Bill Frisell - Four (2022)

"Two years after issuing his acclaimed trio album Valentine, GRAMMY Award-winning guitarist and composer Bill Frisell returns with Four, a stunning meditation on loss, renewal, and those mysterious inventions of friendship. Frisell’s third album for Blue Note Records since signing with the label in 2019 proffers new interpretations of previously recorded originals as well as nine new tunes. The session brings together artists of independent spirits and like minds: Blue Note stablemates Gerald Clayton on piano and Johnathan Blake on drums, and longtime collaborator Greg Tardy on saxophone, clarinet, and bass clarinet. ...”

Blue Note (Video)

Discogs (Video)

2018 April: Music IS (2018), 2020 October: Guitar in the Space Age (2014)

‘Fear Still Remains’: Ukraine Finds Sexual Crimes Where Russian Troops Ruled

"KHERSON, Ukraine — On her eighth or ninth day in Russian detention, Olha, a 26-year-old Ukrainian, was tied to a table, naked to the waist. For 15 minutes, her interrogator leveled obscenities at her, then threw a jacket over her and let seven other men into the room. ... Sitting in Olha’s cramped kitchen weeks later in Kherson, in southern Ukraine, Anna Sosonska, an investigator with the prosecutor general’s office, listened to her recount the ordeal — an account of forced nudity that, prosecutors say, added to an accumulation of evidence that Russian forces had used sexual crimes as a weapon of war in the places they once ruled. ... After months of bureaucratic and political delays, Ukrainian officials are gathering pace in documenting sexual crimes, which are prevalent and devastating in times of war but often remain hidden under layers of shame, stigma and fear. ...”

NY Times

BBC - Ukraine war: Defying Russian onslaught in city 'at the end of the world'

Olha, a 26-year-old Ukrainian, faced sexual violence by Russian soldiers when she was detained in Kherson.

Delroy Wilson – Worth Your Weight In Gold (1984)

"Radiation Roots present a reissue of Delroy Wilson's Worth Your Weight In Gold, originally released in 1984. Delroy Wilson, one of Jamaica's best loved vocalists, got his start with Coxsone Dodd's Studio One label, scoring his first hit when he was just 15 years old. His career soon took off and Wilson spent most of the following two decades producing hits for Dodd, as well as Sonia Pottinger, and Bunny Lee. These six tracks, recorded at Channel One and produced by Augustus ‘Gussie’ Clarke, feature the unbeatable drums and bass of Sly And Robbie. ...”

Forced Exposure (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Worth Your Weight In Gold

2022 October: Dancing Mood at King Tubby Studios (1966)

The Written World and the Unwritten World - Italo Calvino

"I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public—that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. ...”

The Paris Review

2020 April: Invisible Cities (1972), 2021 September: Cooking with Italo Calvino - Valerie Stivers

Atelier of the Boxes, ivory writing tablet and lid (Medieval, between 1340 and 1360, northern France)

The Ukraine War in Its Second Winter—and Beyond

"As Russia’s war in Ukraine crosses over into 2023 and approaches its one-year mark next month, consider this thought experiment: Suppose that in early 2015, after Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, Russia’s seizure of Crimea, and the start of the Kremlin-instigated low-grade war in Eastern Ukraine, a fiction writer with a satirical bent—say, the late Vladimir Voinovich—had written a novel about a full-fledged Russia-Ukraine war in which the following things happen: The Kremlin announces the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces after high-speed ‘referendums,’ and President Vladimir Putin solemnly declares that they are permanently part of Russia—but officials acknowledge that the actual borders of these newly ‘Russian’ lands are unknown since a good part of them is under Ukraine’s control. About six weeks later, a major city in the annexed territories, Kherson, is retaken by Ukraine while ‘Russia is here forever’ billboards and posters still festoon its streets and squares. ...”

The Bulwark

GRID: Did smartphones get dozens of Russian soldiers killed? Armies around the world are struggling to keep troops off their phones.

