Celebrating Five Decades of LA’s Self Help Graphics & Art Center

"Founded 50 years ago in the East Los Angeles garage of Franciscan nun Sister Karen Boccalero, Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG) established itself in the ensuing decades as a vital and vibrant community-focused arts space and printmaking studio. Now, a series of exhibitions staged over the coming months will contextualize the organization’s history and legacy, delving deep into different aspects of its cultural and social resonance. The inaugural show Marking an Era: Celebrating Self Help Graphics & Art at 50 opened last month at the Laguna Art Museum, one of the first institutions to acquire a significant number of prints made by artists at SHG. ..."

Hyperallergic

Los de Abajo Collective (Kay Brown, Judith Duran, Poli Marichal, Victor Rosas, and Marianne Sadowski), “You don’t want to know” (2008), mounted prints 

Submission – Official Map: Long Island Rail Road Screen Maps at Grand Central Madison

"... Oh, I do like this. Graphically strong with bright, poppy colours and making good use of the unusual display format – eight vertical screens next to each other. The map looks to have been specifically designed for this format, as none of the labels cross over the breaks between panels – nicely done! Here’s hoping it doesn’t get blanked out by advertisements too much! It’s hard to see in this photo, but it looks like there’s a lovely wavy texture to the water background, which is a nice design touch. Addition of ferry routes and points of interest on Long Island are also welcome. ..."

 Transit Map

The best South African jazz of 2023 so far

"Early this May, the Johannesburg-based performance outfit The Brother Moves On embarked on a tour to Cape Town where they played three shows in three very different settings. The second of those dates fell on a Saturday, May 6th, at an art studio bordering Woodstock and Salt River. The daytime party that turned into a full-blown live music extravaganza when darkness crept brought two schools of live music under a single roof, with the exciting Kujenga bringing their musical juice to home turf. The audience, comprising a fair balance of old and new fans, as well as the truly curious appreciators of culture, packed the warehouse-sized studio, a shared space housing acclaimed artists like host Breeze Yoko. ..."

 PAN (Video)

From Ashes to Hard Courts: Can Willets Point Be Saved?

"'About half-way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land,' wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby. 'This is the valley of ashes.' In September 1999, in the exact place Fitzgerald describes, Serena Williams won her initial U.S. Open Final, becoming the first Black woman to win a Grand Slam tournament since Althea Gibson, in 1956. And in 2012, it became the spot where, six decades after the team was founded, Johan Santana would finally throw the first no-hitter in Mets history. ..."

Voice

 Come to Willets Point for whatever ails your auto.

Get Up, Stand Up: The 20 Best Reggae Singers Of All Time

"From versatile voices such as Bob Marley’s, to the soul- and gospel-tinged style of Toots Hibbert and the fully committed, utterly convincing messaging of Winston Rodney, the best reggae singers of all time are a varied bunch proving that the music has much more to offer than the obvious stereotypes. Whether they fronted bands or made a name for themselves as a solo artist, here are the 20 best reggae singers of all time. ..." 

udiscover (Video)

The Last Emperor - Bernardo Bertolucci (1987)

"Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE LAST EMPEROR won nine Academy Awards, unexpectedly sweeping every category in which it was nominated—quite a feat for a challenging, multilayered epic directed by an Italian and starring an international cast. Yet the power and scope of the film was, and remains, undeniable—the life of Emperor Pu Yi, who took the throne at age three, in 1908, before witnessing decades of cultural and political upheaval, within and without the walls of the Forbidden City. Recreating Ching dynasty China with astonishing detail and unparalleled craftsmanship by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, THE LAST EMPEROR is also an intimate character study of one man reconciling personal responsibility and political legacy."

Criterion (Video)  

Wikipedia  

Slant: Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor on the Criterion Collection  

Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor”: Beneath the Gold Ornamentation

The 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time

"We wanted to do something special for this double July-August issue of The New Republic, but we weren’t sure what; then it hit us that summer is movie season, so why not combine that fact with this magazine’s great passion and come up with a list of history’s best political movies? (TNR, by the way, is no stranger to motion pictures. ..."

New Republic

Why Crack Became the 1980s ‘Superdrug’

"Crack erupted across America’s marginalized urban neighborhoods in the 1980s like a biblical plague torn from the pages of Revelation. The drug offered an inexpensive, nirvana-like high, leaving users clamoring for ever larger doses in a hopeless yet insatiable quest to sustain the same levels of bliss. It was the perfect 'superdrug,' and Black communities, redlined in concrete city blocks, were neglected as their wealthier white neighbors escaped crack’s worst embrace. Those left behind absorbed the brunt of an apocalyptic epidemic that redrew a generation with ruthless precision across racial and economic fault lines. Donovan X. Ramsey came of age in a crack-era neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio, where it was better not to ask questions...."

