"Time Magazine has named Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and 'the spirit of Ukraine' as its 2022 Person of the Year. The award goes to an event or person deemed to have had the most influence on global events over the past 12 months. ... The magazine's editor said the decision was ‘the most clear-cut in memory’. ‘In a world that had come to be defined by its divisiveness, there was a coming together around this cause, around this country,’ Edward Felsenthal wrote. He added that the ‘spirit of Ukraine’ referred to Ukrainians around the world, including many who ‘fought behind the scenes’. This includes people like Ievgen Klopotenko, a chef who provided thousands of free meals to Ukrainians and medic Yuliia Payevska who was captured, then released after three months in Russian captivity. ...”
Rook Radio 56 // Rare Soul & Funk
"Jay Rook steps back in for the latest episode, bring you another round of rare soul & funk 45s. He journeys from late 60s deep gems from Little Milton all the way to a hint of modern soul sweetness from the likes of Brief Encounter. As usual, expect only vinyl recorded at our Hackney Wick HQ. ...”
Trump Organization Found Guilty in Tax Fraud Scheme
"The Trump Organization, the family real estate business that made Donald J. Trump a billionaire and propelled him from reality television to the White House, was convicted on Tuesday of tax fraud and other crimes, forever tarring the former president and the company that bears his name. The conviction on all 17 counts, after more than a day of jury deliberations in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, stemmed from the company’s practice of doling out off-the-books perks to executives: They received luxury apartments, leased Mercedes-Benzes, extra cash at Christmas, even free cable television. They paid taxes on none of it. ...”
Ukraine war: Russian missile strikes force emergency power shutdowns
"Ukraine is switching to emergency shutdowns to stabilise its power grid after a fresh wave of Russian missile attacks hit the country on Monday. President Volodymyr Zelensky said many regions were affected, and officials said half of the Kyiv region would go without electricity in the coming days. Four people were killed in Monday's attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure. And overnight more missiles hit critical facilities near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, officials said. In a separate development on Tuesday, the governor of Russia's Kursk region said a drone attack on an airfield set an oil storage tank alight. Videos showed fierce flames and dense black smoke billowing from the site. That came after a series of explosions at two military airfields deep inside Russia on Monday, which Moscow blamed on Ukrainian drones....”
Ukraine is becoming colder, and the authorities are struggling to maintain power supplies
He’s the Bad Boy of Chess. But Did He Cheat?
"The day before he beat the greatest chess player in the world, Hans Niemann was a curly-haired 19-year-old American known only to serious fans of the game and mostly as an abrasive jerk. Everyone, it seems, has a story. Like that time in June, when he’d lost in the finals of a tournament in Prague, then stood in the ballroom of the hotel where the event was held and ranted against the city and the accommodations. ...”
2008 October: World Chess Championship 1972, 2009 January: Sicilian Defence, 2009 February: Mikhail Tal, 2009 February: Garry Kasparov, 2009 April: Vasily Smyslov, 2009 August: Chess960, 2009 November: Bent Larsen,2011 November: The Lewis Chessmen, 2012 July: 40 Years Ago Today: Chess Rivals Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky Meet in the ‘Match of the Century’, 2015 September: The Subtext Buried In Seven Great Movie Chess Scenes, 2018 December: The Last Chess Shop in New York City, 2019 May: Deep Blue, 2021 May: Chess in the arts, 2021 July: The Sharp Game, 2022 February: Making Moves at the Marshall Chess Club
It Never Entered My Mind, by The Miles Davis Quintet
"In 1955 Bob Weinstock found himself in a tough spot. He was about to lose his most revered recording artist, trumpeter Miles Davis. Weinstock was head of Prestige Records, the label Miles signed to in 1951 and recorded most of his albums with in the early 50s. The early albums Miles released under Prestige included many jazz greats such as Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, John Lewis and others, but until 1954 the output was spotty due to his Heroin addiction. But after Miles straitened himself and went cold turkey at his father’s house in Illinois and came back to the scene in March 1954, his recording career took off. ...”
