Zones: Post-industrial aesthetics and environments after Stalker

"... Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) is as enigmatic as it is visually arresting. The film retains an ability to mystify contemporary audiences. Its philosophical meditations and spiritual themes are as relevant as ever. Stalker‘s imagery continues to inspire artists, writers, and filmmakers. The relationship between Stalker‘s human protagonists and their post-industrial settings, and the representation of these settings through a refined environmental aesthetic, are essential to the film’s identity. The film radically advanced artistic representations of industrial and post-industrial landscapes, complicating existing aesthetic tropes while updating them for new generations of artists. In many ways we are still learning to be Tarkovsky’s contemporaries. ...”

Off Screen

Off Screen: The Passion of the Zone (Pt. 2)

2012 May: Solaris, 2018 October: Andrei Rublev (1966), 2020 December: Bruegel as Cinema, 2022 December:  Mirror (1975), 2023 January: Stalker (1979)

​The Strange World Of... African Head Charge

"The African Head Charge project is led by producer Adrian Sherwood and Jamaican percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah and started off as a combination of traditional Rasta drumming (including percussion instruments that had become neglected in reggae before AHC’s debut) and Sherwood’s experimentation with cut-up collage and rule-breaking approaches. They’re part of On-U Sound, which is not just a record label but a collective of musicians from different styles merging together for a variety of dub-based ventures, most of them playing across different projects simultaneously. ...”

The Quietus (Audio)

​Cinema of Algeria

"Cinema of Algeria refers to the film industry based in the north African country of Algeria. During the era of French colonization, movies were predominantly a propaganda tool for the French colonial state. Although filmed in Algeria and viewed by the local population, the vast majority of ‘Algerian’ cinema in this era was created by Europeans. ... Algeria became an independent nation in 1962, a topic which garnered heavy attention amongst Algerian movie productions of the 1960s and 1970s. Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's canonical 1967 film The Winds of the Aures depicts a rural farming family whose lives are destroyed by colonialism and war. ...”

Wikipedia

Jacobin: Algerian Film Was Born in the Struggle Against French Colonialism

Algerian cinema: A new wave is emerging (Video)

Algerian Cinema: Its History and Current Complexities (Video)

2021 May: The Battle of Algiers, 2022 July: The Algerian Revolution Changed the World for the Better

​In Small Victory, Signs of Grueling Combat Ahead in Ukrainian Counteroffensive

"The Ukrainian soldiers thought the Russians would quickly retreat from Neskuchne, a tiny village in southern Ukraine, especially after a concerted artillery barrage and a rocket strike on their headquarters.Instead, the Russians dug in, fighting for two days before giving up the village last month, leaving their dead decaying on the roadside and piles of expended ammunition around their makeshift defenses. The Russian defeat, on June 9, was Ukraine’s first win in a prolonged counteroffensive that is well into its fourth week but moving at a slower pace than expected. In that respect, the battle for Neskuchne served as an early warning that Kyiv’s and the Western allies’ hopes for a quick victory were unrealistic and that every mile of their drive into Russian-occupied territory would be grueling and contested. ...”

NY Times

NY Times: Opinion | A Salute to the Honest(ish) Russian Warlord (Video)

Vox: What the Wagner rebellion might mean for Russia’s war in Ukraine

The Intercept_: Prigozhin Told the Truth About Putin’s War in Ukraine

NY Times: Reading the Tea Leaves on the End of the War in Ukraine

Ukrainian soldiers in June at the entrance of a destroyed school that Russians had occupied in Neskuchne before the village was abandoned.

Two Decades of Sonic Exploration: History of Berlin

"Berlin in the 90s was not the cosmopolitan city it is today; much of the music scene did not look far beyond its own connections and experiences. CTM’s founders were then active in Berlin’s club and art scenes, and struck by the novel role of clubs as extended art spaces, relatively free from convention and fundamentally based on the interplay of various artistic and social practices. Many artists active in this context weren’t musicians first and foremost, and saw their work and its settings as continuously shifting and necessarily hybrid. Despite this supposedly porous social and cultural character, exchanges between nightlife and other communities were yet to be developed, as was its wider recognition as a serious form of art. ...”

