Deep Art Nature

US thinks UN chief too accommodating to Moscow, leaked files suggest

"The US believes the UN secretary general is too willing to accommodate Russian interests, according to fresh revelations in classified documents leaked online. The files suggest Washington has been closely monitoring Antonio Guterres. Several documents describe private communications involving Mr Guterres and his deputy. It is the latest from a leak of secret documents, which US officials are scrambling to get to the bottom of. The documents contain candid observations from Mr Guterres about the war in Ukraine and a number of African leaders. One leaked document focuses on the Black Sea grain deal, brokered by the UN and Turkey in July, following fears of a global food crisis. It suggests that Mr Guterres was so keen to preserve the deal he was willing to accommodate Russia's interests. ...”

BBC (Video)

Guardian: Who is Jack Teixeira, the man arrested over Pentagon files leak? (Video)

POLITICO: Here’s what the leaked US war files tell us about Europe

Helping Ukraine Can Deter China

Antonio Guterres (C) visited war-ravaged Ukraine in April of last year

A Growing W.N.B.A. Still Boxes Out Some Personalities

"Aliyah Boston, one of the most dominant and decorated players in women’s college basketball, was selected with the top pick in the W.N.B.A. draft Monday night. ... Since Angel Reese made a mocking gesture to Caitlin Clark at the end of the N.C.A.A. Division I championship game between Louisiana State and Iowa nearly two weeks ago, players, fans and internet rabble-rousers have weighed in on racial double standards that exist in the women’s game: How ponytailed, high-scoring white players are lauded for their brashness while Black women who talk trash are vilified for it. The matter of racial hypocrisy has been a bone of contention in the W.N.B.A., a league where 80 percent of players are women of color but that, players say, has struggled to promote its Black stars. ...”

NY Times

Aliyah Boston declared for the W.N.B.A. draft after playing in the 2021 and 2022 Division I championship basketball games with South Carolina.

Patch & Tweak: Exploring Modular Synthesis

"When asked to suggest a book on modular synthesis, many musicians used to recommend text books or manuals from the 60s and 70s. But the world has changed a lot since then – so Kim Bjørn and I created PATCH & TWEAK: a new book dedicated to modular synthesizers. It covers the instruments themselves, as well as those who create and make music with them. Dozens of artists and hundreds of modules are featured, as well as numerous patch ideas and other indispensable information, all wrapped in a gorgeous design. ...”

Learning Modular

Patch & Tweak: Basic concepts of modular synthesis (Video)

The Final Blocks: Inside Ukraine’s Bloody Stand for Bakhmut

"After 10 months of one of the longest and bloodiest battles in Russia’s war in Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers are now defending a shrinking half-circle of ruins in a western neighborhood of Bakhmut, only about 20 blocks wide and continually pounded with artillery. Pushed into this ever-smaller corner of the 16-square-mile city, the Ukrainian army is determined to hunker down and hold out, even as allies have quietly questioned the rationale for fighting block by block, sustaining significant casualties, in a city that is a devastating panorama of damaged buildings and rubble. Even six weeks ago, Ukraine’s toehold in Bakhmut, site of some of the fiercest urban combat in Europe since World War II, had seemed tenuous and the city close to being encircled, according to recently leaked U.S. intelligence documents. ...”

NY Times

Why Ukraine Fights

Guardian - ‘We feed the world’: Ukrainian farmers warn of war’s global effects

POLITICO - ‘We’ve proved everybody wrong’: Ukraine claps back after counteroffensive intel leak (Video)

A drone flying a giant Ukrainian national flag passes over the Motherland monument during Ukraine's Independence Day on August 24, 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Eddie Palmieri – Unfinished Masterpiece (1975)

"The Runners-Up is a monthly column, which we first tried in 2013, wherein we will analyze an album that isn’t the consensus first choice or most canonical title by a given artist, but is one worthy of more attention than it’s received to date. The album we’ll look at this month is…Eddie Palmieri‘s 1975 album, Unfinished Masterpiece. A vast number of musicians appear on Unfinished Masterpiece: on most tracks, Palmieri is joined by Victor Paz on trumpet, Barry Rogers on trombone, Peter Gordon on French horn, Tony Price on tuba, Lou Marini (’Blue Lou’ from the Blues Brothers band) on alto sax, Lou Orenstein on tenor sax, Mario Rivera on tenor and baritone saxes, Ronnie Cuber on baritone sax and flute, Alfredo de la Fe on violin, Andy Gonzalez on bass, Tommy Lopez Jr. on bongos, Eladio Perez and Jerry Gonzalez on congas, and Nicky Marrero on timbales. ...”