NY Times: Why Crack Became the 1980s ‘Superdrug’  

Guernica: After the Murder By Donovan X. Ramsey 

amazon: When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

A man selling crack on West 42nd Street in Manhattan in 1987.

The most popular pizza style in every state, mapped

"At first glance, pizza seems simple enough: Dough, sauce, melty cheese. Maybe some sausage or pepperoni. A few slices of fresh tomato. Or a thinner crust with bacon or basil. Or why not a double crust stuffed full of mozzarella and garlicky spinach? And now we’re down the rabbit hole of American pizza, which in fact turns out to be a bewilderingly diverse, complicated and contentious culinary crazy quilt. Identifying the most popular regional pizza styles, and the top-rated places for each style, wound up capturing our imagination (and spare time) for months. ..."

Washington Post  

Washington Post: Pizza in America

Anthology Of Contemporary Post Industrial Music

"... The 20th century was marked by a turning point in the way we, human beings, relate to technology. Since the First Industrial Revolution until the advent of personal computers and the internet, we have watched almost one hundred years of technological revolutions that culminated into the creation of colour TV, the nuclear bomb, the modernist vanguards and postmodernism. We also saw the rise of a new music genre that was actually translating this industrial, chaotic, in-between wars and highly technological scenario of the 1970s: it was the birth of industrial music. ..."

Bandcamp (Audio)

The Grail Legend – Emma Jung & Marie-Louise von Franz (1970)

"... Emma Jung has always been a shadowy figure. ... That insightful if slim volume and the far larger accomplishment of 'The Grail Legend' indicate that there were little-appreciated depths to the woman. The spectral availability of 'The Grail Legend' has abetted the obscuration. Emma died in 1955, leaving the book unfinished. It was completed by Marie-Louise von Franz, the leading Jungian analyst and writer since Carl’s death, but was printed in only two limited editions--in German (1960) and in English (1970). ..."

LA Times 

W – Emma Jung, W – Marie-Louise von Franz  

W – Holy Grail 

Emma Jung Holy Grail – Full description 

amazon

The Key Players in Trump’s Plot to Upend the Election, Mapped

"Upending the outcome of a free and fair presidential election is no minor endeavor. It requires time, energy, money and, especially, an awful lot of people willing to do the wrong thing — or at least go along with it. The network of people who allegedly helped Donald Trump try, without success, to stay in power more than two and a half years ago may seem hopelessly chaotic, but there was a method to the madness. American elections are, by design, entrusted to the states and therefore decentralized. ..."  

NY Times

Shocks to the System: Don DeLillo’s novels of the Cold War and its aftermath

"The dream of an artwork that encompasses the whole world; of a novel that tells everybody’s story; of characters who feel and act and speak for us all; of the image that nobody doesn’t recognize. Yet it is the world and characters and images and stories themselves that stand in the way of that dream. They are too real and too small, too specific and too discrete to be for all. A person personifying history is still a person, history warped by and warping a personality. A dramatic narrative consists of speeches, acts, events. A consciousness is marred by the having of particular thoughts. An era is stained by its favorite clichés: the rise and fall, rags to riches, the trauma plot. Is there any escape from the contortions and inherited feelings of melodrama?..."

BOOKFORUM

A Thousand Tiny Quakes

"The explosions came one after another, a relentless series of bombings that echoed across Kyiv in the first weeks of the war. Residents at the center of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were forced underground into makeshift shelters. While the fight for Ukraine’s capital is well known, researchers have developed a way to better understand the battle by capturing subtle tremors beneath the earth’s surface, a method that could improve our understanding of future conflicts. ..."

NY Times

Dean Fuller – The Washington Monument Amb

"...  4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa? If Puremagnetik’s Driftmaker delay was a pedal I’d pay a ridiculous amount of money for it without a second thought. It adds such a gritty, messed up ambience to whatever it touches. Blankfor.ms had a hand in it, so you know the lofi is legit. I don’t wish any of my hardware was a software plugin* This is not to say that I’m dismissing the digital side of music making in any way, shape or form. Plenty of great artists use it to great effect.  
I don’t use these tools because I just don’t have much time to play music. ..."