CTM

Burnt Friedmann's Korg synth at CTM.

​Queens, NYC-Born and Bred / Bari, Italy-Based Cear One on His Passion for Writing, His Influences, His Graff Adventures and More

"Born and raised in Queens, New York and based now in, Bari Italy, Cear One has left his mark not only in his native city, but in Central America and now in his current hometown in Southern Italy. I recently had the opportunity to interview him. When did you first ‘get up?’ I started practicing tags when I was about 13 or 14. But I didn’t actually go outside with spray paint until I was 17. That’s when I did my first throw-ups and fill ins on Queens’ rooftops. Where were you living at the time? I was living in Flushing, but I also went around Astoria, Jackson Heights and other parts of Queens. What inspired you to? My uncle, the Original KR1, was a writer. He was a big influence. Graffiti magazines and videos also inspired me. ...”

Street Art NYC

​Camp spotted on suspected Wagner site in Belarus

"A new high-resolution satellite image obtained by the BBC reveals hundreds of new tent-like structures at the site of a suspected Wagner camp in Belarus. This follows an agreement to relocate Wagner mercenaries and their controversial leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, to Belarus, following the recent mutiny against Russian forces. What does the satellite image show? The satellite image appears to show activity at a disused military base about 13 miles (21km) from the town of Asipovichy - around 64 miles from Minsk, the capital of Belarus. The area has been reported in Russian media as a place which could house Wagner fighters. ...”

BBC

Aljazeera: Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 492 (Video)

POLITICO: West to Putin: We hate you. Don’t go. (Video)

Vanity Fair: How Ukraine Viewed Russia’s Aborted Coup (June 26, 2023)

A Ukrainian military serviceman holds a defused cluster bomb from an MSLR missile, among a display of pieces of rockets used by the Russian army, October 21, 2022.  CNN: Biden administration could soon approve sending controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine

The Shores of Bohemia: A Cape Cod Story, 1910-1960

"There is something ineffable about the appeal of the outer reaches of Cape Cod to generations of writers, artists and architects. Maybe it’s simply that, as Thoreau observed, ‘a man may stand there and put all America behind him.’ Maybe — and this was certainly true for the first part of the 20th century — it was the place’s remoteness and isolation, the sense that as the land reaches out toward the Atlantic, in a single long, crooked limb, the present conventional world slips away, allowing you to rethink, reinvent and get away with all manner of things. Maybe a sort of pre-modern living — with so few amenities and creature comforts — drew the urban cliques who gravitated there, repelled as many were by the excesses of capitalism. Still, the scope of the attraction is astounding. In John Taylor Williams’s account of 50 years of bohemian life in and around the last three towns on Cape Cod, ‘The Shores of Bohemia,’ you’re almost overwhelmed with famous names. ...”

NY Times: The Outer Limits

the arts fuse

amazon

50 Years of Hip-Hop: A History of the Genre’s Evolution

"Hip-hop was born in the summer of 1973 at a block party in New York City’s Bronx when DJ Kool Herc extended the beat of a recording using two turntables and a mixer to fade between them, then started emceeing as the music continued. His techniques came to be known as scratching and rapping — two of the key elements in hip-hop music. It would be another six years before the first hip-hop song was recorded and released, introducing the genre to a wider audience and gaining popularity in the mainstream. By the 1980s, hip-hop had expanded beyond New York and could be heard on the airwaves and in clubs in cities such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, St. Louis, and New Orleans. By 1989, hip-hop had established itself as a mainstay in popular music. ...”

Discogs

NY Times: Hip-Hop, Still Fly at 50

NPR: 50 Years of Hip-Hop (Audio)

21 Miles of Obstacles - The Ukrainian counteroffensive faces an enemy nearly as daunting as the Russians: the terrain.

"The southern offensive could determine the fate of the war, many military analysts believe. Much of Ukraine is rolling steppe and forests, but the south is especially flat, making it more dangerous for advancing troops. Ukrainian officials have said the counteroffensive is going as planned, even though it’s clear, through open source accounts, that Ukrainian vehicles — including recently supplied western tanks and armored personnel carriers — are being damaged and destroyed. Kyiv’s formations have managed to take several small villages, but Ukrainian casualties are mounting. The slow pace is most likely the result of several factors. Russian troops have shown competency fighting defensively, and Moscow’s formations have improved their tactics since earlier in the war. ...”