Aljazeera: Putin puts warship armed with hypersonic missiles on combat duty (Video)

Guardian: Moscow blames its troops’ use of mobile phones for Makiivka missile strike

Emergency service workers extinguish a fire after shelling on the Bakhmut frontline in Ivanivske, Ukraine as Russia-Ukraine war continues on January 02, 2023.

Guillermo del Toro - Crafting Pinocchio

"‘No art form has influenced my life and my work more than animation and no single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio,’ the acclaimed director Guillermo del Toro has said. Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio, an exhibition uniquely organized during the production of a feature film, focuses on Del Toro’s first stop-motion animated feature—an innovative reinterpretation of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s novel, now set in Fascist-era Italy. ...”

MoMA

W - Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

YouTube: Featurette - "Handcrafting Pinocchio" (2022) Animation

VF Live: Poly-Ritmo #7

"Zouk, soul and broken beat records to get dancefloors moving.In VF Live, DJs take you inside their homes, record stores, and studios for intimate sets and mixes.For her seventh set, London-based DJ Poly-Ritmo selects zouk, Brazilian edits, soul, and broken beat records that ‘are tried and tested to make any dancefloor move!’ ...”

Vinyl Factory (Video/Audio)

Russia’s War Could Make It India’s World

"Seated in the domed, red sandstone government building unveiled by the British Raj less than two decades before India threw off imperial rule, S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, needs no reminder of how the tides of history sweep away antiquated systems to usher in the new.Such, he believes, is today’s transformative moment. A ‘world order which is still very, very deeply Western,’ as he put it in an interview, is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of ‘multi-alignment’ where countries will choose their own ‘particular policies and preferences and interests.’ Certainly, that is what India has done since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24. ...”

NY Times

Guardian: Why am I learning Ukrainian? Because language is political for the country I’ve grown to love

NY Times: How Russia’s War on Ukraine Is Worsening Global Starvation

A Hindu ritual on the banks of the Ganges River in Varanasi, northern India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has chosen Varanasi as a core vehicle of his assertion of India as a Hindu nation, raising tensions with Muslims.

​William S. Burroughs' connection to 'Blade Runner'

"William S. Burroughs was a prominent figure in the Beatnik generation of prose writers and had a far-reaching influence on popular culture in music, art, film and literature. Burroughs’ style was highly experimental, and interestingly, he also played a hand in the development of Blade Runner. Of course, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film was based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? so Burroughs’ connection to the film starring Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard is more indirect. In 1979, Burroughs published a science fiction novella by the name Blade Runner (a movie). ...”

FAROUT (Video)

Like An Octopus On The Citizen: What Even Is A Blade Runner? (Video)

William Burroughs, “Blade Runner: A Movie”

W - Blade Runner (a movie)

2009 May: Cut-up technique - 1, 2010 March: Cut-up technique, 2010 December: The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag, 2014 February: William Burroughs at 100, 2014 September: The Ticket That Exploded, 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2015 June: The Electronic Revolution (1971), 2015 August: Cut-Ups: William S. Burroughs 1914 – 2014, 2015 December: Destroy All Rational Thought, 2016 January: Commissioner of Sewers: A 1991 Profile of Beat Writer William S. Burroughs, 2016 June: Nothing Here Now But The Recordings (1981), 2016 September: # 1 – A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, 2016 December: #6 – Call Me Burroughs LP, 2017 January: A Visit to William S. Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Summer, 1958, 2017 December: The Nova Trilogy (The Cut-up Trilogy), 2018 September: Material - The Road to the Western Lands (1998), 2019 March: Insect Trust Gazette (1964 / 1968), 2020 June: Broadsides - William S. Burroughs Collecting, 2021 July: A Word Is a Word Is a Collage (1965)

​The story of a Fifth Avenue mansion scorned by its second owner as a “gardener’s cottage”

"If houses could talk, I’m betting 1048 Fifth Avenue would tell lots of stories—specifically about the first two of its four total owners over more than a century overlooking 86th Street. The first owner was a wealthy industrialist who made the most of his good fortune, holding his daughter’s wedding to a British lord in the music room. The other owner was a society doyenne forced to downsize from an 80+ room palace, and she dubbed it a mere cottage compared to the house she was accustomed to. The story began during the Fifth Avenue mansion-building mania after 1890. For the next 25 years, a rush of business titans and old money millionaires sought to build their castles opposite Central Park. ...”