The Runners Up: Eddie Palmieri (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

YouTube: Unfinished Masterpiece 38:26

2014 March: Harlem River Drive - Harlem River Drive (1971), 2017 December: Nu Yorica: Culture Clash In New York City - Experiments in Latin Music 1970-77, 2018 December: Latin Underground Revolution: Swinging Boogaloo, Guaguanco, Salsa & Latin Funk from New York City 1967-1978, 2018 July: The Soul Of Spanish Harlem / El Barrio: Sounds from the Spanish Harlem Streets, 2022 January: East Harlem/Spanish Harlem/El Barrio

Private Lives: Ian Penman On Rainer Werner Fassbinder

"Rainer Werner Fassbinder is not an artist who fits conveniently anywhere these days, an anachronistic conundrum wrapped up in an enigma. So it makes a strange sort of sense that Ian Penman’s new book Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors comes to us when it does. Penman missed the date for the 40th anniversary of the German director’s death last June, but then he was never really aiming for it in the first place. Furthermore, Penman is somehow only now getting around to having his first book released (Fitzcarraldo Editions previously published an anthology of music writing, It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, in 2019). This unconventional Fassbinder biography adheres to no formal structure, giving the impression that thoughts are jotted down as they occur and then numbered sequentially. ...”

The Quietus

2014 May: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2014 June: Effi Briest (1974), 2014 July: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), 2014 September: A Little Chaos: A Short Crime Film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Enfant Terrible of New German Cinema, 2014 October: Lola - (1981 BRD Trilogy), 2014 October: The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979 BRD Trilogy), 2014 December: Veronika Voss (1982 - BRD Trilogy), 2015 January: Digital Anthology: Rainer Werner Fassbinder - $0.99, 2016 February: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), 2019 June: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

The Russians Took Their Children. These Mothers Went and Got Them Back.

"For weeks after Russian troops forcibly removed Natalya Zhornyk’s teenage son from his school last fall, she had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. Then came a phone call.’Mom, come and get me,’ said her son, Artem, 15. He had remembered his mother’s phone number and borrowed the school director’s cellphone. Ms. Zhornyk made him a promise: ‘When the fighting calms down, I will come.’ Artem and a dozen schoolmates had been loaded up by Russian troops and transferred to a school farther inside Russian-occupied Ukraine. While Ms. Zhornyk was relieved to know where he was being held, reaching him would not be easy. They were now on different sides of the front line of a full-blown war, and border crossings from Ukraine into Russian-occupied territory were closed. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: What Do Leaked U.S. Intelligence Reports Say? Here Is a Quick Guide.

Guardian: Is the Ukraine war boosting or damaging the Russian economy?

Aljazeera: Ukraine likely to face bloody Crimea fight, satellite images show

BBC: Vitaly Votanovsky flees Russia after documenting a Wagner cemetery

Artem Hutorov, center, and Maksym Marchenko, second from left, after their journey from Russia to Ukraine in March.

The Essential Gabriel García Márquez

"Gabito came into the world lathered in cod-liver oil, his parents claimed, with two brains and the memory of an elephant. He was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1927, though he often insisted on 1928, in a nod to Colombian history: That was the year of a notorious massacre of striking banana plantation workers on his beloved Caribbean coast. The episode was perhaps, he once said, his earliest memory. So begins the mythology of Gabriel García Márquez, the magus of magical realism, a Nobel laureate who blended truth and fiction to fit the outsize reality of Latin American life. The breadth of his work was just as capacious. ...”