NY Times

BBC - Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia

​The Feminist Art Journal

"The Feminist Art Journal was an American magazine, published quarterly from 1972 to 1977. It was the first stable, widely read journal covering feminist art. By the time the final publication was produced, The Feminist Art Journal had a circulation of eight thousand copies, and ten thousand copies of the last edition were printed. Cindy Nemser, Patricia Mainardi, and Irene Moss, the three founding members of the Feminist Art Journal all formerly staffed the magazine Women and Art, a publication funded by the Redstocking Artists. ...”

Wikipedia

Criticism: A Feminist Reckoning

Cindy Nemser: FEMINIST ART JOURNAL

YouTube: Artist & Critic with Don Gray, "Cindy Nemser, Feminist Art Journal"

Anarchy in Action – Colin Ward (1973)

"The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism. ... Through a wide-ranging analysis—drawing on examples from education, urban planning, welfare, housing, the environment, the workplace, and the family, to name but a few—Colin Ward demonstrates that the roots of anarchist practice are not so alien or quixotic as they might at first seem but lie precisely in the ways that people have always tended to organize themselves when left alone to do so. ...”

PM Press

W – Anarchy in Action

Anarchy in Action – Colin Ward (1973)

amazon

​Just How Much Trouble Is Vladimir Putin In?

"The last few days have been alternately strange, confusing and nerve-wracking. The world watched as tension between several of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most loyal lieutenants broke into the open, and one of them turned his guns on targets in his own country.For now, the situation appears to have been resolved with an offer of exile to Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, who resisted having his forces integrated into the Russian army and sent them into Russia to confront the military leadership. But it remains unclear to what extent Putin and the autocratic regime he has spent the last 23 years building has been damaged by the display of defiance, either short term or long term. So we asked some of the most astute observers of Russia and its leader to share their thoughts on what we’ve learned about Putin in the last few days, and what that might mean for Russia — and the West — going forward. ... Here’s what they had to say. ...”

POLITICO

NY Times: A Mutiny That Showed the Stress on Putin’s System of Rule

NBC News: Mutiny and mayhem in Russia a probable boon for Ukraine (Video)

The Intercept_: Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship

POLITICO: Prigozhin’s Wagner mutiny is over. What now? (Audio)

NY Times: Opinion | Prigozhin and the Long and Infamous History of Failed Russian Rebellions

NY Times: His Glory Fading, a Russian Warlord Took One Last Stab at Power

An advertising board of Wagner group in St. Petersburg yesterday

Fernando Pessoa’s Unselving

"On July 11, 1903, a long narrative poem called ‘The Miner’s Song’ by Karl P. Effield appeared in the Natal Mercury, a weekly newspaper in Durban, South Africa. Effield—who claimed to be from Boston—was actually none other than the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, then a high school student in Durban. This was the first of Pessoa’s English-language fictitious authors to appear in print—the beginning of Pessoa’s unusual mode of self-othering. The adoption of different personae allowed him to go beyond a nom de plume, and take on unpopular, controversial, and even extreme points of view in both his poetry and prose. ...”

The Paris Review

2008 March: Fernando Pessoa, 2012 October: The Book of Disquiet, 2012 November: Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, 2014 May: Aspects by Fernando Pessoa, 2016 March: Passoa's Trunk - 13+ ways of looking at a poem, 2017 September: Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act, 2020 February: Strange Music Of Silence: Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, 2021 August: The Heteronymous Identities of Fernando Pessoa By Richard Zeniths, 2022 January: Conceptual Personae: The many imagined lives of Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa in 1934. From Os Objectos de Fernando Pessoa

​‘Make Me Famous’ – and Other Things People Want From Art

"In the fascinating art-world documentary Make Me Famous, painter Edward Brezinski finally gets his wish. Although he died — probably — in 2007, Brezinski’s largely unrealized goal in his lifetime was to be a successful artist. Even his mysterious death, in the South of France, didn’t raise his profile or prices — as it has for others and as perhaps he hoped it would do for him. Unclear. But this film succeeds where the artist failed, turning his life and art into the main attraction, with enough conviction to ensure he’ll be more than a footnote in art history. ...”