In Forests Full of Mines, Ukrainians Find Mushrooms and Resilience
"ZDVYZHIVKA, Ukraine — Deep in a pine forest to the north of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, a beautiful mushroom warmed its brown cap in the gentle autumn sun — it was an all but irresistible scene for Ukrainian mushroom hunters. But all around there was danger. Cut through the mossy forest floor were line after line of trenches from the battle for Kyiv last winter, and countless mines and unexploded projectiles. Weighing the risk of mines and the allure of their quarry, thousands of Ukrainians in the first mushroom season since the Russian invasion hunted for mushrooms. Now, they are in the post-picking phase of the season, tallying their spoils and setting out to preserve them for the hard winter ahead....”
A mushroom growing on the forest floor in the Bucha area of Ukraine. During the first mushroom season since the Russian invasion, mushroom hunters were determined to carry on despite war.
When a public bathhouse opened on West 60th Street
"By 1906, New York City had six free municipal-run public bathhouses operating throughout Manhattan. The seventh, at 232 West 60th Street—in a rough tenement enclave between 10th and 11th Avenues—formally opened its doors in June of that year. A ceremony led by William H. Walker, superintendent of buildings, included a number of speeches. ... Now, at the dawn of the Progressive Era, people residing on either side of West 60th Street—the mostly Irish Hell’s Kitchen to the south, and the now-defunct African-American San Juan Hill neighborhood to the north—had a place not just to cool down in hot weather, but to bathe all year round. ...”
Pigs in a blanket
"Pigs in a blanket is a small hot dog or other sausage wrapped in pastry commonly served as an appetizer in the United States. The similarity in name with that of the UK dish pigs in blankets, which is a sausage wrapped in bacon, sometimes causes confusion. The term ‘pigs in a blanket’ typically refers to hot dogs in croissant dough, but may include Vienna sausages, cocktail or breakfast/link sausages baked inside biscuit dough or croissant dough. American cookbooks from the 1800s have recipes for ‘little pigs in blankets’, but this is a rather different dish of oysters rolled in bacon similar to angels on horseback. ...”
‘Our mission is crucial’: meet the warrior librarians of Ukraine
"The morning that Russian bombs started falling on Kyiv, Oksana Bruy woke up worried about her laptop. Bruy is president of the Ukrainian Library Association and, the night before, she hadn’t quite finished a presentation on the new plans for the Kyiv Polytechnic Library, so she had left her computer open at work. That morning, the street outside her house filled with the gunfire of Ukrainian militias executing Russian agents. Missile strikes drove her into an underground car park with her daughter, Anna, and her cat, Tom. A few days, later she crept back into the huge empty library, 15,000sqft once filled with the quiet murmurings of readers. As she grabbed her laptop, the air raid siren sounded and she rushed to her car. ...”
Russian troops deliberately shelled this library in Chernihiv, northern Ukraine, in April 2022.
Qatar’s World Cup Showcases Renewed Ties With Saudi Arabia, but Scars Remain
"There used to be so many Qataris in the bazaar in the Saudi oasis of Al-Ahsa, hunting for deals on spices and sandals, that some merchants called it 'the Qatar market.' Qataris would cross the border and drive 100 miles through the desert to reach the towns of Al-Ahsa, loading their SUVs with sacks of flour, dining in the restaurants and filling the hotels. Then came ‘the crisis,’ as people at the market call it. Saudi Arabia, along with Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, severed ties with Qatar in 2017 and effectively isolated the tiny country, accusing its government of supporting terrorism and meddling in their internal affairs. Qatari officials denied the allegations and accused Saudi Arabia and the other countries of creating a ‘blockade’ against their nation. …”
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, on the sidelines of the World Cup in Doha, Qatar.
Dando Shaft - An Evening With Dando Shaft (1970)
"This, the 1970 debut album from British Folkies Dando Shaft is a superb album. Using only acoustic instrumentation, and without a drummer, they manage to produce a thrilling, vibrant sound. It's an album that I find really suits the Autumn of the year, when nights drawn in and it starts getting chilly. Dando Shaft seemed to tap into that sense of 'getting back to the roots' that British Folk-Rock of the early seventies did back then. Songs such as 'Rain;, 'Cold Wind' and 'September Wine' are really evocative and quite beautiful. The rather more languid and summery closer, 'Lazily Slowly' has a dreamy melody and flute motif that is achingly beautiful. ...”