NY Times

LitHub: Gabriel García Márquez on Life in 1950s Paris By Gabriel García Márquez

LitHub: Poetic Language and the Science of Rediscovery in One Hundred Years of Solitude

2018 May: Latin American Boom, 2017 December: New Gabriel García Márquez Digital Archive Features..., 2020 January: Reality Is the Better Writer

The unusual beauty of a 1908 row house “oasis of tranquility” in the Bronx

"When you think of the Bronx, districts of tidy single-family attached row houses probably don’t come to mind. And that makes sense, considering the late start this northernmost borough had in terms of urban development. The Bronx still maintained a sizable number of rural areas (and large estates owned by the wealthy) within its borders when it was annexed to New York City in stages from 1872 to 1895. The borough was too spread out, and had too few people, to build the kinds of brownstone and townhouse rows that urbanized Manhattan and Brooklyn throughout the 19th century. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Leaked Documents Reveal Depth of U.S. Spy Efforts and Russia’s Military Struggles

"WASHINGTON — A trove of leaked Pentagon documents reveals how deeply Russia’s security and intelligence services have been penetrated by the United States, demonstrating Washington’s ability to warn Ukraine about planned strikes and providing an assessment of the strength of Moscow’s war machine. The documents paint a portrait of a depleted Russian military that is struggling in its war in Ukraine and of a military apparatus that is deeply compromised. They contain daily real-time warnings to American intelligence agencies on the timing of Moscow’s strikes and even its specific targets. Such intelligence has allowed the United States to pass on to Ukraine crucial information on how to defend itself. The documents lay bare the American assessment of a Ukrainian military that is also in dire straits. ...”

NY Times

The Bizarre Life and Even More Bizarre Death of a Russian War Propagandist (Video)

NY Times: Opinion | The Editorial Board - The Arrest of Evan Gershkovich Is Further Evidence of Putin’s Brutality

NY Times: Opinion | Putin’s Energy Offensive Has Failed

Ukrainian soldiers watch the horizon where Russian troops are stationed at a front line position in southern Bakhmut, in Donetsk region, in eastern Ukraine on Friday.

Cultural Revolution: The Watts Renaissance

"The Art of Creative Survival: “During the 1960s and 1970s black Los Angeles produced dozens of cultural groupings that sought both to foster a new art and to generate a new relationship between creativity and community. These organizations were defined in part by their variety: theater companies like the Inner City Cultural Center and the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles; community arts projects like the Mafundi Institute and St. Elmo Village; galleries like Brockman and Gallery 32; formal bodies like the Watts Writers Workshop and informal tendencies like the cohort of avant-garde black filmmakers who trained at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). ...”

Hammer, W – Watts Writers Workshop, W – The Watts Prophets

Performing Arts Legacy: Inner City Cultural Center, Los Angeles

Jordan Downs Transformation by the Decade-1970’s

As If I was Carrying a Gun: Art and Surveillance in 1960s Watts (Video)

LA Weekly: Historic Watts Coffee House Hopes to Become a Gathering Space for Artists Once Again, Watts Profits: The city wants to redevelop the historic Mafundi Institute in Watts. Can the community save it? Remembering, Rethinking, and Renaming the Watts Rebellion

W – Maulana Karenga, W – Kwanzaa

Novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, center, began the Watts Writers Workshop in 1965. It was his personal effort at reconstruction after the Watts Riots.

The Dancing Plague of 1518

"On a hastily built stage before the busy horse market of Strasbourg, scores of people dance to pipes, drums, and horns. The July sun beats down upon them as they hop from leg to leg, spin in circles and whoop loudly. From a distance they might be carnival revellers. But closer inspection reveals a more disquieting scene. Their arms are flailing and their bodies are convulsing spasmodically. Ragged clothes and pinched faces are saturated in sweat. Their eyes are glassy, distant. Blood seeps from swollen feet into leather boots and wooden clogs. These are not revellers but “choreomaniacs”, entirely possessed by the mania of the dance. ...”

Public Domain Review

2018 July: Dancing plague of 1518

Detail of painting based on Peter Breughel's 1564 drawing of a dance epidemic occurring in Molenbeek that year

How Russia’s Offensive Ran Aground

"After months of pouring soldiers into eastern Ukraine, Russia’s progress essentially adds up to this: three small settlements and part of the city of Bakhmut, a high-profile battlefield with limited strategic value. Compare that with what Moscow had hoped to achieve from its winter offensive by now: to seize the entire Donbas region — which contains dozens more settlements, some of them much larger than Bakhmut. To do that, Russia would have to recreate and win battles at the scale of Bakhmut again and again. A breakthrough for Russia appears increasingly unlikely. Regardless of the outcome in the fierce battle of Bakhmut, Moscow’s inability to gain substantial ground in the Donbas shows how little its offensive has achieved and how much its military has struggled to efficiently capture urban areas throughout the war. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: With Russia’s Exit, Norway Becomes Europe’s Energy Champion

BBC: The cost of the Ukraine war for one Russian regiment

Aljazeera: Wagner advances in Bakhmut as Ukraine gears up for counterattack(Video)

NBC News: 'Just the way the Nazis did': Evidence suggests Russians are stealing art from Ukraine on a World War II scale

Olga Honcharova, the temporary director of the Kherson Regional Art Museum, shows empty display cases on Dec. 22.