Voice

‘Make Me Famous’: Film Review

W - Make Me Famous (2021 film)

YouTube: Make Me Famous trailer

Outside the Mudd Club, 1980.

​Impulse! Records: An Alternative Top 20 Zeitgeist Seizing Albums

"There can be little argument that a jazz label ever captured a zeitgeist more completely than Impulse! did during its original 1960s incarnation. In the US, the fight back against white racism was cresting, opposition to the Vietnam war was growing, outrage over the assassinations of figures of hope such as President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X was boiling over, and inner cities were literally ablaze with protest. Impulse! entered this arena in 1961. ... [Shabaka] Hutchings represents a socially informed style of jazz which confronts racism, poverty and political authoritarianism much like the New Thing did in the 1960s. On the threshold of its 60th anniversary in 2021, Impulse! has made a great start in regaining its foundational relevance. ...”

All About Jazz

The Dial

"The Dial was an American magazine published intermittently from 1840 to 1929. In its first form, from 1840 to 1844, it served as the chief publication of the Transcendentalists. From the 1880s to 1919 it was revived as a political review and literary criticism magazine. From 1920 to 1929 it was an influential outlet for modernist literature in English. ... The first year of the Watson/Thayer Dial alone saw the appearance of Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Burke, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Charles Demuth, Kahlil Gibran, Gaston Lachaise, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Arthur Wilson later known as Winslow Wilson, Odilon Redon, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sandburg, Van Wyck Brooks, and W. B. Yeats. ...”

Wikipedia

The Dial Magazine

Modernist Magazines: The Dial

Online Books: The Dial

As Putin’s Trusted Partner, Prigozhin Was Always Willing to Do the Dirty Work

"Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the mercenary leader who led an armed rebellion in Russia on Saturday, was never afraid of a dirty task, many say. Emerging from jail as the Soviet Union was collapsing, he began his post-criminal career selling hot dogs on street corners in St. Petersburg, Russia. There, he befriended Vladimir V. Putin, then a minor official in the city government, developed a catering business and earned billions on government contracts when his friend Vladimir became prime minister and then president of Russia. Mr. Prigozhin quickly earned the trust of his benefactor, who assigned him a number of important tasks that were best handled at arm’s length from the government.   ...”

*****NY Times

*****NY Times: How a Rebellion in Russia Unfolded Over 36 Hours (Video)  “Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner private military company, led an armed rebellion in Russia on Saturday and claimed that his forces came within 125 miles of Moscow. Here is how the events unfolded. ...”

***NY Times - Timeline: What Led to the Standoff Between Russia and Prigozhin

***NY Times - Here is the latest on the standoff between Prigozhin and the Russian military.

NY Times: Russia in Crisis as Mercenary Revolt Threatens Putin

NY Times: Putin embraced turmoil, and now it is rattling his leadership.

W - Wagner Group rebellion, W - Wagner Group, W - Neo-Nazism

The Intercept_: Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Coup Targets Putin and His “Oligarchic Clan”

POLITICO: Wagner rebels career toward showdown with Putin as they push to Moscow (Audio)

BBC: Is this a coup? What is Prigozhin doing in Russia? IVideo)

Guardian: Even if Wagner rebellion fails, Putin’s presidency has never looked weaker

Map shows Wagner Group’s movements

Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship

"After Ukrainian forces regained control of the port city of Kherson last November, following eight months of Russian occupation, some journalists entered the liberated city within hours. Without formal permission to be there, they documented the jubilant crowds welcoming soldiers with hugs and Ukrainian flags. Ukrainian officials, who tightly control press access to the front lines, responded by revoking the journalists’ press credentials, claiming that they had ‘ignored existing restrictions.’ In the months since then, as Ukraine has sought to liberate more territory occupied by Russia, the Ukrainian government has intensified its efforts to control the narrative of the war by tightening journalists’ access to the conflict. ...”