Ephemeral New York

​Music and missile strikes: Ukraine rings in the New Year under Russian attack

"KYIV, Ukraine — An industrial warehouse vibrated to the thud of speakers ahead of the new year as a group of young revelers in the Ukrainian capital seized the opportunity to briefly forget the bitter tune of warning sirens and missile blasts that has dominated the past 10 months. Dozens gathered in this dilapidated corner of Kyiv on Friday to party, determined to celebrate — if only for one DJ set — despite the destruction Russia continued to rain down ahead of 2023. It was one of a number of smaller events planned around Kyiv and other cities to mark the occasion, as a show of defiance against Moscow’s bombardment and in some cases as an opportunity to raise funds for Ukraine’s military. ... Dressed in a skin-tight black vinyl top, hot pants, tights, platform boots and black contact lenses, Ugly Boy looked every bit a holiday partygoer. But the timing of the event — day time on Friday, the day before New Year’s Eve — was unusual. ...”

NBC News (Video)

NY Times: Clergymen or Spies? Churches Become Tools of War in Ukraine

Guardian - ‘Terror on New Year’s Eve’: huge Russian missile attack kills one in Ukraine (Video)

Critical Threats: Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 30

Revelers at a party to celebrate New Years in Kyiv, Ukraine on Friday.

Watch How Arctic Air Blanketed the U.S. Last Week

"As you might have noticed, it was unusually cold last week. The animation above depicts the weather system’s bone-chilling journey across the country as the spinning expanse of Arctic air known as the polar vortex bulged south before righting itself and returning to its northern home. Along the way, it brought subzero temperatures, a Midwestern blizzard and a devastating snowstorm that buried the Buffalo area for days. The animation visualizes data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ...”

NY Times

Camille Pissarro - Piette's House at Montfoucault (1874)

"During the winter of 1874, Pissarro visited his friend and fellow artist Ludovic Piette at his farmhouse in the village of Montfoucault, southwest of Paris. This painting shows the house and surrounding gardens blanketed in deep snow. The artist used a limited range of colors and worked quickly in the cold, leaving the bare canvas visible in places between areas of thickly applied paint.“

The Clark

​What happened in the Russia-Ukraine war this week? Catch up with the must-read news and analysis

"... Annexations. In a major escalation in the seven-month old war, Vladimir Putin on Friday signed papers marking the illegal annexation of the occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk.In reply, a defiant Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the Ukrainian president, announced that Ukraine was officially applying for membership of Nato, saying he was taking this ‘decisive step’ in order to protect ‘the entire community’ of Ukrainians. He promised the application would happen in an ‘expedited manner’. In the Grand Kremlin Palace, Putin signed ‘accession treaties’ – in defiance of international law – formalising Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine, marking the largest forcible takeover of territory in Europe since the second world war. It came on the heels of Kremlin-orchestrated fake referendums in the regions. ...”

Guardian

POLITICO: Putin, Xi vow closer ties as Russia bombards Ukraine again (Video)

NY Times: In Battered Ukrainian City, the Latest Battle is Against Winter

A firefighter from Emergency Service Department Number 21, the single working fire station in Lyman, Ukraine, extinguishing a fire in an abandoned home this month.

​Celebrating Pele, the greatest player in World Cup history

"It is a matter of opinion whether Edson Arantes do Nascimento was the greatest footballer in the history of the world, but there’s little doubt he was the greatest footballer in the history of the World Cup. One simple fact concisely demonstrates that: Pele won it three times. No one else in history, man or woman, can match that. There was more to Pele than simply the World Cup. At club level, he won six Brazilian titles, two Copa Libertadores trophies and remains Santos’ all-time top goalscorer. He subsequently starred in the North American Soccer League for New York Cosmos. But no one has ever matched Pele’s World Cup record, achieved when international football, rather than club football, was unquestionably the most revered form of the game. …”