Aksak Maboul - Une Aventure De VV - Songspiel (2023)

"Billed as something of a departure from previous Aksak Maboul releases due to its overtly theatrical content, and released on band and label founder Marc Hollander’s Made to Measure experimental composers series on his Crammed Discs imprint to emphasise that fact, Une Aventure de VV (Songspiel) utilises the band’s wildly eclectic sonic palette to less immediate but still hugely rewarding ends than its predecessor. Inspired by experimental radio plays like those once created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or the German Hörspiel, the album’s surrealistic narrative fuses elements of Tarkovsky and the Strugatsky brothers’ Stalker with aspects of Alice In Wonderland and Jean Cocteau’s Orphée. ...”

The Quietus

Bandcamp: Une aventure de VV (Songspiel) (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

2014 November: Aksak Maboul, 2017 July: Made to Measure, Vol. 1 (1984), 2018 February: Before And After Bandits: Marc Hollander Of Aksak Maboul & Crammed Discs, 2020 March: Tout a une fin / Blaue Bleistift (2020), 2020 August: Aksak Maboul ‎– Figures (2020) , 2020 September: From Aksak Maboul to Crammed Discs, Marc Hollander Envisions a Musical Melting Pot

Gavin Bryars – The Sinking Of The Titanic (1975)

"... Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet. In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song - sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads - and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song ‘Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet’. This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one. ... - Gavin Bryars”

UbuWeb (Audio)

W - The Sinking of the Titanic (Bryars)

Discogs (Video)

Putin doesn’t want the war to end – he wants to blast us back to the 40s Soviet era

"Four years ago, I wrote a novel in which the feeling that there was a 'deficit of future' was so acute that every nation in Europe wanted to hold its own referendum on the past. Until then, referendums had always been about the future. But the moment arrived when the horizon closed, and we started to only look back towards the past. A referendum on the past would involve choosing to return to the happiest decade or year from the 20th century in each nation’s history. A deficit of future always unlocks huge reserves of nostalgia for the past: which decade would nations choose? Germany picks the very end of the 80s, a perpetuum mobile of 1989 in which the wall is constantly falling. Italy goes back to the 60s. It’s as if the map of Europe shifts from territorial to temporal, and nations close themselves up – for a very short while – inside their own happy past. ...”

Guardian

NBC News: Elite Russian security officer who defected calls Putin a paranoid ‘war criminal’ (Video)

Aljazeera: Russian official sought by ICC for war crimes speaks to UN (Video)

Dozens of people have gathered outside the Russian embassy to protest President Vladimir Putin's recognition of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent.

‘I’m too ghetto’: College basketball star slams racial hypocrisy over hand gesture outrage

"Angel Reese caused controversy on women’s college basketball’s biggest stage as the LSU star waved her hand in front of her face to signify that ‘you can’t see me’ while staring down Caitlin Clark, then pointed toward her finger as if to say a championship ring was coming while walking toward the Iowa star. The gestures late in the Tigers' 102-85 victory in the NCAA championship game on Sunday lit up social media, with comments supporting the ‘Bayou Barbie’ for trash talk as just part of the game, while others condemned her for lacking grace in victory. ...”

yahoo (Video)

YouTube: Stephen A Smith Responds to Outrage Over Angle Reese Taunting Caitlin Clark!

YouTube: Caitlin Clark on Angel Reese' gestures: I don't think there should be any criticism for what she did

The Athletic: LSU, Iowa and women’s basketball deserve better than lousy officiating and paternalistic discourse (Video)

YouTube: Super ugly sportsmanship by Angel Reese towards Caitlin Clark considering how terrible the refs were on Iowa’s gameplay.. hated to see it. (Video)

The Athletic - Angel Reese vs. Caitlin Clark smashed a ratings record: What’s next for women’s hoops on TV?

