Hollow City: Edward Hopper’s portraits of urban alienation

"Urban hellscapes, New York ones in particular, look more heavenly in the soft glow of hindsight. Seventies Manhattan, formerly Exhibit A for how the country was going straight to shit, is widely remembered as a wonderland, quattrocento Florence for punks. ... Edward Hopper’s drawings and paintings of New York are all but synonymous with quiet desperation: the distinctly big-city feeling of being gray and alone in a loud, colorful place. But look at Nighthawks—based, Hopper said, on a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, not far from where he lived—and tell me you don’t long for this prehistoric land where you never have to wait for a seat and distraction has yet to conquer the world. At first, Edward Hopper’s New York, an exhibition at the Whitney Museum, a few blocks from where that restaurant once stood, seems like a straightforward case of grass-is-always-greener thinking. ...”

The Baffler

Whitney: Edward Hopper, New York

2008 July: Edward Hopper, 2010 October: Finding Nighthawks, 2010 December: Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time, 2012 Wednesday: Through Edward Hopper's eyes: in search of an artist's seaside inspiration, 2013 July: Hopper Drawing, 2014 May: INTERVIEW: “An Interview with Edward Hopper, June 17, 1959″., 2014 September: How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks, 2015 February: Edward Hopper's New York: A Walking Tour, 2015 September: Edward Hopper life and works, 2016 May: "Night Windows," 1928, 2016 July: Sunday (1926), 2016 September: Drug Store (1927), 2018 January: Seven A.M. (1948), 2018 February: Jo Hopper, Woman in the Sun, 2019 August: Pennsylvania Coal Town (1947), 2020 January: Queensborough Bridge, 1913, 2021 July: ​The Mournfulness of Cities, 2022 October: The Waning Years of Edward Hopper

Room in New York, 1932

Tyler Mitchell featuring Marshall Allen - Dancing Shadows (2021)

"Dancing Shadows is the latest release from bassist Tyler Mitchell.  On it he is joined by several fellow Arkestra members — percussionist Elson Nascimento, drummer Wayne Smith, and the incomparable Marshall Allen on sax and EVI. These four are joined by two saxists, Chris Hemingway on tenor and Nicoletta Manzini on alto, who come from more traditional modern jazz backgrounds and offer balance to the others, who have spent so many years plumbing the Afro-futurist cosmos. They also foreground the fact Sun Ra's music is not just strange and avant-garde. It was originally intended to appeal to the sensibilities — 50s jazz, swing, and R&B — of audiences who needed cajoling and pop toe-tapping to before reaching the more outre dimensions of the music. ...”

SquidCo (Audio)

amazon

YouTube: Dancing Shadows, A Call for All Demons

​Kyiv prepares for a winter with no heat, water or power

"KYIV, Ukraine — The mayor of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is warning residents that they must prepare for the worst this winter if Russia keeps striking the country’s energy infrastructure — and that means having no electricity, water or heat in the freezing cold cannot be ruled out. ‘We are doing everything to avoid this. But let’s be frank, our enemies are doing everything for the city to be without heat, without electricity, without water supply, in general, so we all die. And the future of the country and the future of each of us depends on how prepared we are for different situations,’ Mayor Vitali Klitschko told state media. Russia has focused on striking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure over the last month, causing power shortages and rolling outages across the country. Kyiv was scheduled to have hourly rotating blackouts Sunday in parts of the city and the surrounding region. ...”

POLITICO (Video)

Guardian: In Kyiv, I saw Ukrainians on the frontlines of a very real culture war

NY Times: Even as Challenges Mount, Europeans Stick by Ukraine

NY Times: Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday’s Midterms

Now Is Not the Time to Negotiate with Putin

A man sits in a cafe during a blackout in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022

The History of Jazz Visualized on a Circuit Diagram of a 1950s Phonograph: Features 1,000+ Musicians, Artists, Songwriters and Producers

"The danger of enjoying jazz is the possibility of letting ourselves slide into the assumption that we understand it. To do so would make no more sense than believing that, say, an enjoyment of listening to records automatically transmits an understanding of record players. One look at such a machine’s inner workings would disabuse most of us of that notion, just as one look at a map of the universe of jazz would disabuse us of the notion that we understand that music in all the varieties into which it has evolved. But a jazz map that extensive hasn’t been easy to come by until this month, when design studio Dorothy put on sale their Jazz Love Blueprint. ...”