The Athletic

NY Times: Pelé, a Name That Became Shorthand for Perfection (Video)

NY Times: Pelé, the Global Face of Soccer, Dies at 82 (Video)

NY Times: Pelé Will Live Forever

YouTube: Pele’s Top 5 Goals, Pele’s Best Skills

Developer Takes a Nosedive as Court Orders Foreclosure and Sale of Old P.S. 64 in the East Village

"With a stroke of her pen last Friday, December 23, New York Supreme Court Justice Melissa Crane appears to have ended developer Gregg Singer’s two-decades-long campaign to convert a landmarked former school building in the East Village into an upscale college dorm. Justice Crane ruled that Singer — who purchased the dilapidated, turn-of-the-century school near Tompkins Square Park in 1998 — has defaulted on the $44 million loan he took out in 2016 to finance his dorm conversion scheme. ... It’s a rather bizarre twist of fate for the old school, which has languished empty for the past 21 years, ever since Singer evicted CHARAS/El Bohio, the Puerto Rican–led community center that occupied the building in 1979, after the school was abandoned by the city. ...”

Voice

On December 20, a truck delivered scaffolding to P.S. 64 under the watchful gaze of a new mural symbolizing the spirit of Loisaida.

‘Senseless barbarism’: Russian missiles target Ukraine’s cities

 "Russia has launched a barrage of missile attacks across Ukraine targeting several major cities, including the capital Kyiv, in one of its biggest assaults in weeks. Ukraine’s military said it shot down 54 missiles out of 69 launched by Russia in an attack that began at 7am local time (05:00 GMT) on Thursday. Air raid sirens rang out across the country, and in Kyiv blared for five hours – one of the longest alarms of the war. No deaths were immediately reported.Ukraine’s air force said the attacks had involved sea- and air-based cruise missiles fired ‘from different directions’ and followed an overnight assault by kamikaze drones. Air defence systems were activated in Kyiv to fend off the raids, according to local officials. ...”

Aljazeera - ‘Senseless barbarism’: Russian missiles target Ukraine’s cities (Video)

The Intercept_: Danish Reporter Says Ukrainian Intelligence Tried to Coerce Her Into Working as a Propagandist (Video)

NBC News: Massive Russian missile barrage pummels cities across Ukraine (Video)

Guardian: ‘Surviving will be difficult’: west sending warm clothes to Ukraine as temperatures fall

A rescue worker walks among homes destroyed by a missile attack in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday.

​Wild and Wilde: At Celebrity Cemetery, Nature Takes on Starring Role

"PARIS — Dry leaves rustled under Benoît Gallot’s footsteps as he rambled his way across the rugged terrain. Stopping by shrubs of laurel and elder, he pulled aside their foliage to uncover a crumbling stone colonnade. A parakeet, perched up in a nearby tree, squawked. It looked like a scene deep in one of France’s luxuriant forests — but this was inside one of the world’s most visited burial grounds, the Père-Lachaise cemetery, nestled between traffic-laden avenues in eastern Paris.The cemetery has long been known as the final resting place for celebrated artists, including Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Édith Piaf. ...”

NY Times

Elegy of a Voyage - Aleksandr Sokurov (2001)

"There is perhaps no other living filmmaker whose work reveals the difference between dramatic and lyric in cinema better than Aleksandr Sokurov. His films and videos exist less to tell stories – although there is usually the thread of some plot or situation – than to expand a moment in time, a sense of place, or an emotion, often to epic duration. Throughout his career, his video elegies series has taken this lyrical impulse to its extreme, achieving a new height in contemplative art. ... Elegy of a Voyage, commissioned by the Boijmans Van Beunigen Museum in Rotterdam, is Sokoruv's meditation on classic painting, specifically Breughel's The Tower of Babel. The journey of the title is the one that brings him into the painting's holy presence. ...”