LSU star Angel Reese mocked Caitlin Clark with her own celebration at the end of title game

YouTube: Holly Rowe Discusses Angel Reese's Gesture To Caitlin Clark

The Best Frozen Pepperoni Pizzas

"What a uniquely modern pleasure—to keep a whole pizza on hand, ready to bring to life at a moment’s notice.But frozen pizza can be pretty polarizing. For some, it’s a welcome blast from the past, catapulting you back to childhood or college days when it was the easiest thing to cook for yourself. For others, it’s a pale imitation of the real deal, a far cry from an ideal slice, nostalgia best held at a distance. We think frozen pizza is its own category, different from the offerings at your local slice shop or chain pizzeria, and special in its own right. But not every pizza is worth the freezer space. We tasted 12 widely available, mainstream frozen pepperoni pizzas. Here are our favorites. ...”

NY Times

Ukraine war: Russian strike on eastern city Kostyantynivka 'kills six'

"Ukraine says heavy Russian shelling has killed at least six civilians in Kostyantynivka, an industrial city near embattled Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. Missiles and rockets damaged 16 apartment blocks and other buildings including a nursery school, head of the presidential staff Andriy Yermak said on social media. The toll was not verified by the BBC. The city is just 27km (17 miles) west of Bakhmut, where many have died on both sides in months of heavy fighting. Mr Yermak said the Russians hit Kostyantynivka with S-300 surface-to-air missiles and Uragan rockets, and at least eight people were injured. The city is near Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, two key cities which Russia is striving to capture in order to complete its occupation of Donetsk region. ...”

BBC

NBC News: Russia blames Ukraine and arrests suspect after bomb kills prominent pro-war blogger (Video)

Aljazeera: Wagner claims ‘legal’ control of Ukraine’s Bakhmut (Video)

NY Times: The Children’s Rights Advocate Accused of Russian War Crimes

A Russian propaganda billboard in Kherson days after Ukraine retook the city in November. The sign reads, “Passport of the Russian Federation — social stability and safety.”

Sealand: The national football team from a country half the size of a football pitch

"During the 2018 World Cup in Russia, it emerged that a seven-page document had been supplied to stadium security staff, detailing dozens of flags that tournament organisers had banned from being displayed. These included the flags of jihadist terrorist groups al-Qaeda and al-Shabaab, of pre-revolutionary Iran, and separatist emblems for Somaliland and Catalonia. Sandwiched between the flag of the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Catalan Estelada was flag No 29, a flag actively prohibited from being displayed at the biggest sporting event on the planet. The flag of Sealand. …”

The Athletic (Video)

W – Principality of Sealand

amazon: Sealand: The True Story of the World’s Most Stubborn Micronation and Its Eccentric Royal Family

Black literary surrealism

"Literary magazines have been at the center of a black transnational cultural renaissance. This is not where I intended to end up when I first encountered Ethiopia (Awakening), 1921—a sculpture by Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968), an important artwork created at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance—at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. ... True to the curatorial vision, Fuller’s sculpture is often described as the first pan-African American work because it connected Ethiopia, the only independent African country at the time, to the emerging Black society in America. Fuller belongs on a long list of artists and writers who were championed by the 20th-century American intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. ...”

Africa Is a Country

Guardian - Afrofuturism: reimagining science and the future from a black perspective

‘Rebuilding is part of our resistance’: how Ukraine is bringing Bucha back to life

"Standing on the crumbling roof of a house, dozens of workers hammer in unison. Around them, cranes, bulldozers and trucks work frantically to repair roads and buildings destroyed by Russian artillery. It is hard to believe that this noisy construction site is in Yablonska Street, in the town of Bucha, in the north of Kyiv, at the precise crossroads where a year ago the bodies of dozens of civilians, brutally killed by Russian soldiers, were strewn over almost a mile, some with their hands bound behind their backs. Ukraine has already repaired, and in many cases fully rebuilt, many of the sites destroyed by Moscow, including bridges, roads and government buildings. It is only the beginning of what Kyiv has described as the largest rebuilding effort since the second world war and perhaps the most expensive in history, with an estimated cost of half a trillion dollars. But managing this unprecedented influx of money in a country with a long history of corruption will bring challenges, experts say. ...”