Open Culture

21 Grams - Alejandro González Iñárritu (2003)

"21 Grams is a 2003 American psychological drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu from a screenplay by Guillermo Arriaga. The film stars Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Danny Huston and Benicio Del Toro. The second part of Arriaga's and Iñárritu's ‘Trilogy of Death’, preceded by Amores perros (2000) and followed by Babel (2006), 21 Grams interweaves several plot lines in a nonlinear arrangement. The film's plot is about the consequences of a tragic hit-and-run accident. Penn plays a critically ill mathematician, Watts plays a grief-stricken mother, and Del Toro plays a born-again Christian ex-convict whose faith is sorely tested in the aftermath of the accident. The three main characters each have ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ story threads, which are shown as non-linear fragments that punctuate elements of the overall story, all imminently coming toward each other and coalescing as the story progresses....”

Wikipedia

21 Grams: A Focus Features’ 20th Anniversary Film For Hispanic Heritage Month

21 Grams: Review by Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, Review by J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, Review by Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com

YouTube: Official Trailer: 21 Grams

LAFC finds Hollywood ending, beats Philadelphia on penalty kicks for first MLS Cup title

"LAFC beat the Philadelphia Union to win its first MLS Cup in unbelievable fashion Saturday at Banc of California Stadium. Here’s what you need to know:

• LAFC got a 128th-minute equalizer from Gareth Bale to bring the game level at 3-3 and force penalties, where backup goalkeeper John McCarthy, a former Union player and Philadelphia native, made two saves to lead the Black and Gold to an unreal win.
• McCarthy, who was named MVP, was substituted on after starting keeper Maxime Crepéau was carted off with an injury — and got a red card — late in extra time.
• LA is the eighth team in MLS history to win both the Supporters’ Shield and MLS Cup in a single season. ...”

The Athletic (Video)

LA Times (Video)

LAFC goalie John McCarthy dives to block a shot during Saturday’s penalty-kick shootout against the Philadelphia Union.

America’s Quintessential Maverick Composer, at 100

"Many of the musical and philosophical characteristics that defined Lou Harrison, who would have turned 100 this year, as a quintessential American maverick composer come through in ‘La Koro Sutro’ (’The Heart Sutra’). Harrison’s early fascination with Eastern spiritual thought and culture culminated in pieces like this 1971 choral work. The text is one of the most beloved Buddhist scriptures, describing the pathway to attaining nirvana. ... ‘La Koro Sutro’ is ambitious and large-scale, lasting nearly 30 minutes, yet somehow personal and modest, too, with a kind of innately American directness. The musical language is steeped in Asian elements, ancient modes, pentatonic scales, chantlike choral writing and systems of 'just' (what Harrison considered the more natural) tuning, rather than the tempered intonation common to Western music for centuries. ...”

NY Times (Audio)

2008 September: Lou Harrison, 2012 January: Music from Canticle No. 3., 2017 July: Lou Harrison: A World of Music

Lou Harrison, the American composer, in 1973.

How Republicans Fed a Misinformation Loop About the Pelosi Attack

"WASHINGTON — Within hours of the brutal attack last month on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House, activists and media outlets on the right began circulating groundless claims — nearly all of them sinister, and many homophobic — casting doubt on what had happened. Some Republican officials quickly joined in, rushing to suggest that the bludgeoning of an octogenarian by a suspect obsessed with right-wing conspiracy theories was something else altogether, dismissing it as an inside job, a lover’s quarrel or worse. The misinformation came from all levels of Republican politics. ...”

