​A New Brushstroke Analysis Reveals Vermeer Was Not the Painstaking Perfectionist Art Historians Long Thought

"For generations, art historians believed Johannes Vermeer was a perfectionist who worked very slowly—a theory supported by his precisely placed brush strokes and relatively limited career output. But in examining one of the painter’s masterpieces, researchers at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C., found that may not have actually been the case. Underneath Woman Holding a Balance, Vermeer’s classic canvas dated from around 1664, are layers of spontaneous brushstrokes, chemical imaging has exposed. ...”

art net

NGA: Vermeer’s Secrets

Ongoing and Upcoming Vermeer-Related Events

2009 September: Vermeer's Masterpiece, The Milkmaid, 2011 February: Vermeer: Master of Light, 2013 October: Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, 2015 December: This Is Not a Vermeer ™, 2017 January: The Art of Painting (1665–1668), 2021 December: Museum rivalry ‘could make Dutch Vermeer show last of its kind’, 2021 December: Okay Cupid: Reopening Vermeer’s love letter to contradiction

Woman Holding a Balance (c. 1664)

​An American in Ukraine Finds the War He’s Been Searching For

"SOLEDAR, Ukraine — ‘Please, come with me.’ He was begging. He didn’t have much time. The Russians were blasting this town in eastern Ukraine with rockets, airstrikes and thundering artillery. The ground shook. Andrew Milburn, a retired Marine colonel, could have been hanging out at home, 6,000 miles away in the Florida suburbs, enjoying retirement. Instead he was standing in Soledar, a town under fierce assault, black smoke filling his nostrils, staring at a Ukrainian woman he had never met, pleading with her to evacuate. ‘Please,’ he tried again. ‘You will die here.’ The woman had long gray braids and a face etched by countless sorrows. When she refused to leave, Mr. Milburn nearly exploded with frustration. ...”

NY Times

Aljazeera - Women in war: A psychologist helps Ukrainian soldiers’ families (Video)

NY Times: Decades of Nuclear Reactor Strikes Predate Ukraine Power Plant Crisis

Aljazeera: Deadly Russian missile attack hits Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia city

NY Times - Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

"The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" - Bob Dylan (1967)

"‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest‘ is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan which was released as the fifth track on his eighth studio album John Wesley Harding (1967). The track was written by Dylan and produced by Bob Johnston. It was recorded in one take on October 17, 1967, at Columbia Studio A in Nashville. The song's lyrics refer to two friends, Frankie Lee and Judas Priest. Lee asks Priest for a loan of money. Priest offers the money freely. Lee spends it in a brothel over 16 days, then dies of thirst in Priest's arms. It has been suggested by commentators that the song refers to Dylan's relationship with his manager Albert Grossman or to his contractual negotiations with his record company. The song received a largely negative critical reception. ...”

W - "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest"

Bob Dylan: "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest"

YouTube: The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest (Official Audio)

One Ring

"The One Ring, also called the Ruling Ring and Isildur’s Bane, is a central plot element in J. R. R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). It first appeared in the earlier story The Hobbit (1937) as a magic ring that grants the wearer invisibility. Tolkien changed it into a malevolent Ring of Power and re-wrote parts of The Hobbit to fit in with the expanded narrative. The Lord of the Rings describes the hobbit Frodo Baggins‘s quest to destroy the Ring. Critics have compared the story with the ring-based plot of Richard Wagner‘s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen; Tolkien denied any connection, but at the least, both men drew on the same mythology. …“

Wikipedia

A Weapon With a Will of Its Own: How Tolkien Wrote the One Ring as a Character

2010 January: The Lord of the Rings, 2018 January: An  Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle   Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More, 2019 January: The Largest J.R.R. Tolkien Exhibit in Generations Is Coming to the U.S.: Original Drawings, Manuscripts, Maps & More, 2020 January: Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve, 2020 August: The Complete Guide to Middle-earth - Robert Foster (1971), 2021 September: When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings..., 2021 October: When J.R.R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford English Dictionary..., 2022 March: J.R.R. Tolkien Tolkien Estate

​Crimea Bridge Explosion Disrupts Crucial Supply Route for Russian Forces

"A major explosion severely damaged the bridge connecting Russia’s mainland to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, disrupting traffic on a crucial artery for the supply of fuel, military equipment and food to Russian troops fighting to hold ground in southern Ukraine. The bridge, opened by President Vladimir Putin to great fanfare in 2018, was meant to symbolize the might of the Russian state and the permanence of Russia’s annexation of the peninsula four years earlier. Russia even released a feature movie about its construction. Russia’s investigations committee said three people died after the early-morning explosion on Saturday of a truck on the bridge’s roadway next to a supply train that was carrying fuel. Some demolition experts who analyzed footage of the blast questioned the Russian version and said that the explosion must have come from under the bridge, caused either by an explosives-laden boat, manned or unmanned, or by shaped charges placed by divers. ...”