He Returned a Dazed Soldier to the Russians. Ukraine Calls It Treason.
"KHERSON, Ukraine — On the night of March 15, Illia Karamalikov received an unexpected phone call. As a nightclub owner and member of Kherson’s city council, he had been running a volunteer neighborhood watch in this southern Ukrainian city that had just been invaded by thousands of Russian troops. The soldiers had taken Kherson with little resistance but then largely kept going, racing toward other territory and showing no interest in administering the city. Looting and chaos followed until Mr. Karamalikov and others organized neighborhood patrols of local men. They weren’t working with the Russians but had their permission. ...”
Watchmen at the junction in Kherson where they captured a disoriented Russian pilot in March.
Cooking with Intizar Husain - Valerie Stivers
"The novel Basti by Intizar Husain begins with children in the fictional village of Rupnagar— which means beautiful place in Urdu—shopping for staple foods like salt and brown sugar. Trees here breathe ‘through the centuries,’ time ‘speaks’ in the voices of birds, the world is new, and the sky is fresh. From a distance, elephants look like mountains moving. For the children, including the novel’s protagonist, Zakir, one source of information about the world is the town shopkeeper, Bhagat-ji, a Hindu; Zakir’s father, Abba Jan, a Muslim, is another. ...”
Sight and Sound: The Greatest Films of All Time
"In 1952, the Sight and Sound team had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed. The Sight and Sound poll is now a major bellwether of critical opinion on cinema and this year’s edition (its eighth) is the largest ever, with 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics each submitting their top ten ballot. What has risen up the ranks? What has fallen? Has 2012’s winner Vertigo held on to its title? Find out below. ...”
Shadowy Arm of a German State Helped Russia Finish Nord Stream 2
"SCHWERIN, Germany — Between a tram stop and a kebab shop, the gray building in the northeastern German city of Schwerin looks innocuous enough — and so does its tenant, the Foundation for the Protection of the Climate and Environment. Yet this regional foundation, created 23 months ago by the local state government, has done little for the climate. Instead, it served as a conduit for at least 165 million euros from the Kremlin-owned energy company Gazprom to build one of the world’s most contested gas pipelines: Nord Stream 2. The United States in 2020 was threatening sanctions against any company working on the pipeline. The thinking was that putting companies under the umbrella of a foundation would deter Washington from imposing the penalties because it would then effectively be targeting a German government body. ...”
GRID - The Crimea question: Why Ukraine’s final battle might be the Western alliance’s toughest test
Pipes from Nord Stream 2 work in Sassnitz, Germany. Russia invaded Ukraine weeks after the pipeline was finished.
Travelling the Weimar Republic in the footsteps of the Expressionist directors
"Coming so soon after a crushing military defeat and a failed socialist revolution, the birth of a new German cinema in the 1920s is frankly astonishing. More surprising still is that Weimar Germany, home to some of the modernist era’s most daring avant-garde thinkers, became such a powerhouse of innovative cinematic ideas that it rivalled Hollywood. Expressionist cinema is intimately bound to the events and fallout of the First World War. In the years immediately following Germany’s defeat, the nation was attempting to adjust to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and find a way of meeting the financial demands of the Versailles Treaty. ...”
Expressionist art offers examples of the uncanny "second sight": Beckmann pictures the Frankfurt synagogue in 1919 with its wall slanting as if they might topple at any moment.
Complete Communion: Jazz For November Reviewed By Peter Margasak
"Newly unearthed archival recordings of live dates from the 1960s, a profound homage to the swing-and-drag aesthetic of drummer Paul Motian from former collaborators, a new quintet from the veteran Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson, and a thrumming quintet session from drummer Tom Skinner of The Smile are featured in Peter Margasak’s latest round up of jazz and improvised music ...”
