​At Ukraine’s Gravesites, a Spring Ritual Hints at Renewal

"STARYI SALTIV, Ukraine — The families milled about, greeting one another and exchanging news, or sitting at picnic tables laid with candy, Easter eggs and freshly baked bread, reviving village life in an improbable place: the cemetery. Outside the cemetery’s checkerboard of graves, which were festooned on Sunday with fresh flowers and where children ran about collecting candy, the village of Staryi Saltiv is a grim tableau of ruins. ‘You can see people are returning to clean the cemetery, and the village is coming back to life,’ said Natalia Borysovska, a seamstress whose house was destroyed last year. She had no home to return to after fleeing — but still a family plot to tend.Sunday was a traditional day of remembrance in Ukraine, called Provody. Families spend time in cemeteries each year on the first Sunday after the Orthodox Easter, tidying up graves and leaving food and flowers for their dead loved ones. ...”

NY Times

Guardian: New Ukraine positions near Kherson could signal spring offensive – report

Aljazeera - Photos: Fears, vulnerabilities, divides and dancing in Moldova

Guardian: Russian-speaking Ukrainians want to shed ‘language of the oppressor’

Alla Chyhyrynska, 64, at the grave of a relative on Sunday in Shestakove, outside Kharkiv. An annual day of remembrance draws villagers to cemeteries in Ukraine.

​Watch Cab Calloway Actually Perform “Mr. Hepster’s Dictionary,” His Famous Dictionary of Jazz Slang (1944)

"Who’s up for a good dictionary on film? Colin Browning, assistant editor of The Bluff, a Loyola Marymount University student newspaper, has some kopasetic casting suggestions for a hypothetical feature adaptation of the ‘Merriam-Webster classic.’ He’s just muggin’, of course. Still, he seems like a young man who’s got his boots on. Dig?…no? In that case, you’d best acquaint yourself with the only cinematic dictionary adaptation we’re aware of, the Mr. Hepcat’s Dictionary number from Sensations of 1945, above. Musical team Al Sherman & Harry Tobias drew directly from Cab Calloway’s Cat-ologue: a Hepster’s Dictionary, a lexicon of Harlem jazz musicians’ slang originally published in 1938’ when choosing terms for Calloway to define for a young protégée, eager to be schooled in ‘the lingo all the jitterbugs use today.’ In between, Calloway, lays some iron in white tie and tails. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

​19th century architectural remnants hiding in today’s Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Every week, thousands of people come to see the millions of artifacts on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the city’s treasures for indoor art viewing and outside people watching. But hidden inside this majestic museum building and its many additions fronting Fifth Avenue from 79th to 84th Streets are some fascinating architectural artifacts. They’re not officially on exhibit, nor do they come with captions explaining their origins. These are the remnants of the museum’s first incarnation as a much smaller Romanesque- and Gothic-style structure dating back to 1879—nine years after a group of citizens decided Gotham needed a world-class art museum, then put plans in place to make it happen. ...”

Ephemeral New York

Ukraine war: The Russian ships accused of North Sea sabotage

"Russia has a programme to sabotage wind farms and communication cables in the North Sea, according to new allegations. The details come from a joint investigation by public broadcasters in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. It says Russia has a fleet of vessels disguised as fishing trawlers and research vessels in the North Sea. They carry underwater surveillance equipment and are mapping key sites for possible sabotage. The BBC understands that UK officials are aware of Russian vessels moving around UK waters as part of the programme. The first of a series of reports is due to be broadcast on Wednesday by DR in Denmark, NRK in Norway, SVT in Sweden and Yle in Finland. ...”

BBC (Video)

Vox: So what’s the deal with Ukraine’s spring offensive?

Guardian - Curating the war: Kyiv museum exhibits objects left by Russian soldiers

BBC - Ukraine war: Bakhmut defender remembered by comrades

Putin’s Reign of Terror (Video)

NY Times: Airman Shared Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer Than Previously Known

​Best Reggae Producers: 10 Pioneers Of Jamaica’s Musical Legacy

"The best reggae producers pioneered new sounds and recording techniques. They also ensured that Jamaica was recognized as a country capable of creating worldwide stars. From helping to sow the seeds of hip-hop to ushering in the ‘version,’ or creating utterly unique music that couldn’t have been made by anyone else, in any other place, the best reggae producers deserve to be held up alongside any other sonic innovators in musical history.Here are the best reggae producers of all time. ...”

udiscover (Audio)

Sir Coxsone Dodd

Time and Its Other: The Temporal Landscapes of Béla Tarr

"There is something almost tormenting and inhuman about the cinema of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. The characters and faces feel foreign or even alien, as well as the situations they find themselves in. It is as if an apathetic fisherman has hooked something more alive even than fish that refuses to resist. But isn’t resistance a condition of life, or is it just the way we have come to think of it? The famous escape – what Fitzgerald calls ‘the journey into a trap’ – is an opportunity or a crack, an image of the resistance-against-and-beyond the already monolithic rolling of the hours, but not salvation, never salvation. Tarr makes me want to help the catch, to unhook it and throw it back into the depths from which it came. But I know – its wounds are incurable. ...”