Martin

YouTube: the_washington_monument_amb

Puremagnetik’s Driftmaker 

Qatar’s World Cup FIFA Bribe Documents Exposed

"The moral and legal compromises FIFA and the Qatari government made to hold the 2022 World Cup in the Doha metropolitan area range from tolerating the host country’s ban on homosexuality to deadly abuses of migrant laborers at stadium construction sites. According to documents submitted to the record of a lawsuit in federal court late this afternoon, the road to the first Middle Eastern World Cup also began with a series of straightforward bribes. ..."

Qatar’s World Cup FIFA Bribe Documents Exposed

La’eeb, the mascot of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, at Al Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, Qatar...

The Forgotten Radicalism of the March on Washington

“As remembered and commemorated by most Americans, the 1963 March on Washington — its 60th anniversary fell on Monday — represents the essence of the civil rights movement, defined in our national mythology as a colorblind demand for neutrality and fairness in the face of discrimination, embodied in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that his ‘four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Less well remembered, in our collective memory at least, is the fact that both the march and King’s speech were organized around much more than opposition to anti-Black discrimination. ..."

NY Times | Opinion 

Jacobin: You’ve Been Lied to About the 1963 March on Washington (2022) 

Bob Dylan’s Search for Authenticity at The March on Washington (2020)

The 5 Innovative Bridges That Make New York City, New York City

"The Brooklyn Bridge ignites the passions of tourists and locals alike. For every 10,000 visitors who pause in its bike lanes to snap selfies, there’s an alum of nearby PS 261 who celebrated its birthday with a song that mentions the fates of its engineers John and Washington Roebling to the tune of I’ve Been Working on the Railroad. (A sample chorus: Caisson’s disease! Caissons disease! Caisson’s disease is really bad!) ... In 1886, a hustler named Steve Brodie claimed to have survived a jump off of it, a tale propagated by Bugs Bunny. ..."

Open Cultuer (Video)

Fred Locks - Black Star Liner (1976), Black Star Liner In Dub (2012)

"Stafford Elliot (born 1955), better known as Fred Locks, is a roots reggae singer best known for his mid-1970s single 'Black Star Liners' and the album of the same name. ... Grounation offshoot Vulcan issued the debut album Black Star Liner/True Rastaman in 1976, an album that has remained popular with roots reggae audiences ever since, with the title track regarded as a roots anthem. In the late 1970s, Elliott was also a member of the vocal trio Creation Steppers, along with Eric Griffiths and Willy Stepper, releasing records in Jamaica on their own Star of The East label, and having a hit in Jamaica with 'Stormy Night'. ..."

Wikipedia  

YouTube: Black Star Liner - 1976 (Full), Spotify (Audio)  

YouTube: Black Star Liner In Dub (Full), Bandcamp (Audio)

A rare vintage wooden phone booth inside a fabled Brooklyn tavern

"They used to be everywhere: restaurants and bars, drugstores and soda fountains, libraries, private clubs, schools, and hotel lobbies. But the wood phone booth with a hinged door that closes like an accordion has almost totally vanished from the cityscape. These relics of 20th century New York City, with their secretive air and noir-ish feel, are dwindling fast. So it’s quite a thrill to find one by accident inside—where else?—an old-school Irish saloon where generations of Brooklynites gathered to drink their troubles away. ..."

Ephemeral New York

Cézanne’s Sensations

"In the years preceding the Second World War, the art historian John Rewald persisted in pruning the branches of the Aix-en-Provence countryside. He believed this would make it possible to recover, through the lens of his camera, the raw data Cézanne perceived. For him, time was a parasite whose marks he wished to erase, just like he wished to purge from the historical record a Cézanne faithful to nothing.1 Proust wrote against such illusions: 'What we call reality is a certain relationship between sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously—a relationship which is suppressed by a simple cinematographic vision, which actually moves further away from the truth the more it professes to be confined to it.' ..."

Non Site

Still Life with Cut Watermelon (Nature morte avec pastèque entamée), ca. 1900.

Metropolis: 36 Views of New York

"For most of 2022, Stipan Tadić rode the D train from Coney Island to the Bronx and back as he meticulously explored each stop, retracing the route countless times in search of perfect scenes for his series of New York cityscapes. Now, Tadić’s finished project Metropolis: 36 Views of New York — composed of 36 oil canvases that document the blocks surrounding the subway line — is on view through September 5 at James Fuentes Gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The result is a series of ubiquitous New York imagery: chicken hanging in a steamy restaurant window, delivery drivers waiting in the cold, and the unabashed stare of a bodega cat. ..."