NY Times

​Why Vladimir Putin Would Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine

"On October 23rd, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, made phone calls to the defense ministers of four NATO member countries to tell each of them that Ukraine was planning to detonate a ‘dirty bomb’—that is, a conventional weapon spiked with radioactive material—on its own territory. Three of the four recipients of this information—France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—responded that day with an unusual joint statement denouncing the claim. (Shoigu’s fourth interlocutor was Turkey.) Russian leaders and propagandists, who covered the phone calls in some detail, don’t necessarily think that anyone, anywhere, will believe that Ukraine would use a radioactive weapon against its own people just so it can blame Russia for the attack. Shoigu’s phone calls were preëmptive, another example of Russia creating information noise, sowing doubt, asserting the fundamental unknowability of the facts of war. On Thursday, Vladimir Putin said that he had personally directed Shoigu to make the calls, and this claim underscored their true meaning: Russia is preparing for a nuclear, or nuclearish, strike in Ukraine. ...”

New Yorker

Guardian - ‘I am staying here’: Kherson residents defy Russian call to evacuate city

GRID - Putin, his commanders and Russia’s nuclear option in Ukraine: What you need to know

NBC News: Russia softens nuclear rhetoric over Ukraine (Video)

​Qatar World Cup: What was promised and what is actually being delivered

"’The promise given was a necessity of the past; the word broken is a necessity of the present.’ Florentine diplomat, historian and philosopher (a genuine Renaissance man) Niccolo Machiavelli would have been good at winning bids for major sporting events. A World Cup for all of Italy? Sure. Us, the Duchy of Milan, Papal States, Venetian Republic, we’re all Italian brothers. A dozen new stadiums? Absolutely — why not 15? New roads? Of course, we’ll pave them with gold! ...”

The Athletic

NY Times: The World Cup is Weeks Away. Will Qatar Be Ready?

NY Times: Qatar Offered Fans Free World Cup Trips, but Only on Its Terms (Video)

Broadway–Lafayette Street/Bleecker St Transfer

"The Broadway–Lafayette Street/Bleecker Street station is a New York City Subway station complex in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan on the IRT Lexington Avenue Line and the IND Sixth Avenue Line. It is served by the 6, D, and F trains at all times; the B and M trains on weekdays; the <6> and <F> trains during rush hours in the peak direction; and the 4 train during late nights. The complex comprises two stations, Bleecker Street and Broadway–Lafayette Street. The Bleecker Street station was built for the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT), and was a local station on the city's first subway line, which was approved in 1900. ...”

W - Broadway–Lafayette Street/Bleecker Street station

Museum of the City of New York: The Broadway-Lafayette Transfer and the Evolution of the City’s Subway (Sep. 2012)

Tour the Best Spots Along the West Village’s Swanky Bleecker Street (Oct 2018)

YouTube: Broadway/Lafayette-Bleecker St Transfer

A Capital Draped in Darkness

"KYIV, Ukraine — As night falls and darkness descends on Kyiv, the flashlights on smartphones begin to flicker on like fairy lights, leading the way home. Dogs wear glow sticks around their necks; flower merchants switch on headlamps to show off the vibrant colors of their lilacs and peonies; and children are outfitted in reflective clothing for safety. The streets of this capital city, illuminated with nightlife only weeks ago, are now shrouded in darkness and shadows after sunset. That’s the result of the rolling power outages Ukraine has put in place to prevent a complete collapse of the national energy grid, after repeated Russian bombardments. Failing on the battlefield, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has stepped up his campaign to break the nation’s resolve by degrading daily life, with strikes aimed at disabling critical infrastructure like electric power. That included a missile strike this week that disabled the pumps that drive water, leaving most of the city without water for a day. ...”

NY Times

Bernard-Henri Lévy and the Heroes of Ukraine, Ukraine: Trench warfare in 21st-century Europe - Report by Marc Roussel

Guardian: Russia will rejoin UN grain corridor from Ukraine in humiliating U-turn (Video)

NY Times: Putin Says Ukraine Doesn’t Exist. That’s Why He’s Trying to Destroy It.

The darkened bell tower of the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, in October.

Creatures in an Alphabet – Djuna Barnes (1981)

"Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), the lesbian Modernist recluse, always a sideline figure, has come into something of a revival in recent years. She was a writer’s writer, influential, admired by T. S. Eliot, John Hawkes, Malcolm Lowry and William Faulkner, among others. Her novel Nightwood has been reprinted and hailed as a forgotten classic but the rest of her corpus is given vanishingly little attention. Any reader worth their salt is interested in her and Nightwood is in the upper reaches of my to-be-read pile, but my introduction to her came a couple of years back with her strange swan song, 1982’s Creatures in an Alphabet. ...”

Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews

amazon

​The Best Reissues on Bandcamp: September/October 2022

"Our latest round-up of the finest new reissues Bandcamp has to offer features the re-release of an era-defining American classic and excavated rarities from Italy, Thailand, and beyond. ... Ahmad Jamal, Live in Paris (1971), Transversales Disques’ stellar Live in Paris series continues with recordings of the Ahmed Jamal Trio. Like the French label’s previously released performances by Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp, this session was laid down at Grand Auditorium Studio 104, Maison de la Radio. It includes three compositions performed by the pianist, including ‘Manhattan Reflections,’ with Jamil Nasser superbly assisting the richness of Jamal’s play on double bass and Frank Gant on drums, encapsulating the borough’s big city cool. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

​How Holocaust historians are unearthing Ukraine’s present

"Kyiv, Ukraine – On the eve of Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, two organisations – one French, the other Ukrainian – began one of their regular meetings in Paris to discuss plans for a Holocaust memorial complex at Babyn Yar, the site of mass killings during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv. Russian President Vladimir Putin had not yet announced the beginning of what he refers to as Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, but the writing was on the wall, says Patrick Desbois, a French Catholic priest who has devoted much of his life to researching the Holocaust and more modern atrocities elsewhere, including in Guatemala, Syria and Iraq. ... News of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers soon emerged, and Desbois’ Paris-based Holocaust research organisation, Yahad-In Unum, began to shift focus to history in real time, deploying its well-honed skills to investigate possible war crimes under way. ...”

Aljazeera (Audio)

NY Times: Did Germany Learn From Its Russia Trouble? The Test May Come in China.

BBC: Inside a US military cyber team’s defence of Ukraine

NY Times: The U.N. and Turkey work to restore the suspended grain deal.

The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in Lubmin, Germany. Mr. Scholz this year halted the project, which would have linked Germany with Russia, providing a steady stream of natural gas.

 

Toasting fork

"A toasting fork is a long-handled fork used to brown and toast food such as bread, cheese, and apples by holding the pronged end in front of an open fire or other heat source. It can also be used to toast marshmallows, broil hot dogs, and heat hot dog buns over campfires. Toasting forks were traditionally made from metal such as wrought iron, brass, or silver, and later from steel, but handles of wood or ivory might be used to prevent the heat of the fire being conducted to the hand. Food is pierced with the prongs of the fork and held over the fire until it turns brown. The toasting process requires care and attention to ensure that the item is evenly cooked and not burnt. Many toasting forks had a built-in suspension ring on one end, which allowed them to be hung when not in use. ...”

Wikipedia

YouTube: Forging a Toasting Fork

Wrought iron toasting fork (c.1900)

A Dose of Rational Optimism

"There is a masterpiece in J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia, and a very interesting muddle. Humanity, the Berkeley economist argues, spent nearly the entirety of its history condemned to poverty by an insufficient supply of calories and a chronically excessive birth rate. But in the ‘long twentieth century’—the period between 1870 and 2010—an almost miraculous transformation took place: more and more people lived longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than ever before. Arenas of intellect and creative expression that were once accessible only to the most privileged of elites became the common experiences of mass cultures. Humans did not find utopia, DeLong argues, but we stumbled in its general direction. ...”

DISSENT

amazon: Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century  - J. Bradford DeLong

Russia ends civilian pull-out before Kherson battle

"Russian officials say they have completed an operation to move civilians out of the occupied southern city of Kherson ahead of an expected battle with advancing Ukrainian forces. At least 70,000 civilians are said to have crossed to the left (eastern) bank of the Dnipro river, in what Ukraine has called forced deportations. ‘We're preparing Kherson for defence,’ one Russian militia commander said. Meanwhile, Russia said it had mobilised the required 300,000 reservists.Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told President Vladimir Putin that 41,000 of those called up had already been deployed to the battlefield in Ukraine. The numbers have not been independently verified. The minister's comments come amid growing public anger across Russia over the mobilisation drive. ...”