The Intercept_

The Intercept_: On the Ground in Ukraine (Audio)

NY Times: Ukraine’s Western-Trained Brigades Begin to Enter the Fight, NY Times: Understanding Ukraine’s Counteroffensive (Audio)

Aljazeera: Zelenskyy urges world to heed Ukraine’s ‘terror’ attack warning (Video)

BBC - Ukraine war: Living without water in a town devastated by dam breach

The damage caused to the Kakhovka dam earlier this month wiped out homes and left families without water

A Day At The Cage

"It overflows with history and diversity, sweat, blood, and Air Jordans. It’s where all five boroughs come to play, but this isn’t your usual recreational rookie tomfoolery. ‘The Cage,’ on West 4th Street and Sixth Avenue, is NYC’s iconic basketball court — NBA legends such as Stephon Marbury, Rod Strickland, and Jayson Williams all stepped foot through the magical gates to play some streetball here. Whispers are traded around the court that even Julius Irving played here. ...”

Voice

Behold the Cage

W - West Fourth Street Courts

vincenzo d’alto - West 4th Street Courts

Clef (left) and Skisso bringing their best to the court.

When Afrobeat Legend Fela Kuti Collaborated with Cream Drummer Ginger Baker

"At the end of the 60s, superstar drummer and angriest man in rock Ginger Baker was on the verge of collapse. Strung out on heroin, deeply grieving Jimi Hendrix’s death, and alienated from his former Cream and Blind Faith bandmates, he needed a new direction. He found it in Nigeria, where he decamped after driving a Range Rover from Algeria across the Sahara Desert. (A madcap adventure captured in the 1971 documentary Ginger Baker in Africa). Once in Lagos, Baker started jamming with Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti. The meeting of these two musical forces of nature produced a suite of recordings. ...”

Open Culture (Video)

YouTube: Ginger Baker in Africa (1971) 53:35, Ginger Baker’s Air Force 2 (1970) 49:10

Odesa Was Ready to Reclaim Its Beaches. Then a Dam Broke.

"Last summer, the beaches that ring the port city of Odesa in southern Ukraine were crowded with volunteers packing sandbags under bluffs where troops were positioned in machine gun nests as the threat of a Russian amphibious assault still loomed. This summer was supposed to be different. In the first days of June, the sun was warm, the Black Sea was a shimmering blue, and many Ukrainians were already packing the beaches despite an official ban on swimming. Then the Kakhovka dam was destroyed. It released a torrent of water rushing down the Dnipro River, washing over towns and villages across southern Ukraine. Thousands of houses and businesses were flooded, vast stretches of rich farmland were ravaged, and the full environmental and economic cost is likely to take years to measure. ...”

NY Times

NY Times - At War: Images From an Expanding Ukraine Conflict

NBC News: Ukraine conference grapples with ‘years and years’ of rebuilding needs (Video)

Guardian: Zelenskiy admits Ukrainian counter-offensive going ‘slower than desired’

At a beach in Odesa, Ukraine, this month.

​A week with the worst international football team in the world

"It ends, like it almost always does, in the familiarity of defeat. What else would you really expect when, in the only occupied stand, there is a group of fans named Brigata Mai 1 Gioia? Translation: the ‘Never One Joy Brigade’. When you are a supporter of San Marino, officially the worst international team in the world, it can be useful to have a sense of humour. … San Marino, an enclave within central Italy with a population of 33,700, lose football matches. Sometimes they lose football matches spectacularly. In the worst times, they take such a tanking you could be forgiven for wanting to end the game early and give them a good cuddle. ...”

The Athletic (Video)

Virginia Woolf’s Forgotten Diary

"On August 3, 1917, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary for the first time in two years—a small notebook, roughly the size of the palm of her hand. It was a Friday, the start of the bank holiday, and she had traveled from London to Asheham, her rented house in rural Sussex, with her husband, Leonard. For the first time in days, it had stopped raining, and so she ‘walked out from Lewes.’ There were ‘men mending the wall & roof’ of the house, and Will, the gardener, had ‘dug up the bed in front, leaving only one dahlia.’ Finally, ‘bees in attic chimney.’ It is a stilted beginning, and yet with each entry, her diary gains in confidence. Soon, Woolf establishes a pattern. ...”