Hyperallergic 

ARTFORUM  

Juxtapoz

“Smoker – 20th Ave” (2022)

 

‘Live at the Cheetah Vol. 1 & 2′: The Fania All-Stars’ Salsa Masterpiece

"Like any legendary record label worthy of its legacy, Fania Records was particularly attuned to both great music and savvy self-promotion. So when it initially assembled the cream of its late 1960s artist roster (Ray Barretto, Joe Bataan, Willie Colon, Larry Harlow, label co-founder Johnny Pacheco, et al.) to play a club date together as the Fania All-Stars, it was as much a celebration of the exciting sounds on New York City’s Latin music scene as a shrewd marketing exercise. ..."

‘Live at the Cheetah Vol. 1 & 2′: The Fania All-Stars’ Salsa Masterpiece (Video)

Vaya Records: Fania Records’ Inspiring Sub-Label (Video)  

Inca Records: A History Of The Puerto Rican Salsa Label (Video)

Belligerence and hostility: Trump’s mugshot defines modern US politics

"Mugshots define eras. Bugsy Siegel peering malevolently from beneath his fedora in a 1928 booking photo summed up the perverse romance of gangsters in the prohibition age. Nearly half a century later, mugshots of David Bowie, elegantly dressed but dead-eyed after his arrest for drug possession, and a dishevelled Janis Joplin, detained for 'vulgar and indecent language', spoke to the shock waves created by 1960s counterculture. ..."

Guardian (Video)

 

‘Zeit’: How Tangerine Dream Brought Ambient Music To The World

"Glued together from dissonant elements of musique concrète, jazz-rock improvisation, and prime mover Edgar Froese’s primitive tape collages, Tangerine Dream’s 1970 debut, Electronic Meditation, bore scant relation to the eerily pristine proto-electronica with which the pioneering German outfit would shortly become synonymous. However, while it was still largely driven by organic instrumentation, including flutes, Froese’s Hendrix-ian guitar squalls and newly arrived second lieutenant Christopher Franke’s drum kit, the band’s second LP, Alpha Centauri, featured a significantly heavier reliance on emerging electronic technology and layers of atmospheric keyboards, paving the way for their third LP, Zeit. ..."

udiscover (Video)  

amazon  

YouTube: Zeit 2:32:42 2021

 December: Poland (The Warsaw Concert 1984)

Dwarf planet

"A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit of the Sun, smaller than any of the eight classical planets but still a world in its own right. The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto. The interest of dwarf planets to planetary geologists is that they may be geologically active bodies, an expectation that was borne out in 2015 by the Dawn mission to Ceres and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Astronomers are in general agreement that at least the nine largest candidates are dwarf planets: Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, Ceres, and Orcus. ..."

Wikipedia

Artistic comparison of Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Salacia, 2002 MS₄, and Earth along with the Moon

The Music of the Gnawa: Spirits are Colors in the Night

"The power and mystic pulse of the drone has been a foundation of music, both spiritual and secular, minimal and rhythmic. Whether as the basis for Indian and Asian ritual, or the single note of chord that propels funk and reggae, or the mournful moan of the guitar or fiddle in blues and country music, the drone has been the simple but foundational source of music both ecstatic and contemplative. In the West, it was the Indian and Asian drone that first inspired modern pioneers like John Cage, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and later composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. ..."

PERFECT SOUND FOREVER (Video)

City Lights Pocket Poets Series

“The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955. The series is most notable for the publication of Allen Ginsberg‘s literary milestone ‘Howl‘, which led to an obscenity charge for the publishers that was fought off with the aid of the ACLU. The series is published in a small, affordable paperback format with a distinctive black and white cover design. This design was borrowed from Kenneth Patchen‘s An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air (1945), published by Untide Press in Oregon.

Wikipedia 

verdant press: Pocket Poets Series 

[PDF] CITY LIGHTS POCKET POET SERIES 1955-2005 

amazon: City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology: 60th Anniversary, Google: City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology

The glow of the city on a Depression-era summer night

"Martin Lewis is the artist behind this film noir-like masterpiece of light and darkness, a drypoint etching simply titled 'Glow of the City' and completed in 1929. It’s a study in contrasts: the dark church steeple of 19th century New York against the illumination of a 20th century skyscraper—the Chanin Building, which would have recently opened on East 42nd Street. This cathedral of commerce radiates light and power amid the everyday dreariness of tenement backyards and laundry on clotheslines. ..."  