Guardian

Aljazeera - Russia-Ukraine war: Will there be a spring counteroffensive? (Video)

Aljazeera: Global network aims to sue Wagner as a ‘terrorist’ organisation (Video)

NY Times: Ukraine Charges a Leading Ukrainian Vicar, as Russia Pounds Eastern Ukraine

An aerial view of Yablonska Street, once covered with bodies of dead civilians. Today it is a giant and very noisy construction site, with cranes, scaffolding, bulldozers and trucks working to repairs roads and homes destroyed by Russian artillery.

Raymond Roussel - Locus Solus (1914)

"The wealthy scientist Martial Canterel guides a group of visitors through his expansive estate, Locus Solus, where he displays his various deranged inventions: a machine propelled by the weather, which constructs a mosaic out of varying hues of human teeth; a hairless cat charged with a powerful electric battery; a bizarre theater in which corpses are reanimated with a special serum to enact the most important movements of their past lives. Wondrously imaginative and narrated with Roussel’s deadpan wit, Locus Solus is unlike anything else ever written. ...”

New Directions

W - Locus_Solus

New York School Poets

amazon

[PDF] Locus Solus

YouTube: Locus Solus 4:06:20

2009 September: Raymond Roussel, 2012 January: The Tropological Space of Locus Solus, 2015 August: Galerie Buchholz, 2018 June: The Accidental Avant-Gardist

GRAND JURY VOTES TO INDICT TRUMP

"What We Know About the Indictment of Donald Trump, and What Comes Next - “Donald J. Trump was indicted in Manhattan on Thursday, becoming the first American president, current or former, to be charged with a crime. His indictment was handed up by a grand jury which has been hearing evidence about Mr. Trump for months. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the charges, is focused on the former president’s involvement in the payment of hush money to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with him. Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time, made the payment during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign. The office of the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, issued a statement on Thursday evening saying that Mr. Trump had been indicted, and that his lawyers had been contacted to arrange a surrender. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Donald Trump Is Indicted in New York

NY Times: A President Faces Prosecution, and a Democracy Is Tested

NY Times: Opinion | I Worry About a Failed Prosecution of Trump, but I Worry More About No Prosecution

**********NY Times: Trump Charged With 34 Felonies in Hush-Money Case

******NY Times: How Trump’s Playboy Persona Came Back to Haunt Him

****NY Times: For Some G.O.P. Voters, Fatigue Slows the Rush to Defend Trump

Ukrainians in a Hidden Command Post See Bakhmut Going Their Way

"Hidden in the bowels of an unmarked building, set well back from the fighting, a command center directing operations in the city of Bakhmut was high-tech and humming. Soldiers monitored video screens with live feeds of destroyed buildings and a cratered battlefield. Six weeks after coming to help defend Bakhmut, the men of the Adam Tactical Group, one of Ukraine’s most effective battle units, were quietly confident they had turned the tide against Russian troops trying to encircle and capture it. ‘The enemy exhausted all its reserves,’ the commander, Col. Yevhen Mezhevikin, 40, said on Tuesday, straddling a chair as artillery, air defense and intelligence-gathering teams worked around him. Through wave after wave of Russian assault and tenacious Ukrainian defense, Bakhmut has, over eight months, become a central battlefield of Russia’s invasion despite limited strategic significance. ...”

NY Times

Guardian - Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times

Ukrainian Spring?

The military operations of a major Ukrainian battle group defending the city of Bakhmut from an unnamed location in eastern Ukraine.

Understanding Espresso: A Six-Part Series Explaining What It Takes to Pull the Ideal Shot

"It doesn’t take long to learn how to pull a shot of espresso. Search for that phrase on Youtube, and you’ll find hours’ worth of sound instruction, most of it in the form of brief and easily digestible videos. All of them cover the same basic stages of the process: grinding, dosing, tamping, and brewing. When examined closely, each of those stages reveals a formidable body of knowledge to master. If any one Youtuber can lay claim to having mastered all of them, it must be James Hoffmann, previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on subjects from deep-fried coffee to the classic Bialetti Moka Express. In the six-part series above, he offers viewers an overview of all they need to know to achieve a true understanding of espresso. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