The Paris Review

2019 April: Bloomsbury Group, 2020 August:  How Virginia Woolf Kept Her Brother Alive in Letters, 2021 January: Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf’s Literary Revolution, 2021 June: A House of One’s Own - Janet Malcolm

Ukraine war: BBC on the front line as Ukraine attacks Russian trenches

"Two weeks since the counter-offensive began, Ukraine is making modest but steady progress in three areas of attack across the 1,000km (620 mile) front line. Troops are launching probing attacks, while most of Ukraine's forces are being held in reserve, waiting for a big enough opening in Russian defences to launch a main attack and try to recapture land in the south of the country. The fighting has been hard, with heavy casualties on both sides, and opposing armies claiming the upper hand. Ukraine's advance in southern Donetsk has stuttered, but continues. The BBC joined the 68th Jaeger Brigade as its combat forces sought to expand their control eastward of the recently regained village of Blahodatne. In their sights were a series of trenches protecting Russian forces on nearby hilltops. ...”

BBC (Video)

There Is No Substitute for Ukrainian Victory

Aljazeera: Ukraine says ‘biggest blow’ yet to come in counteroffensive push (Video)

NY Times - ‘They Expected Me to Die on My Own’: Life as a Ukrainian P.O.W.

Fighting in the recently retaken areas was at close quarters

The modest East Side park inspired by a 15th century church in Rome

"Walk through the spiked iron gates of St. Catherine’s Park in Lenox Hill, and you’ll feel like you’re entering almost any bustling New York City pocket park. Spread across this leafy, one-acre green space on First Avenue between 67th and 68th Streets are picnic tables, a playground, and ball courts. On a warm June afternoon, a sprinkler shaped like an elephant sprays water over gleeful kids, and weary parents occupy the many wood benches. But St. Catherine’s, which opened as a city park in 1917 and takes its name from the Church of St. Catherine of Siena across First Avenue on East 68th Street, has something to it that’s unique among Gotham’s many community parks. ...”

Ephemeral New York

​Kummahs of Oman: Stitches of Tradition

"From her home in Muscat, capital of Oman, Safiya Ahmad Al Lawati is using peach-colored thread to embroider a cap known in Omani Arabic as a kummah. Pushing her needle through the thick white calico, she works the thread around one of the cap’s dozens of small eyelets that aide ventilation in a hot climate. ‘I started early this morning,’ she explains. ‘It is a long and complicated process, and it can take up to a month or more depending on how elaborate the decoration is.’ ...”

AramcoWorld

​‘They enjoyed this’: Ukrainian woman recounts five-month nightmare of torture and imprisonment

"Olena Yahupova was first taken by the Russian occupiers in the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar last October. Neighbours she knew had informed on her, telling the FSB secret police that her husband was a Ukrainian military officer. What followed, she says, was two days of torture with the secret police – which turned out to be only a prelude to a nightmare of five months of detention and forced labour, during which she also had to act in faked news clips. ... Enerhodar was a city of 53,000 before the war, best known as being the site of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. A key target for the Russian invaders, it was captured in early March 2022. ...”

Guardian

NBC News: Ukraine recaptures southeastern village as long-awaited counteroffensive rumbles on (Video)

Guardian: Ukraine takes village on Zaporizhzhia front, Russia-appointed official says

NY Times: Ukraine Appears to Make a Small Gain in the South as Counteroffensive Continues

Houses and stadium are seen underwater and polluted by oil in the flooded Kherson, Ukraine, Saturday, June 10, 2023. Ukraine claims recapture of seven villages in early stages of counteroffensive

​I'm Going Where The Water Drinks Like Wine / 18 Unsung Bluesmen Rarities 1923-29

"There's been Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, there's been Bukka White, Sleepy John Estes, Skip James, etc. They became legendary in their lifetime or the White counterculture saved them in extremis from oblivion in the '60s. ... These musicians didn't meet their destiny at a crossroad; no folk or blues label rediscovered them. They never got a second chance. They had to accept lowly jobs unrelated to their art. They survived. Most of them came from Mississippi, Memphis, St. Louis. They were all highly unique, and they recorded at a young age - a very young age in some cases - in the '20s. They would walk into a hotel, guitar in hand, for a recording session or two. For some, we don't even know their names, since they cut a few 78rpm sides and left for who knows where. Their traces get lost in the Great Depression. ...”