WSJ (Video/Audio)

NY Times: A Distracted Russia Is Losing Its Grip on Its Old Soviet Sphere

Guardian: Putin’s war is illegal – and Russians fleeing the draft may have the right to asylum

Black smoke billowed from a fire on the Kerch Strait Bridge that links Crimea to Russia on Friday.

​Newcastle United’s transfer, stadium and investment plans one year after takeover

"This is the first of three articles this week to mark the one-year anniversary of Newcastle United’s controversial takeover by a Saudi-backed consortium. Today George Caulkin and Chris Waugh explain how the club has changed in 12 months. Tomorrow Oliver Kay visits Saudi Arabia to ask questions about how the takeover is perceived there, football’s role in the country and allegations of sportswashing. On Friday Matt Slater examines the degree of Saudi involvement and influence at the Premier League club. ..."

The Athletic

Newcastle’s takeover: In Saudi Arabia, exploring how the club fits a country’s vision

Newcastle United’s takeover: How strong is Saudi Arabia’s influence one year on?

​Guerrilla warfare

"Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare in which small groups of combatants, such as paramilitary personnel, armed civilians, or irregulars, use military tactics including ambushes, sabotage, raids, petty warfare, hit-and-run tactics, and mobility, to fight a larger and less-mobile traditional military. Although the term ‘guerrilla warfare’ was coined in the context of the Peninsular War in the 19th century, the tactical methods of guerrilla warfare have long been in use. In the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu proposed the use of guerrilla-style tactics in The Art of War. ...”

Wikipedia

Guerrilla warfare during the Peninsular War, by Roque Gameiro, depicting a Portuguese guerrilla ambush against French forces. The term "guerrilla" was coined during this conflict, which occurred in the early 19th century.

​‘They Are in a Panic’: Ukraine’s Troops Size Up the Enemy

"STAVKY, Ukraine — Racing down a road with his men in pursuit of retreating Russian soldiers, a battalion commander came across an abandoned Russian armored vehicle, its engine still running. Inside there was a sniper rifle, rocket propelled grenades, helmets and belongings. The men were gone. ... After months of static fighting and holding the line under withering Russian artillery barrages, Ukrainian soldiers are exulting over their smashing of Russian lines in the northeast three weeks ago, and their recapturing of swaths of territory seized by Russian troops earlier this year. They have almost retaken the whole of Kharkiv Province, as well as territory in each of the four regions that President Vladimir V. Putin claims to have annexed for Russia. ...”

NY Times

BBC: Putin's dream of Russian victory slips away in Ukraine

NY Times: Opinion | David Brooks - The Triumph of the Ukrainian Idea

The Prescient Literary Visions of Vladimir Voinovich

Fighters with the Carpathian Sich battalion searching houses used by Russian soldiers in the recently recaptured village of Stavky.

"Pretty Little Angel Eyes" - Curtis Lee (1961)

"... What resulted was an infectious master take of a tune written by Lee and Boyce: ‘Pretty Little Angel Eyes,’ recorded at the moldy, rat-inhabited Mira Sound Studio (an optimal environment for acoustically dynamic record-making, as Spector discovered). The uncomplicated song came alive with an agile arrangement, heavy on the backbeat with precise and well-timed harmonies by the Halos (who weren't credited on the label). Lee's lead vocal was also nicely done, a step up from earlier efforts. It couldn't miss. Hitting the charts in July '61, it was top ten throughout most of August into early September. ...”