Film Critic

Sokurov

Video:  Elegy of a Voyage  47:20

2009 March: Aleksandr Sokurov, 2021 August: Russian Ark (2002)

The battle for Kyiv revisited: the litany of mistakes that cost Russia a quick win

"Six days before Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, a small group of western intelligence officers were briefing on the Russian military plan. On a quiet table, in an unfashionable chain restaurant in London, an astonishing strategy was recounted: a blitzkrieg to surround Kyiv and Ukraine’s other big cities, followed by a ‘kill list’ operation run by Russian FSB intelligence to eliminate Ukraine’s national and local leaders.Western intelligence was certain of the Kremlin’s intentions. But many of the Russian soldiers about to start the biggest war in Europe since the second world war had no clear idea what was to come. Bored troops, nominally on exercises in Khoyniki, Belarus, 30 miles north of Ukraine, were selling their diesel fuel in the week before the invasion and passing the time by drinking. ...”

Guardian

Aljazeera - 2022 review: Visualising how the Russia-Ukraine war unfolded

NY Times: Russia rejects a new Ukrainian proposal for peace talks.

On the Main Road. Retreat, escape… by the Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin, depicts the startling defeat of Napoleon I in Russia in 1812.

​The Great Authorial Hook-Up Chart

"When you think of the literary world, ‘sex appeal’ isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. But your favorite authors weren't just using their imaginations when it came to writing about sex. A little digging will show that French novelist Colette had an affair with her stepson, Simone de Beauvoir recruited lovers for her husband and everyone else was basically hooking up with each other. As you can see on the chart above, it doesn't take much to get from Oscar Wilde to Roald Dahl. ...”

The Airship

The Webb Telescope Is Just Getting Started

"So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, named for James Webb, the NASA administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. ...”

NY Times

Annotated views of the Cosmic Cliffs, indicating some of Megan Reiter’s observations.

Ukraine war: Five ways conflict could go in 2023

"... Those who seek to invade another country anywhere across the great Eurasian steppes are condemned eventually to winter in it. Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin all had to keep their armies moving in the face of a steppes winter, and now - his invasion going backwards on the ground - Vladimir Putin is digging his forces in for the winter to await a new Russian offensive in the spring.Both sides need a pause but the Ukrainians are better equipped and motivated to keep going, and we can expect them to maintain the pressure, at least in the Donbas. Around Kreminna and Svatove they are very close to a big breakthrough that would throw Russian forces 40 miles back to the next natural defensive line, close to where their invasion effectively began in February. ...”

BBC

Vox: 2022, in 7 minutes (Video)

NY Times: Russian City Mourns Its Lost Soldiers, but Doesn’t Resent Putin’s War

POLITICO: Ukraine takes two steps forward, one step back in anti-corruption fight (Audio)

Destroyed Russian tank in liberated town of Sviatohirsk

Tango: The Art History of Love – Robert Farris Thompson (2005)

"... With the publication of Tango: The Art History of Love last autumn, [Robert Farris] Thompson gave that century-old, planet-wide phenomenon its black spring, detailing roots in Montevideo’s candombe rituals and black gaucho milongas out on the pampas. Kongo precedents prep the dance ground, then a knife pegged in the floorboards serves as razor pylon while 1930’s tanguero Cachafaz bests rival El Negro Santillán. Tango returns the drumless music formulated in South America’s whitest land to the hands of black innovators such as bassist Leopoldo Thompson, who fueled legendary orchestras led by Firpo, Canaro, and de Caro, and Horacio Salgán, whose hot sound spiced with arrastres — slurred low notes that incite the dance — spurred Ella Fitzgerald to initiate Salgán’s 1965 disc, Buenos Aires at 3 a.m. ...”

Cutting the Transcultural Rug: An Evening with Robert Farris Thompson, by Alan Lockwood

Soundcloud: A Tango with Robert Farris Thompson (Audio) 59:00

amazon

UbuWeb: Sound - Tellus #16 - Tango (Audio)

The Hidden History of Tango

2014 April: Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy, 2017 February: Canons of the Cool, 2021 December: Robert Farris Thompson, ‘Guerrilla Scholar’ of African Art, Dies at 88

The History of Barcelona, in 26 Interactive Maps

"It’s now possible to flip through the key chapters of Barcelona’s life as a city, through the The Historic Charter of Barcelona. This is a new interactive mapping project tracking the history of the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region from 150 A.D. to 2010, created by an urban-planning and data-viz collective called 300.000 Km/s (whose projects we’ve written about in the past). ...”

