Normal (1981)
"‘On The Way To The Peak Of Normal’ is the third album by Holger Czukay, originally released in 1981. After ‘Movies’, his first post-Can solo album, Czukay continued exploring the methods of sampling and laidback jamming on this follow-up. The side long ‘Ode To Perfume’ / ‘Fragrance’ coasts along on some heavily twangy guitar, shortwave static, treated vocals, and drunken trumpet, all in a hypnotic late night groove. Intended as environmental music for some underlit, velvet clad chillout room, the album can be seen as one long rumination on improvised understatement.“
2011 September: Can, 2011 February: Plight & Premonition, 2013 October: Flux + Mutability - David Sylvian and Holger Czukay (1989) , 2014 June: Holger Czukay - Der Osten Ist Rot, Rome Remains Rome (1984/7), 2016 March: Invaders Of The Heart - Jah Wobble (1982), 2017 April: Jah Wobble, The Edge, Holger Czukay - Snake Charmer (1983), 2017 June: The Legend Lives On… Jah Wobble In Betrayal (1980), 2017 July: Can - The Singles (2017), 2017 September: Holger Czukay (1938-2017), 2019 September: Cinema (2018), 2020 January: Persian Love (1979)
I Lived in Russia? Annexation Is News to Key City Reclaimed by Ukraine.
"LYMAN, Ukraine — As dusk gathered on Sunday, Elena Kharkovska stood in the courtyard of her apartment block, contemplating what she had just learned: Without ever moving, she had supposedly lived in Russia for one day. President Vladimir V. Putin decreed on Friday that four regions of Ukraine — including the province of Donetsk, which includes Ms. Kharkovska’s hometown, Lyman — had been annexed into Russia. But before the news could reach her, Ukrainian soldiers were in control of the city again, as Russian forces retreated. Without electricity, radios or the internet, residents of the city of Lyman said, they were unaware of the grandiose ceremony Mr. Putin held at the Kremlin on Friday to celebrate an annexation that the world largely condemned as a sham. ...”
A badly damaged building in Lyman, a strategic rail hub.
They Legitimized the Myth of a Stolen Election — and Reaped the Rewards
"Five days after the attack on the Capitol last year, the Republican members of the House of Representatives braced for a backlash. Two-thirds of them — 139 in all — had been voting on Jan. 6, 2021, to dispute the Electoral College count that would seal Donald J. Trump’s defeat just as rioters determined to keep the president in power stormed the chamber. Now one lawmaker after another warned during a conference call that unless Republicans demanded accountability, voters would punish them for inflaming the mob. ...”
An aide inspected the official tally to certify the vote hours after rioters had stormed Congress to disrupt the transfer of power.
Impulse! Records: How a classic jazz imprint is reinventing itself for new generations
"With an orange and black template and exclamation-point-ending aesthetic that came to define the label in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s tempting to refer to Impulse! Records in the past tense, as if the 60-year-old jazz label hadn’t continued to pursue and release records by young players and composers that align with the mission and aesthetic laid out by founder Creed Taylor. But while Impulse! is best known for its profound influence on music culture through releases by John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler and dozens more, across the past half-decade the imprint has issued revelatory work by shock-of-the-new players, many of them British....”
Ukraine retakes a key city Putin claimed to have annexed. Here's why it matters.
"Ukraine said it had retaken full control of a key eastern city on Sunday, handing the Kremlin another stinging setback just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed that the area would belong to his country forever. The recapture of Lyman represents a symbolic and strategic victory for Kyiv, which vowed its forces would push deeper into occupied territory after forcing Moscow's military into its latest bloody and humiliating retreat. Western officials and observers said Russia’s loss of a logistics hub key to the supply of forces in the south and east was a significant development that could pave the way for more. ...”
Ukrainian soldiers scavenge an abandoned Russian T-90A tank in Kyrylivka, in the recently retaken area near Kharkiv on September 30.
State of Siege - Costa-Gavras (1972)
"Revolutionary times are times of revelation: they uncover and flood with light what has long been darkly buried. Implicit in the above exchange between a kidnapped Philip Michael Santore (Yves Montand) and his masked Tupamaro inquisitor, Hugo (Jacques Weber), in Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege (1972) is the unassailable conviction that politics forms the hidden skeleton of our world. Anyone who can be bothered to dig beneath the surface quickly strikes his shovel against these grim, intractable bones, the ossified determinants of who holds power and who does not. Looming invisibly over the interrogation is Costa-Gavras, supremely aware that he wields in his lens a uniquely effective kind of shovel. Indeed, this to him is what the cinema is: ‘a way of showing, exposing the political processes in our everyday life.’ ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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!’ ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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.”
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. ...”
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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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
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. ...”
NBC News: Gunman fires at draft office in Russia amid growing anger over Putin's mobilization (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. ...”
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)
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