BBC

Aljazeera - ‘Too loud to be true’: Is Russia setting a trap in Kherson? (Video)

LitHub - Poetry After Bucha: Serhiy Zhadan on Ukraine, Russia, and the Demands War Makes of Language

Guardian: What happened in the Russia-Ukraine war this week? Catch up with the must-read news and analysis (Video)

Ukrainian forces have made big gains in Kherson region but the wet weather is slowing down their progress

Delroy Wilson – Dancing Mood at King Tubby Studios (1966)

"Just wanted to share this sorta ‘rare’ clip of Dub/Rocksteady artist Delroy Wilson covering his song ‘Dancing Mood’ at OG King Tubby (King Tubby was one of the lead pioneers of Dub genre) Studios. Being big fans of Jamaican music development we thought we’d share and inform a few of you on some ‘1’s and 2’s’ of Jamaican music culture. ...”

UNION (Video - Live)

W - Delroy Wilson

allmusic: I'm in a Dancing Mood (Audio)

​The story of the two young faces on an 1861 Turtle Bay row house

"It’s a charming scene on the facade of 328 East 51st Street: a boxy bas relief sculpture of two short-haired young children. One holds what seems to be a pet, perhaps a kitten, while the other looks on and touches it with tenderness. Such a sweet depiction in a domestic setting would lead you to assume that the children were part of a family that once resided in the house, built in 1861 between First and Second Avenues. ...”

Ephemeral New York

​Putin's Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes

"In a 90-minute special investigation, FRONTLINE and The Associated Press go inside Russia’s war on Ukraine and uncover harrowing evidence of potential war crimes. ... ‘Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes’ draws on original footage; interviews with Ukrainian citizens and prosecutors, top government officials and international war crimes experts; and a vast amount of previously unpublished evidence obtained and verified by the AP — including hundreds of hours of surveillance camera videos and thousands of audio recordings of intercepted phone calls made by Russian soldiers around Ukraine's capital city, Kyiv. From award-winning director Tom Jennings, producer Annie Wong, AP global investigative reporter Erika Kinetz and her AP colleagues, the 90-minute documentary traces a pattern of atrocities committed by Russian troops in Ukraine, focusing on areas near Kyiv, such as Bucha, where some of the most shocking carnage was found. ...”

YouTube: FRONTLINE 1:23:16

The Paris Review - Genres for War: Writers in Ukraine on Literature

NY Times: Why Russia Stole Potemkin’s Bones From Ukraine

Olga Kryazhich’s destroyed apartment.

​“I’d Read Her Grocery Lists.” On Cooking with Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath is the sort of writer for whom the idiom, ‘I’d read her grocery lists’ was conceived. On this point, however, she has an edge: You can, indeed, read her grocery lists. Plath’s journals, published posthumously, are filled with granular detail: Amidst dramatic entries on feminist doctrines and suicidal ideation, she penned shopping lists, recipes, and musings about what to bake for forthcoming dinner guests. ‘The prospect of continually eating cake and continually having more of it always appeals to the feminine-logic side of my nature,’ she mused in a 1954 entry—precisely the sort of intellectual mergance that characterizes her notebooks: Part philosophical inquiry, part cake. ...”

LitHub

LitHub: The Moment Sylvia Plath Found Her Genius

The Atlantic: Why Sylvia Plath Still Haunts American Culture

2008 February: Sylvia Plath, 2011 May: "Daddy" (Video), 2017 July: Ariel (1965), 2018 April: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956, 2019 January: Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath’s New Short Story, 2021 June: The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, 2021 July: Sylvia Plath’s Tarot Cards, 2022 January: Foreword to Ariel: The Restored Edition written by Frieda Hughes, 2022 March: Crossing Paths with the Spirit of Sylvia Plath – Helen Humphreys

​Hildur Guðnadóttir, After & Before

"If you’re an admirer of composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, then you’ve likely listened to her phenomenal music for Tár, the new Cate Blanchett film, even if you haven’t had a chance to see it in a theater yet. You’ve also, then, sorted out that it may be her most challenging score date, from what seems like the emulation of traffic noise in ‘Tár – II. Allegro’ to the oceanic roiling of ‘Mortar.’ So, while getting oriented with the intensity of Tár, here’s a soothing but no less engaging flashback to 2014: a 20-minute live solo performance in which she sings and plays and loops segments through all manner of textural filters. ...”

disquiet (Video)

W - Hildur Guðnadóttir

YouTube: Hildur Guðnadóttir

​Can Putin’s ‘Butcher of Syria’ save Russia from another rout?