Bloomberg

The History of Barcelona

​The revenge of history in Ukraine: year of war has shaken up world order

"The Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recalls a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “Wars are not won by generals, but by schoolteachers and parish priests.” It’s a country’s taught collective memory, its shared sense of its own history, that are the decisive instruments for mobilisation, and are as important on the battlefield as weaponry.Few conflicts have been so shaped by the chief actors’ sense of their own national story as the Ukrainian war that began in February. It is the competing grand narratives of the past, not just in Russia and Ukraine, but in Germany, France, Poland, the Baltics, the UK, the US, and even the global south, that make this war so hard to resolve.Indeed, sometimes this war feels less like the end of history and more like the revenge of history. ...”

Guardian

GRID - World in Photos: Christmas in Ukraine

NY Times: In Nord Stream Mystery, Baltic Seabed Provides a Nearly Ideal Crime Scene

A section of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in Lubmin, Germany. ...

​Haitian Revolution

"The Haitian Revolution ... was a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti. The revolt began on 22 August 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony's independence. It involved black, biracial, French, Spanish, British, and Polish participants—with the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerging as Haiti's most prominent general. The revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery (though not from forced labour) and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World.  Haiti at the beginning of the Haitian revolution in 1791. The revolution's effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. ...”

Wikipedia

The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery

YouTube: Greatest Black Emancipation   The Haitian Revolution 1791 1804

The Battle for Palm Tree Hill - January Suchodolski, 1845

Diary Days from Christmas Past

"With December 25th fast approaching we have put together a little collection of entries for Christmas Day from an eclectic mix of different diaries spanning five centuries, from 1599 to 1918. Amid famed diarists such as the wife-beating Samuel Pepys, the distinctly non-festive John Adams, and the rhapsodic Thoreau, there are a sprinkling of daily jottings from relative unknowns - many speaking apart from loved ones, at war, sea or in foreign climes. All diaries are housed at the Internet Archive - click the link below each extract to take you to the source. ...”

Public Domain Review

In Ukraine, Christmas Lights Defy Darkness of War, and Children Ask for Peace

"KYIV, Ukraine — Hundreds of missiles and drones aimed at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have left millions of people without power — and dozens of cities without Christmas lights.It was no accident that the wave of attacks came before the holidays and in the darkest and coldest time of year, said Denys Shmyhal, Ukraine’s prime minister. ‘It is important for the Russians,’ he said, ‘that Christmas and New Year’s Eve pass in darkness in Ukraine.’ With that in mind, some Ukrainian cities decided to be inventive with their Christmas decorations — finding ways to win back the season while not wasting precious electricity or disappointing children as holiday lights blink out during the attacks. In the usually serene square of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, the capital, the authorities put up what they called the Christmas Tree of Invincibility. It was decorated with papier-mâché white doves and a strip of blue and yellow lights — the colors of the Ukrainian flag — powered by a diesel generator. ...”

NY Times

Guardian - ‘It won’t be like before’: Christmas in Ukraine transformed by war (Video)

A square in Kyiv that is usually filled with entertainment and games for children at Christmastime, but such displays are rare this year.

​Why there are no football matches on Christmas Day

"This Christmas Day, after ingesting uncomfortable amounts of food and medicinal levels of alcohol, people across the USA will be able to flop down on the couch and gorge themselves on sport too.If the three NFL games — including reigning Super Bowl champions the LA Rams hosting the Denver Broncos — don’t grab you, then perhaps the three NBA fixtures might, with the LA Lakers in action, among others. Not so for Premier League fans in England, though. ...”