In Ukraine, Russia is trying to freeze us into submission or death. It will fail.
"The Holodomor is one of the most terrifying words ever coined: no movie or book can convey its horrors. Have you ever tried to imagine mass starvation? Millions of slow, torturous, painful deaths. It’s difficult even to conceive of it – but it’s there in the historical record. Picture it: people cling to life with all their dwindling might. They eat grass, leather boots, tree bark. They mix orach with pounded corn cobs. They grind millet husks with weeds, just to last a day longer. The foods are hardly chewable, and the human body cannot digest them, so people have constant stomach aches. They make the legs swell and the skin crack. Bodies lie in the streets. Some are missing flesh. Mothers lose their senses seeing their kids die. ...”
Starving people in the Ukraine during the civil war 1920/21
Mars Mesmerizes at December Opposition
"Like that back-ordered telescope we've been waiting months to receive, the truck has finally arrived and delivered Mars to our doorstep. Impressively bright at magnitude –1.8, it rises in Taurus in the scintillating company of the Winter Hexagon gang. Despite this not being a particularly close opposition, the Red Planet sails high in the sky, where improved better atmospheric seeing helps to compensate for its relatively small apparent diameter. ...”
This map of Mars's surface shows key features visible during the planet's last opposition in 2020. Winds and dust storms, which recirculate topsoil, can alter the appearance of albedo markings at each opposition. Giovanni Schiaparelli, a 19th-century Italian astronomer, invented the Martian nomenclature, basing it on place names from ancient history and mythology.
“This Is A Revolution”: 5 Women On The Ongoing Fight For Freedom In Iran
"Shiva Mahbobi stands up and holds out her arms, stretching them like wings. At five feet tall she cuts a delicate, birdlike figure, her face crowned by the blonde streak in her quiff. ‘It was about this big,’ she says, indicating the claustrophobic two-metre span of the Iranian prison cell where she spent seven months of solitary confinement. A small window, high above her, offered a narrow glimpse of sky. The walls around her were painted yellow, peeling and crumbling, like her mind was expected to, as she battled to stay sane through loneliness, boredom, filth, sickness and pain. ...”
Winter starts, Ukraine goes dark: Fear and resolve in blackouts
"Kyiv, Ukraine – I’m not much of a fighter, but I know the feeling. And if you’ve ever prepared to take a punch to the stomach, you know the feeling, too. The intake of breath. The tensing of the muscles. The knowledge that the blow is coming. The hope that it won’t be too painful. That’s what it’s like in Ukraine, waiting for the next wave of Russian missile strikes. Everyone knows it’s inevitable. It’s just a question of when. And how bad. Since October 10, every few days, Russia has deployed its strategic bombers and warships to unleash aerial devastation on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. Cruise missiles have smashed into power plants and water facilities. Most are shot down by Ukrainian air defence. But enough get through to take large parts of the energy grid down completely. ...”
A pedestrian passes by cars covered in snow, in Kyiv, Ukraine, November 30, 2022
Ambient Music With A Library Of Congress C1 Cassette Player
"In his latest video, synthesist Hainbach takes a look at the Library Of Congress C1 Cassette Player, and using it for creating ambient music. The C1 has some unique features, making it an interesting tool for experimenting with cassette tapes. It offers variable speed tape playback, half speed switching, and the ability to play both sides of a tape without flipping the tape. Here’s another performance featuring a C1 and other cassette players, playing tape loops, via Amulets (Randall Taylor). ...”
2018 October: Distressed Tape, 2019 February: Sandpaper Is a Form of Change, 2019 February: Hainbach - Gear Top 7: My Personal Favorites In 2018, 2019 May: The Sound of Architecture and Design | Bauhaus, Piezo Microphones and FX, 2019 June: Make Noise Morphage - My "Film Noir" Reel, 2019 August: The Sands Take You | tape loop, OP-1 (2019), 2019 September: Gestures (2019)
Shopping Diary
"September 14. I am in my mobile mall, which is my phone’s WiFi hotspot on the NJ Transit. Paynter Jacket Co. is this British couple, Becky and Huw, who make chore jackets in micro-batches. When you purchase a jacket, you also buy its journey, from sourcing the cloth to cutting the pattern to meeting with Sergio, who serges the jackets together in Portugal. I already have their perfect chore jacket from a micro-micro-batch, a Japanese tiger-print patchwork. The latest is a Carpenter Jacket, so, not a chore jacket at all. ...”