Way Back Attack

W - “Pretty Little Angel Eyes”

YouTube: Pretty Little Angel Eyes

Late Afternoon in Our Meadow - Camille Pissarro (1887)

"This painting has an uncanny, cinematic feel like the final shot of some epic Italian film of rural life. The woman in the light-bathed field is isolated and still as a statue. The whole world seems to stop and think as a warm golden day comes to a close. This elegiac mood is intensified by the sense of almost infinite colours contained in the sunshine, for Pissarro, one of the founders of impressionism, here adopts Georges Seurat’s very different aesthetic, dotting his canvas with pointillist pinpoints of different colours, meant to mix in your eye. The effect is strange and distancing as it freeze-frames the afternoon.”

National Gallery

 

Ukraine war: The families who made it through the new Iron Curtain

"Moscow's move to annex parts of Ukraine has sent a new Iron Curtain down across a vast swathe of territory - cutting off an unknown number of people from their own country. Until 1 October, Ukrainians were able, with difficulty, to move to and from across the front lines. From a crossing point at Vasylivka, on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river, some would travel to nearby non-occupied Zaporizhzhia to visit relatives, buy food or medicines. But many left for good, carrying what they could with them, in search of new lives in areas not under Russian occupation. Some travelled on to Europe. ...”

BBC

Apathy Keeps Russia’s Death Cult Alive

Vanity Fair - “Dad, You Have to Come—Or We Will Be Adopted!”: One Ukrainian Family’s Harrowing Wartime Saga (Video)

Damaged and burned vehicles are seen at a destroyed part of the Illich Iron and Steel Works Metallurgical Plant in Mariupol, April 18, 2022.

​Provincetown Players

"The Provincetown Players was a collective of artists, writers, intellectuals, and amateur theater enthusiasts. Under the leadership of the husband and wife team of George Cram ‘Jig’ Cook and Susan Glaspell from Iowa, the Players produced two seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts (1915 and 1916) and six seasons in New York City, between 1916 and 1922. The company's founding has been called ‘the most important innovative moment in American theatre.’ Its productions helped launch the careers of Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell, and ushered American theatre into the Modern era. ...”

W - Provincetown Players, W - Davenport Group

A  History of the Provincetown Playhouse

Lewis Wharf, first home of the Provincetown Players in 1915

 

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. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

W - Apollo Brown

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: The Left & Apollo Brown - Gas Mask (Deluxe), Gas Mask Instrumentals (Full Instrumental Album, Mix Heavy Beats)

2022 October: Eight Essential Releases by Detroit Producer Apollo Brown

 

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. ...”

The Bulwark

VOX: The Russian nuclear threat, explained

NY Times: U.S. Believes Ukrainians Were Behind an Assassination in Russia

Fox News: Putin Propaganda Primetime

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. ...”

NY Times (Video)

NY Times: With His 62nd Home Run, Aaron Judge Makes His Case (Video)

The Athletic: Inside Aaron Judge’s astonishing march to MLB, and Yankees, history, one home run at a time (Video)

NY Post: Why Roger Maris’ special season doesn’t match up to Aaron Judge’s (Audio)

​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. ...”

Africa Is a Country

The Islamic Veil in Fanon’s post-colonial psychoanalysis: A changing symbol 

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. ...”

NY Times

Guardian - ‘What was it all for?’: recaptured Lyman left shattered by Russian occupation

NY Times: A Frontline Mystery: Was He Scouting for Firewood, or for Russia?

GRID - Fighting Russia with a laptop: Meet the women on the front lines of Ukraine’s information war

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”

The Paris Review

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.“

boomkat

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: On The Way To The Peak Of Normal (1981) full Album

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. ...”

NY Times

Guardian - Danger in every step: the ‘chaotic and complex’ work of Ukraine’s de-miners

BBC: A rare glimpse of daily life in occupied Ukraine

ARTFORUM: Ukrainian Museum Collections to Come Under Russian Control as Annexation Looms.

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. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: How a Tiny Elections Company Became a Conspiracy Theory Target

NY Times: Donald Trump’s Methods (Audio)

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....”

In Sheep’s Clothing Hi-fi (Video)

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. ...”

NBC News (Video)

Aljazeera: What the war means for Ukrainians with disabilities (Audio/Video)

Guardian: Ukraine declares full control of Lyman after Russian forces pull out (Video)

Guardian: Who is Tucker Carlson really ‘rooting for’ in Ukraine?

VOX: 3 questions that will determine the future of Ukraine’s fight against Russia

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.’ ...”

Criterion - State of Siege: Their Torture, and Ours

Criterion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W - State of Siege

YouTube: Three Reasons: STATE OF SIEGE

​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