Off Screen

2012 January: The Man from London, 2012 January: The Turin Horse, 2022 September: Damnation (1988), 2022 September: : Sátántangó (1994)

The Turin Horse (2011)

​The Making of Modern Ukraine, Yale’s famous course on Ukrainian history by Professor Timothy Snyder

"’Everyone needs a future. We need a politics of the future; we need an event that can break us out of our rut and which will point us towards a future. I believe it’s very important that Europeans and others help to offer Ukrainians a future after this war in the form of membership in the European Union, and in the form of generous aid which allows Ukrainians to rebuild,’ said Professor Timothy Snyder, a famous historian in his speech at the Kyiv Security Forum on May 8, 2022. This fall, Dr. Snyder is making his lecture course on Ukraine at Yale University, The Making of Modern Ukraine, available to all interested. ... As stated in Yale University’s course catalog, the course represents a ‘study of Ukraine from the Cossack rebellions of 1648 to the democratic revolution of 2004. Topics include the decadence of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, Russian and Austrian imperial rule, the collapse of traditional Jewish and Polish social life, the attraction of Russian culture, the emergence of a Ukrainian national movement, civil war, modernization, terror, the consequences of Nazi occupation (including genocide and ethnic cleansing), problems of democratic reform, and European integration since 1991′. In somber times of russian invasion into Ukrainian sovereignty, the course also underlines the uniqueness of Ukraine’s national identity. ...”

Ukrainian World Congress (Video) (Sep. 22, 2022)

NY Times: The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word By Timothy Snyder (April 22, 2022)

Thinking about...  (Video/Audio)

YouTube: Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine, 23 videos (Dec 7, 2022)

​Netflix Will End Its DVD Service, 5.2 Billion Discs Later

"Call up your Luddite loved ones and your nostalgic friends who still cherish physical media. After 25 years, Netflix is ending its DVD-by-mail business. Before it was upending the entertainment industry and ushering in the streaming era, Netflix was a company whose business model revolved around sending DVDs through the mail in easily recognizable red-and-white envelopes. At its peak, in 2010, roughly 20 million subscribed to the DVD service. But the practice has long felt anachronistic, and the company said on Tuesday that it will ship its final DVDs to customers on Sept. 29. How many customers? ...”

NY Times

****NY Times: The Dramatic, Comic, Tragic, True-Life Story Behind the Death of DVD.com

​Elevating the Underground: The ’70s NYC Loft Jazz Scene

"... That’s how [Wadada Leo} Smith describes the origins of the loft music scene that arose in 1970s New York City, a DIY network of literally homegrown venues created by and for musicians who transcended the conventions of jazz—even the term itself. ... Nevertheless, ‘loft jazz’ is the tag commonly attached to the movement that began in earnest when players turned their downtown NYC homes into performance spaces, mostly in Greenwich Village East and West; Soho; and the Lower East Side.In the pre-gentrification ‘70s, much of Manhattan’s southerly section was a textbook example of urban blight. But that’s what made it possible for musicians to occupy loft spaces on the cheap. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

​A $787.5 Million Settlement and Embarrassing Disclosures: The Costs of Airing a Lie

"In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false? But the $787.5 million settlement agreement — among the largest defamation settlements in history — and Fox’s courthouse statement recognizing that the court had found ‘certain claims about Dominion’ aired on its programming ‘to be false’ at the very least amount to a rare, high-profile acknowledgment of informational wrongdoing by a powerhouse in conservative media and America’s most popular cable network. ...”

NY Times (Video)

*****NY Times: Opinion | The Fox Settlement Saved America From a Potentially Dangerous Situation

NY Times: The Plan to Get Rupert Murdoch to Pay Up

NY Times: What’s Next for Dominion After Its $787.5 Million Settlement With Fox News? (Video)

NY Times: Opinion | Why Fox Had to Settle

NY Times: Opinion | How Fox Helped Break the American Right

NY Times: Dominion's Defamation Lawsuit Against Fox

A 1962 sign from the John Birch Society imploring people to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Henry Taylor’s B Side: Where Mind Shapes Itself to Canvas

"Ages ago when there were LP records and 45s, the B side of a popular single made allowances for experimentation and could be counted on as an alternative vision to the more mainstream and compulsory hit single. ... Henry Taylor’s thirty-year retrospective at MOCA Grand pays homage to the unexpected, the visceral, and the odd man out, and like any successful B side, you want to keep listening. Featuring more than 150 works that include paintings, drawings, sculptures, and painted objects like cereal boxes and beer crates, this survey represents a vision forged in fire yet tempered with tremendous sensitivity, compassion, and humor. ...”