Camille à la ville paper dolls.
Ukraine Warns of More Strikes on Power Plants, as Russians Dig In
"Amid Ukrainian warnings that Moscow is preparing a new wave of strikes on energy plants, Russian forces are fortifying their defensive lines in southern Ukraine after retreating from the city of Kherson. Since being ordered to pull out of Kherson earlier this month, Russian troops have been digging trenches and erecting barriers against the possibility of a new Ukrainian offensive east and south of the city, a gateway to the occupied Crimean Peninsula. But the Kremlin, presumably still stinging from the bitter setbacks, on Monday dismissed widespread speculation that its forces might soon relinquish another prize in Ukraine’s south, the nuclear plant in Zaporizhzhia that it seized soon after invading in February. ...”
Milford Graves Full Mantis review – cutting-edge drums and terrific storytelling
"What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A drummer. Except that this delightfully entertaining and idiosyncratic music documentary ought to banish the stereotype of drummers as talentless thickos. It’s also one of those films you can happily watch without having a jot of prior interest in its subject. Just as well, because few will have heard of Milford Graves, the avant-garde jazz percussionist. In archive footage of a noisy performance with other 1960s pioneers – this film is too cool for subtitles to tell you who’s who – there’s a woman in the audience with her hands clamped over her ears, face a rictus of pure agony. ...”
William Blake - Satan Exulting over Eve (1795)
"Satan hovers in malevolent glory over Eve, who is entwined by his alter ego, the serpent of the Garden of Eden. The uneven, fibrous, opaque color of the ground under Eve distinguishes this area as printed, while the even sweep of the red washes shows that the flames behind Satan are mostly watercolor, a medium William Blake often used because he liked its transparent quality. Blake's images reflected his own very personal visions, which he insisted were ‘not a cloudy vapour or a nothing; they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.’ The twelve large, color-printed drawings that he created in 1795 rank among his most complex works. ...”
2009 April: William Blake, 2010 December: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 2011 June: The Ghost of a Flea, 2012 August: Isaac Newton (1795), 2015 November: America a Prophecy (1793), 2019 May: The Notebook of William Blake, 2019 October: ‘To Particularize Is the Alone Distinction of Merit’: Blake’s Visionary Imagination, 2021 September: William Blake’s 102 Illustrations of The Divine Comedy Collected in a Beautiful Book from Taschen, 2022 May: William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary
Monday briefing: How the weather could sway the outcome of the war
"Good morning. As winter arrives in Ukraine, sleet and snow will become a daily fact of life. Depending on the severity of the weather, the ground will become impassably muddy, or freeze over. Civilians in parts of the country will be left without power, heating or water as a result of Russian attacks on infrastructure, and could face frostbite, hypothermia and pneumonia. Temperatures will get as low as -20C. While the months ahead look grim, the question of how these drastically changing conditions will impact the progress of the war is more complicated. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Julian Borger, reporting for the Guardian from Kyiv, about how both sides will hope to use the circumstances to their advantage – and how the prospects for diplomacy could be shaped by the facts on the ground. ...”
Ukraine accuses Russia of committing war crimes throughout its full-scale invasion - including in Bucha, near Kyiv
Avatar deepartnature 41s ago Octavio Paz: Political thought
"... Originally, Paz supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, but after learning of the murder of one of his friends by the Stalinist secret police, he became gradually disillusioned. While in Paris in the early 1950s, influenced by David Rousset, André Breton and Albert Camus, he started publishing his critical views on totalitarianism in general, and particularly against Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union. ... In his magazines Plural and Vuelta, Paz exposed the violations of human rights in communist regimes, including Castro's Cuba. Paz continued to consider himself a man of the left, the democratic, 'liberal' left, not the dogmatic and illiberal one. ... Politically, Paz was a social democrat, who became increasingly supportive of liberal ideas without ever renouncing to his initial leftist and romantic views. ...”