"Russia’s General Sergei Surovikin is no stranger to mass murder and spreading terror. In Chechnya, the shaven-headed veteran officer, who has the physique of a wrestler and an expression to match, vowed to ‘destroy three Chechen fighters for every Russian soldier killed.’ And he’s remembered bitterly in northern Syria for reducing much of the city of Aleppo to ruins. The 56-year-old air force general also oversaw the relentless targeting of clinics, hospitals and civilian infrastructure in rebel-held Idlib in 2019, an effort to break opponents’ will and send refugees fleeing to Europe via neighboring Turkey. The 11-month campaign ‘showed callous disregard for the lives of the roughly 3 million civilians in the area,’ noted Human Rights Watch in a scathing report....”

POLITICO (Audio/Video)

Aljazeera: Ukraine says southern offensive complicated by weather, terrain (Video)

BBC - Ukraine war: Russia troop deployment to Belarus prompts speculation (Video)

GRID: Germany is spending $200 billion to fight Putin’s energy squeeze. Will it end up dividing Europe?

Ukrainian servicemen and police officers stand guard in a street after a drone attack in Kyiv on October 17, 2022

​Different Worlds: Unsound Festival 2022 Reviewed

"No matter if it’s loosely coiled or tucked away in a cassette, for Dmytro Nikolaienko every tape loop has its place. The producer is carefully removing one after the other and placing it into a tape player or an old reel-to-reel recorder. You can see how carefully he’s gluing the tapes together, and you can hear the results. Some of them are too long, so he uses a pencil or micro tripod in order to hook them on. Krakow’s Unsound Festival had often surprised its participants by organising concerts in unusual spaces, and this year, at the 20th edition of the festival, it did so yet again. We are in a small auditorium at the former building of the Clinic For Internal Diseases, which opened in 1901. ...”

The Quietus

09/10 – 16/10/2022   Unsound Kraków 2022

Unsound Kraków 2022: Bubbles - First Artist Announcement.

Martyna Basta

Arab Coffeehouse - Henri Matisse (1912–1913)

"Arab Coffeehouse (French name: Le café Maure), is an oil-on-canvas painting by French visual artist Henri Matisse. Produced in 1913, Arab Coffeehouse was part of a series of goldfish paintings that Matisse produced in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1912, Matisse visited Tangier, Morocco, where he noted how the locals would be fascinated for hours by goldfish swimming in bowls. Matisse was noted to admire the lifestyle of the Moroccans. Like other 20th-century cosmopolitan Parisian artists, Matisse ‘valued Islamic art for its ornamental exuberance and anti-illusionistic qualities’. ...”

Wikipedia

2012 May: Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse: Visions of Arcadia, 2015 April: Van Gogh, Manet, and Matisse: The Art of the Flower, 2016 April: Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, 2017 May: Matisse in the Studio, 2018 August: The apartment rooftop that hosted Henri Matisse, 2022 May: Matisse: The Red Studio

​In a stretch of southern Ukraine, the Russians have left, but their bombs remain.

"KHERSON REGION, Ukraine — The magnetic squeal of the metal detector signals that the team of Ukrainian soldiers is ready to sweep the grounds of a school that Russian forces had used as a fighting position. The roof of the school was blown off during fighting months ago, and the remains of three charred Russian military vehicles were still scattered around the building. The grounds were littered with shell craters and scraps of blasted metal pieces. The Ukrainian military’s southern command said on Monday that since it launched its southern counteroffensive at the end of August, its forces have retaken 90 towns and villages where more than 12,000 people were still living. ...”

NY Times

BBC: Russia accused of sabotaging Ukraine water pipe to Mykolaiv

Aljazeera: US lawmakers withdraw letter calling for Ukraine war diplomacy (Video)

NBC News: What is a 'dirty bomb' and what damage can it cause? (Video)

Police officers secure the scene in a "hazardous material hot area" after the explosion of a "dirty bomb" during a simulated attack at a dock at the Port of Los Angeles in 2004.