The Athletic

​The 1959 Project

"... What is The 1959 Project? Most jazz fans find themselves suffering from golden age syndrome at some point or another; for the casual listener it might define their relationship with the music, given that so many of the genre’s seminal (and best-selling) records are now well-worn classics. A fair number of them, in fact, were released or recorded 60 years ago, and thus form the inspiration for this (quite probably foolhardy) endeavor. But for me, and I imagine for others, the best thing about jazz music isn’t the albums. ...” About

The 1959 Project (Video)

March 26, 1959 - John Coltrane in the studio, 1958 (Video)

Christmas Eve missile strike kills at least 8 in Ukraine city of Kherson

"The liberation of Kherson by Kyiv troops more than a month ago hasn’t brought peace of mind nor a feeling of security to residents of the southern Ukrainian city. Moscow launched a missile strike on the city Saturday morning, killing at least eight people and injuring another 58, with 18 of the injured were in serious condition, according to local officials. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Kyiv officials published graphic pictures of burning cars and people lying in blood on the streets. ... Bridget Brink, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, called Saturday’s assault ‘another brutal attack by Russia on recently-liberated Kherson. Truly horrific, especially on Christmas Eve’. Kherson, which had a pre-war population of about 300,000, became a target for Russian troops after their withdrawal from the city and other settlements on the western bank of the Dnipro River to the eastern bank in November in an attempt to avoid being cut off by the artillery of advancing Ukrainian troops. ...”

POLITCO

Guardian: Russian artillery barrages kill civilians in southern and eastern Ukraine

BBC: Russia-supporting Wagner Group mercenary numbers soar

Intensified daily strikes force civilians to choose between risking their lives staying in Kherson or leaving the city for safer Kyiv-controlled areas of the country

Clarence Carter - “Back Door Santa” (1968)

"A slice of greasy blues soul that draws from the Willie Dixon classic ‘Back Door Man,’ Clarence Carter’s ‘Back Door Santa,’ co-written with Marcus Daniel for the 1968 compilation Soul Christmas, adds a touch of raunch to the holiday celebrations. ‘I ain’t like old Saint Nick,’ Carter barks over a bleating horn section and chopping funk guitar, ‘he don’t come but once a year. I come runnin’ with my presents every time you call me dear.’ ...”

The BMI Holiday Countdown: Clarence Carter, “Back Door Santa” (Video)

W - Clarence Carter

YouTube: Back Door Santa (1968), Duane Allman (With Clarence Carter) - The Road Of Love, Making Love (At The Dark End Of The Street), Slip Away, Too Weak to Fight

***YouTube: Darlene Love - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) Phil Spector , Cheech & Chong - Santa Claus and his Old Lady

​Jan. 6 Panel Issues Final Report, Placing Blame for Capitol Riot on ‘One Man’

"Declaring that the central cause of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was ‘one man,’ the House committee investigating the assault delivered its final report on Thursday, describing in extensive detail how former President Donald J. Trump had carried out what it called ‘a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election’ and offering recommendations for steps to assure nothing like it could happen again.It revealed new evidence about Mr. Trump’s conduct, and recommended that Congress consider whether to bar Mr. Trump and his allies from holding office in the future under the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Inside the Jan. 6 Committee (Audio) 56:35

NY Times: The Most Sought After Manuscript in Publishing? The Jan. 6 Report.

Caught on Camera, Traced by Phone: The Russian Military Unit That Killed Dozens in Bucha

"They were mothers, fathers, children and grandparents. Their lives became intertwined by a tragic fate: For weeks in March, their bodies would lie along a single street in Bucha. The photographs of these victims, published widely after Bucha was liberated, became emblematic of the indiscriminate way Russia would wage war in towns and cities across the country. Russian officials denied that their soldiers killed civilians in Bucha. They claimed that the images of the bodies were ‘fake’. Our visual investigation identifies the Russian military unit responsible for many of the killings along Yablunska Street. Watch the video here.The New York Times has identified 36 of the victims along Yablunska Street. We spoke to dozens of family members, friends and colleagues in Bucha to identify the people in the photographs — and used satellite imagery, cellphone videos, social media posts and text messages to retrace their final moments. ...”

NY Times

NY Times - Caught on Camera, Traced by Phone: The Russian Military Unit That Killed Dozens in Bucha (Video) 28:50