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discogs (Video)

amazon

​Gangster film

"A gangster film or gangster movie is a film belonging to a genre that focuses on gangs and organized crime. It is a subgenre of crime film, that may involve large criminal organizations, or small gangs formed to perform a certain illegal act. The genre is differentiated from Westerns and the gangs of that genre. ... New Hollywood directors would be honored with 5 of the top 6 films on the list—1967's Bonnie and Clyde by Arthur Penn, 1972's The Godfather and 1974's The Godfather Part II both by Francis Ford Coppola, 1983's Scarface, a remake of the 1932 original, by Brian De Palma, and 1990's Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese. The rise and fall of a mobster in a classic gangster film is often a thematic trope. ...”

Wikipedia

25 of Hollywood’s Classic Gangster Films

YouTube: The Death of the American Gangster Film  36:20, The Godfather: How Michael Corleone Evolves  13:30

American Gangster - Ridley Scott (2007)

​Russian forces face shortage of tanks as counteroffensive creeps forward

"Russia’s forces are suffering a shortage of tanks, the country’s defence minister has admitted, as Ukraine’s offensive in the south and east continued to push back the frontline with the help of western hardware. Sergei Shoigu, on a visit to a military factory in western Siberia, said that production of armoured vehicles needed to be increased as Kyiv talked up the heavy losses being inflicted on the occupying enemy. An increase in the manufacture of tanks was said by Shoigu to be necessary ‘to satisfy the needs of Russian forces carrying out the special military operation’, in comments that echoed those of Vladimir Putin earlier in the week. ...”

Guardian

BBC: Counting Russia's dead in Ukraine - and what it says about the changing face of the war

NY Times: Russia, Learning From Costly Mistakes, Shifts Battlefield Tactics

NBC News: Ukraine counteroffensive has 'no chance,' Putin says as Russians brace for long war (Video)

Ukraine has recently launched an offensive to reclaim territory seized by Russia

​The Fierce, Flourishing World of Battle Rap

"On the eastern edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant — a Brooklyn neighborhood synonymous with hip-hop excellence — a tiny wellness center is tucked between a Pentecostal church and a real estate office. Inside its sterile, 800 or so square feet, there’s a wall of mirrors, stock photos of people performing various exercises and fluorescent lighting that makes the plastic plants in the corner look even more fake. On certain nights, one could be excused for thinking this is a waiting room and not what it actually is: a battleground. Here, in this unassuming room, the Trap NY — one of several battle rap leagues based in New York City — hosts most of its events. ...”

NY Times

From left: Bosevich4, Chris Dubbs and Bizzness at the Trap NY in January.

Heart of the Congos - The Congos (1977)

"Heart of the Congos is a roots reggae album by The Congos, produced by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry at his Black Ark studio with a studio band including Boris Gardiner on bass and Ernest Ranglin on guitar. The album was released in 1977. It is noted as being one of Perry's masterpiece productions of the Black Ark era. The first issue of the LP in Jamaica was a very limited release said to consist of only several hundred copies. It was remastered using the original Black Ark quarter inch master tapes with the exception of 'At The Feast' and re-released in 1996 on the Blood & Fire label, run by Steve Barrow, T Elwing, and Mick Hucknall, with assistance on the ground provided by Andrea Lewis (Jamaica). ...”

Wikipedia

The Vinyl Press

amazon

YouTube: T.h.e C.o.n.g.o.s - H.e.a.r.t O.f T.h.e C.o.n.g.o.s ( Full Album )