Son cubano

"Son cubano is a genre of music and dance that originated in the highlands of eastern Cuba during the late 19th century. It is a syncretic genre that blends elements of Spanish and African origin. Among its fundamental Hispanic components are the vocal style, lyrical metre and the primacy of the tres, derived from the Spanish guitar. On the other hand, its characteristic clave rhythm, call and response structure and percussion section (bongo, maracas, etc.) are all rooted in traditions of Bantu origin. Around 1909 the son reached Havana, where the first recordings were made in 1917. This marked the start of its expansion throughout the island, becoming Cuba's most popular and influential genre. ...”

W - Son cubano

The Influential Sounds of Son Cubano in Cuba (Video)

amazon: Cuba and Its Music. Ned Sublette, Guardian: Havana good time

YouTube: Jazz a la Cuba (1933), Sexteto Habanero-(Bururú Barará) Como Esta Miguel, El Manisero · Antonio Machin, El Bongo del Habanero · Sexteto Habanero, Papaupa.Son Montuno de Arsenio Rodriguez, Chano Pozo-Parampampin, Arsenio Rodriguez - Mi Chinita Me Boto, SEPTETO NACIONAL (Cuba 1920-....) SongoroCosongo&Donde estab

Sexteto Occidente: Maria Teresa Vera (guitar), Miguelito Garcia (clavé), Ignacio Piñeiro (double bass), Julio Torres Biart (tres), Manuel Reinoso (bongo) and Francisco Sanchez (maracas) Date 1926

​World Cup provisional squads explained: What are the rules and will they be made public?

"A month from today, it all begins. The World Cup in Qatar looms ever larger on the horizon and the countdown is on to the first of 64 games that will crown a winner at the Lusail Stadium on Sunday, December 18. Doubts persist over the suitability of Qatar to host this World Cup, as well as its readiness to welcome more than one million visitors, but the biggest names in football are about to descend on a tiny Gulf nation that’s half the size of Wales and roughly as big as the US state of Connecticut. …”

The Athletic

The Analyst: World Cup 2022 Guide to Each Group

​Terror to elation: Ukrainian woman’s journey from Azovstal to PoW to freedom

"It was like something from the cold war. After five months in the most notorious jail in occupied Ukraine, Alina Panina, 25, had found herself, without explanation, at the foot of a bridge over a river in no man’s land with 107 fellow female Ukrainian prisoners of war. Behind Panina lay Russian-occupied territory and her experiences of the siege of Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, the subsequent surrender and then captivity in Olenivka prison in Donetsk. There she was witness to the aftermath of an explosion that killed 53 male prisoners, a blast said by Kyiv to have been engineered by Moscow to silence the victims of torture. Ahead, north, stood the Russian PoWs for whom she and the other women were, it seemed, being swapped – and free Ukraine. ...”

Guardian

Aljazeera - Analysis: The Russia-Ukraine war and the view from Saudi Arabia (Video)

GRID: In Russia’s war against Ukraine, are ‘a coup or a nuke’ the only endgames left?

BBC - Ukraine war: The cost of occupation in Kherson region

Many villages in Kherson region were turned into a battleground

​Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated.

"When Representative Troy Nehls of Texas voted last year to reject Donald J. Trump’s electoral defeat, many of his constituents back home in Fort Bend County were thrilled. Like the former president, they have been unhappy with the changes unfolding around them. Crime and sprawl from Houston, the big city next door, have been spilling over into their once bucolic towns. ... The county in recent years has become one of the nation’s most diverse, where the former white majority has fallen to just 30 percent of the population. ...”

NY Times

Once predominantly white, Fort Bend has quickly become one of the most diverse places in the country. Its congressman is an outspoken denier of Donald J. Trump’s defeat.

 

​A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon

"South American and Mesoamerican civilizations have fascinated me since childhood, when I would watch The Mysterious Cities of Gold. ... Only ten years ago, I learned about Aztec codices and a whole world of deities, each taking care of some aspects of human life. Using these codices, I tried to identify them all, like a Pokemon chaser, despite scattered, partial and sometimes contradictory sources. I finally collected and restored illustrations of more than a hundred gods. ...”

The Pudding