Revisiting The Jam's riotous performance of 'In The City' from 1977
"This week marks 43 years since The Jam announced their arrival onto the scene with their riotous debut single ‘In The City’, a track which immediately stopped Britain in their tracks and the mod revival would then be born. The impressionable three-piece warmed themselves to angry teens across the country from the get-go, instantly connecting to Paul Weller, Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler who, in appearance, looked like people they would associate with and, opposing to the mainstream musicians of the time, not some pop star who appears to have been dropped down from an alien planet. ...”
2009 March: The Jam, 2012 November: "Going Underground", 2013 January: In the City, 2013 February: This Is the Modern World, 2013 July: All Mod Cons, 2013 November: Setting Sons, 2014 January: Sound Affects (1980), 2014 December: Live At Bingley Hall, Birmingham, England 1982, 2015 March: "Town Called Malice" / "Precious", 2015 September: "Strange Town" / "The Butterfly Collector" (1979), 2016 April: "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight" (1979), 2017 January: Absolute Beginners EP (1981), 2017 March: David Watts / "A" Bomb In Wardour Street (1978), 2017 December: The Gift (1982), 2018 May: Peel Session
Even amid murderous Russian raids, western apathy is Kyiv’s deadliest foe
"A two-day-old baby is killed in an attack on a maternity ward in southern Ukraine. Officials say at least 437 children have died since Russia’s invasion began. More than 800 have been injured. How many kids are permanently traumatised is anybody’s guess. Every day, Vladimir Putin gets away with murder.The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station is shelled again, despite repeated UN warnings of Europe-wide catastrophe. In liberated Kherson, more grisly evidence of war crimes is uncovered. Wherever the Russians go, it’s the same horror story. Every day the killers go unpunished. ...”
A couple walks in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 24, 2022, after a Russian rocket attack knocked out power.
Religious war
"A religious war or a war of religion, sometimes also known as a holy war (Latin: sanctum bellum), is a war which is primarily caused or justified by differences in religion. In the modern period, there are frequent debates over the extent to which religious, economic, ethnic or other aspects of a conflict are predominant in a given war. The degree to which a war may be considered religious depends on many underlying questions, such as the definition of religion, the definition of 'religious war' (taking religious traditions on violence such as 'holy war' into account), and the applicability of religion to war as opposed to other possible factors. Answers to these questions heavily influence conclusions on how prevalent religious wars have been as opposed to other types of wars. ...”
World Cup 2022: How Teams Can Advance to the Round of 16
"The 2022 World Cup is well underway. This year’s tournament is a little more open than usual, our chief soccer correspondent writes. And with the first matches completed in each group, we’ve already seen two major upsets: Argentina’s loss to Saudi Arabia, and Germany’s defeat against Japan. In the tournament’s opening matches, known as the group stage, each team plays the other three teams in its group, earning three points for a win and one point for a draw. ...”
‘I can’t take up a weapon, so I create’: how Ukraine’s artists are taking on Putin’s Russia
"When I meet him, artist Oleksiy Sai, along with his wife and son, have slept the night in their studio, a warren of rooms tucked behind an unassuming courtyard in central Kyiv. It’s on the ground floor, and with good walls, so they reckon it’s reasonably safe from Russian rockets. Safer, that is, than their apartment: the previous day they were woken by the juddering scream-boom of cruise missile strikes, one cratering a children’s playground a block from their flat. Somehow, their windows survived, though the glass was blown out of most of the nearby buildings. Now, the whole family is busy making work: his son Vasyl is at a screen editing videos; his wife, Svitlana Ratoshnyuk, is making folksy textiles embroidered with ‘Fuck Putin’ in Ukrainian. ...”
Salvaging belongings and clearing debris from a residential building hit by Russian missiles this week in Vyshhorod, Ukraine.