Ephemeral New York

What Today’s Museums Can Learn From Van Gogh

"As much as we rightfully worship at the altar of Vincent van Gogh, he has been grist for the blockbuster for an awfully long time. Is there any more juice to be squeezed from his decade-long career? While the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented his cypress trees this summer, the Art Institute of Chicago put forth Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape, which looks at a tiny, formative slice of his career in 1887 when he spent three months visiting Paris suburbs with Georges Seurat, Emile Bernard, Paul Signac, and Charles Angrand. Co-curated with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this undertaking illustrates how these artists explored the terrain of the “in-between” (not rural, not urban) while also inspiring one another to experiment with post-Impressionist painting techniques...."

Hyperallergic

2010 March: Van Gogh Museum, 2010 May: Why preserve Van Gogh's palette?, 2012 April: Van Gogh Up Close, 2015 May: Van Gogh and Nature, 2016 January: Van Gogh's Bedrooms, 2016 November: Wheat Fields - Van Gogh series, 2019 April: At Eternity’s Gate - Julian Schnabel (2018), 2020 April: The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen (1884), 2021 February: Vincent van Gogh Paris painting from 1887 to make public debut, 2022 May: Langlois Bridge at Arles, 2022 May: Hidden Van Gogh self-portrait discovered 

"Factories at Clichy" (1887)

Altair // Eurorack Modular Synthesizer + Guitar // Bitbox Micro, Zadar, Beads, Plaits, Clouds

"Composition for eurorack modular synthesizer based on the variations in dynamic of sound and white noise. Semi-generative patch to show the possibilities of 1010music Bitbox Micro sampler. Music inspired by Lars Von Trier's Melancholia movie. Better to listen with headphones. Explanations below."  

YouTube: Melancholia // Eurorack Modular Ambient // Bitbox Micro, Xaoc Zadar, Xaoc Batumi, Mutable Clouds  

YouTube:Igor Yalivec

Ukraine wants its people back – but first it needs glass for broken windows

"The village of Shevchenkove wants its villagers back. There is one significant problem: very many of its buildings do not have windows. From the early days of the war, up until November last year when the Russian forces were pushed over to the other side of the Dnipro River, Shevchenkove and its surrounding hamlets in the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson were on the frontline. The mayor was taken prisoner and its local people terrorised by hourly shelling. Many fled. Then the Russians withdrew. While the danger of artillery and rockets remained, many were motivated to return home. ..."

Guardian 

Philosopher Jason Stanley: 'Russia is explicitly fascist'  

NY Times: The Smartphone Game That Ukrainian Soldiers Play on the Front Line  

Russia’s Vile New Anti-Ukraine Propaganda

The windows of a damaged school in Kotlyareve, Mykolaiv oblast, are covered in plywood and thin layers of plastic.

Dutch Artist Ottograph on His Beginnings, His Various Names, His Influences, Painting in NYC and More

"This past Sunday, Welling Court Mural Project director Alison C. Wallis introduced us to the distinctly talented Dutch artist, Ottograph, who had just graced the exterior of a three-story local home with his delightfully playful aesthetic. What follows are excerpts from an interview conducted then at Welling Court with the renowned international artist by Street Art NYC contributor and UP Magazine staff member Ana Candelaria. ..."

Street Art NYC

Arbee ~ La place est prise / Glacial Anatomy ~ Field

"One of the pleasures of watching Montreal’s Florina Cassettes is matching their cover art with the original paintings.  The young label’s unified cover aesthetic is particularly appealing as it zeroes in on abstractions ~ even in otherwise straightforward art, as in George Romney’s 'Portrait of Sir Robert Gunning' below.  A splash of olive, a triptych of ivory, a base of red all seem suited to Arbee‘s gentle flowing music.  The image appears to be turning (see the cylindrical bent of the tape’s upper left), and indeed this is the case of original art, now rotated. ..."

a closer listen (Audio)  

Bandcamp (Audio)

Discovering Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles

"Charles Bukowski, whether in prose or in verse, he treated us to his distinctive vision of Los Angeles. We can sometimes think of the iconic writer as a lonely (‘dirty’) old man, tapping away at his typewriter in a small apartment, but really, the artist that grew up in Pasadena after moving from Andernach, his Prussian birth town, left an indelible pen-scratch all over the City of Angels. …”  

FAR OUT (Video)