2010 September: Espresso, 2013 April: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2013 May: Coffeehouse, 2015 June: Barista, 2015 August: Coffee Connections at Peddler in SoHo, 2015 November: The Case for Bad Coffee, 2016 January: 101 Places to Find Great Coffee in New York (2014), 2017 June: How Cold Brew Changed the Coffee Business, 2017 September: Our 7 Favorite Literary Coffee Shops, 2017 October: Clever Literary Coffee Poster, 2017 October: Coffee as Existential Statement: A Crisis in Every Cup on Valencia Street, 2018 February: The Trencherman: A Tale of Two Coffee Shops, 2020 April: Unfair trade, April 2020: A (Very) Brief History of NYC Espresso, 2020 May: The Islamic History of Coffee, 2021 January: The Life Cycle of a Cup of Coffee: The Journey from Coffee Bean, to Coffee Cup, 2021 June: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard, 2021 July: The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?, August 2021: The Birth of Espresso: How the Coffee Shots The Fuel Our Modern Life Were Invented, 2021 October: Brew: A Brief History of Coffee, 2021 November: Coffee and Climate Have a Complicated Relationship, 2022 January: The Bialetti Moka Express: The History of Italy’s Iconic Coffee Maker, and How to Use It the Right Way, 2022 April: All Espresso Drinks Explained: Cappuccino, Latte, Macchiato & Beyond, 2022 June: How to Make the Perfect Cup of Italian Coffee, 2022 August: Café A Brasileira, 2022 August: It’s Not Just You — Blank Street Coffee Is Suddenly Inescapable

Jimmy Heath, aka Little Bird, Takes Soul’s Serenading Flight

"When saxophonist Jimmy Heath died at 93 from undisclosed causes on Sunday, January 19, 2020, he left younger brother Albert as the last of the Heath brothers, a remarkable trio of musicians who worked collectively and individually to help craft the pillars of jazz music. With Albert on drums, Percy on bass and middle brother Jimmy, nicknamed Little Bird because of the early influence of Charlie Parker on his playing, on saxophone, the Heaths played on hundreds of recordings with legends and under known greats of the musical idiom. Without the Heaths musical input, jazz would not be what it is today. ...”

Riot Material (Audio)

Jimmy Heath at a session at New York’s WOR Studios, 1953. From left: Miles Davis, Kenny Drew, Art Blakey, Jimmy Heath.

In pictures: The Ukrainian religious sites ruined by fighting

"Ukraine has accused Russia of damaging or destroying at least 59 religious sites across the country since its invasion began. They include an Orthodox cathedral with its steeple ripped apart, a Jewish school struck by shelling, and parish churches left almost totally flattened. Targeting historic monuments and cultural heritage sites is a war crime under international law, according to the Hague Convention. Russia denies targeting civilian infrastructure, but the BBC has identified a number of religious sites that have suffered damage. St Michael's Cathedral was described by Mariupol's tourist office as ‘the most beautiful place’ in the city's Left Bank district.Offering ‘panoramic views of the Sea of Azov, green hills and coastal villages’, the cathedral - opened in 1997 - attracted both worshippers and visitors alike, it said. ...”

BBC

BBC: 'I'm shocked by my church leaders in Moscow' - priest in Ukraine

NY Times: How Ukraine’s Battered Steel Industry Galvanized Its War EffortThe iron- and steel-producing factories of Ukraine’s

NBC News: Russia stops sharing information on nuclear forces with the U.S. (Video)

Vox: What US weapons tell us about the Russia-Ukraine war (Video)

The priest of the village of Yasnohorodka, near Kyiv, stands inside his destroyed church

Arooj Aftab - What's In My Bag?

"Brooklyn-based Pakistani composer, singer & producer Arooj Aftab goes shopping at Amoeba San Francisco and talks about Billie Holiday's recordings with orchestra, the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire's beautiful tone, and one of the most incredible albums she's ever heard. The deluxe edition of Arooj Aftab's breakthrough album, Vulture Prince, is available from Verve Records. In 2022, Arooj Aftab won a GRAMMY Award for Best Global Music Performance and she was just nominated in that category for the second consecutive year.“

Amoeba (Video)

Junto Profile: Joe McMahon, aka Equinox Deschanel

"... Joe McMahon, but since there are three of us by that name who are musicians, I use Equinox Deschanel for my musical endeavors. ... I’m based in the San Francisco Bay Area right now, but I’m originally from a small town in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. ... My influences are wildly varied: jazz, musique concrète, ambient music, generative music, “classical” electronic music, prog rock, Spike Jones, Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa — anything that looks at things a little bit sideways. ...”

disquiet (Video)

Before the Shadow Play