Riot Material

Whitney - Henry Taylor: B Side

W - Henry Taylor

Juxtapoz: The Incredible Henry VIII

YouTube: Henry Taylor: In the Studio, Henry Taylor

Warning shots not required, 2011

​Russia Is Importing Western Weapons Technology, Bypassing Sanctions

"Late last month, American and European Union officials traded information on millions of dollars worth of banned technology that was slipping through the cracks of their defenses and into Russian territory. Senior tax and trade officials noted a surge in chips and other electronic components being sold to Russia through Armenia, Kazakhstan and other countries, according to slides from the March 24 meeting obtained by The New York Times. And they shared information on the flow of eight particularly sensitive categories of chips and other electronic devices that they have deemed as critical to the development of weapons, including Russian cruise missiles that have been used to strike Ukraine. As Ukraine tries to repel Russia from its territory, the United States and its allies have been fighting a parallel battle to keep the chips needed for weapons systems, drones and tanks out of Russian hands. ...”

NY Times

The Discord Leaks: No, Ukraine Is Not ‘Doomed’ (Video)

POLITICO: Eastern Europeans face Brussels backlash over Ukraine grain bans (Audio)

Guardian: For years, we believed we could live as both Ukrainians and Russians. Not any more

Smoke rises from the site of a Russian rocket strike in March at an industrial complex in Slovyansk, Ukraine.

East L.A. walkouts

"The East Los Angeles Walkouts or Chicano Blowouts were a series of 1968 protests by Chicano students against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District high schools. The first walkout occurred on March 5, 1968. The students who organized and carried out the protests were primarily concerned with the quality of their education. This movement, which involved thousands of students in the Los Angeles area, was identified as ‘the first major mass protest against racism undertaken by Mexican-Americans in the history of the United States.’ …”

W – East L.A. walkouts, W – Sal Castro, W – David Sanchez (activist), W – Vickie Castro, W – Carlos Montes, W – La Raza (newspaper)

[PDF] The 1968 East LA Walkouts and the Sorry State of US Education

50 years ago, thousands walked out of East LA schools. Now, they say ‘the fight isn’t over.’

YouTube: Yo Soy Chicano: The East LA Student Walkouts of 1968, The 1968 East L.A. Student Walkouts (y Ruben P.C.)

Nearly two full years before the walkouts, eighteen demonstrators picketed in front of Lincoln High School in 1966 to protest against the lack of counseling services and educational opportunities for Latino students.

My Curtains, My Radiator

"I moved to Chicago late last summer and spent my first evening alone scrubbing and rescrubbing an old dresser I had found in the basement of my new apartment. It was plastered in dust and cobwebs, and dotted with some small dried-out things that were probably once eggs. Underneath, it was beautiful—maybe a hundred years old, a deep cherry color with intricate metal handles. I cleaned it and stapled fabric to the bottoms of the drawers, which still catch sometimes and deposit small slivers of wood on my T-shirts. Still, it works well enough. I loved the apartment when I moved in. ...”

The Paris Review

​Ukraine reports ‘unprecedented bloody battles’ in Bakhmut

"Ukraine’s military has reported ‘bloody battles unprecedented in recent decades’ in the eastern city of Bakhmut as the death toll from a Russian attack on residential buildings in nearby Sloviansk climbed to 11. The reported battles on Saturday came as the Russian defence ministry said fighters from its Wagner mercenary group had captured two more areas of Bakhmut. Wagner has spearheaded Russia’s attempt to take the city – the main target of Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine – since last summer.The fight has been the longest and deadliest battle of the war for both sides. ... It added that Russian army paratroop units were supporting the claimed advance by holding back Ukrainian forces on the flanks. ...”

Aljazeera (Video)

NY Times: As Poland and Hungary Ban Ukraine Grain Imports, Brussels Cries Foul

BBC - Ukraine war: In Kyiv, top officials shrug off US documents leak

NY Times: When Freezing Sperm Makes a Patriotic Statement

Ukrainian artillery fires towards the front line during heavy fighting near Bakhmut, Ukraine, on April 13, 2023

Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar

"Another year. A season passed. We’ve made it through winter: food from the larder and hoary-headed frosts. The meals were heavy. So were the ermine capes, the wools and silks on our heads. Dry January came and went. Resolutions frayed as the weeks ticked by. What does it mean to live a life in time? A life divided into equal parts, shaped by the stars, named for gods and saints? To speak astronomically, a year has a simple definition: one trip around the sun. From one vernal equinox to the next takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. Give or take. But for a long time before Copernicus put forth his heliocentric model, artists and augurers were mapping the phases of the moon and the changing of the seasons to mark the years. We’ve been making calendars since the Bronze Age. They recur across civilizations, and across systems of knowledge. ...”

NY Times

From one vernal equinox to the next takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. Give or take.

Remanence ~ Sepiadrone (2023)

"Here’s some advice we seldom hear: best played at medium volume. Remanence (Brian McWilliams, previously covered as Aperus, and John Phipps) also recommend that the music be played at night so the nuances can blend with ‘the muted atmosphere of a quiet environment.’ They are right; these drones are poorly suited to sunshine, preferring to exist in the backgrounds, corners and closets, seeping out as the night descends. The dark ambient gurgles and long, slow drones are akin to those of artists on the Cold Spring label, though Remanence admits a slice of filtered light. ...”

a closer listen (Audio)

Bandcamp (Audio)

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)