"... And there were those exotic names again: Lightnin’ Slim, Slim Harpo,
Lonesome Sundown … Almost as if a semi-intoxicated copy writer had
looked at the Chess roster with its Sonny Boy’s, Muddy’s etc. and said I
can do better than that. Lonesome Sundown was allotted two tracks on Authentic R&B,
just down from the three each for Lightnin’ Slim and Slim Harpo, and
probably an indication of the compiler’s view of these artists’ relative
importance. ..."
"The desegregation of Boston public schools (1974–1988) was a period in which the Boston Public Schools were under court control to desegregate through a system of busing students. The call for desegregation and the first years of its implementation led to a series of racial protests and riots that brought national attention, particularly from 1974 to 1976. In response to the Massachusetts legislature's enactment of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered the state's public schools to desegregate, W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts laid out a plan for compulsory busing of students between predominantly white and black areas of the city. The hard control of the desegregation plan lasted for over a decade. ..."
NY Times: Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem
YouTube: The Busing Battleground | Full Documentary | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS
Accompanied by motorcycle-mounted police, school buses carrying African American students arrive at formerly all-white South Boston High School on September 12th, 1974.
"The annual Musicmakers Hacklab at CTM has traditionally brought people together from various places and backgrounds in hopes of catalysing interdisciplinary, hybrid reactions. So when a core component of the yearly project was removed – namely, the ability to travel to Berlin and share physical space – how could new modes of remote collaboration be developed?... "
YouTube: CTM 2021: »MusicMakers Hacklab Finale«
MusicMakers Hacklab finale is getting ready to start at silent green Betonhalle. Hacklab fellows are visible on the screen suspended above the stage
"... The pebbles, rocks, and boulders that can be found in the stream that
runs down into the Bay of Ficajola, Corsica, share a waypoint but not an
origin. Some have been dislodged from adjacent hills and mountains by
rain and conveyed downstream until friction and gravity curtail their
transport to the sea. Some preexist the flow of water, their geological
makeup stubbornly resisting any attempt to shift or dissolve them.
Others have been placed there deliberately, to serve as stepping stones
or to dam the stream and divert its course. They differ in age by
millennia. But there in the riverbed, the ragged edges of their cleaved
histories worn smooth by the agency of the current, the stones share a
resemblance. ..."
"I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture,
the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really
only a placeholder for a name. I wanted to tell him how much I resented
him for this, but I couldn’t muster the courage to be disagreeable.
At the time it was my firm belief that
generations did not exist, that they were simply a retroactive
periodization that imposed narrative cohesion on history, one which had
really no more legitimacy than such contested categories as 'the Dark
Ages' or 'postmodernity.' ..."
"New York City photographers James and Karla Murray
have been using photography to preserve the disappearing mom-and-pop
shops of the city for decades. The husband and wife duo traverses all
five boroughs of New York searching for those hidden gems that might
vanish at any moment. In their new book, Store Front NYC: Photographs of the City’s Independent Shops, Past and Present,
they share images of long-disappeared icons and still-thriving favorite
haunts. Here, the Murrays give us a sneak peek inside the book by
sharing a few of their favorite lost and extant mom-and-pop shops
featured, along with a bit of history about each spot! ..."
"One doesn’t accidentally end up in Red Hook. It’s not a neighborhood you pass through on your way somewhere else. Unless you take a wrong turn coming out of the tunnel from Manhattan, it’s not a place you are likely to stumble across. It’s a destination. A choice. Or sometimes a fate, depending on where in the neighborhood you call home.Despite its proximity to Manhattan, Red Hook — a Brooklyn enclave that juts into Upper New York Bay where it connects with the East River, right across the water from Wall Street — can feel like an industrial seaside town that time forgot. The weather is different. There is salt in the air. The storms are stronger, the rain heavier, the winter harsher. ..."
NY Times: Everybody Loves Red Hook. Or So They Say.
2016 May: GOWANUS! Brooklyn’s Troubled Waters , 2017 October: On the Hook, 2021 June: Gowanus Canal
Vacant Lot with Lady Liberty, 2004
"For over 50 years, the composer and musician Carl Stone
has been focused on the art of sampling. He’s built one of the most
dynamic bodies of work in modern music, first with synthesizers and tape
manipulation, then with the compositional and live performance
possibilities of computer programming. His work has developed a
distinctive deconstructivist tact, going from the minimalism of his
early work through to his expanded play with melodic and pop structures
in recent albums. Influenced by many years spent living and teaching in
Japan and frequent trips across South Asia, picking up sounds along the
way. Throughout his career, Stone has been committed to collapsing
barriers between the avant-garde, folk, and pop to a remarkable degree. ..."
2010 August: Carl Stone, 2012 September: Carl Stone' DARDA performance Super Deluxe Tokyo, 2013 December: Tetsu Inoue and Carl Stone - pict.soul (2001), 2016 August: Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties (2016), 2022 April: Mom's (1992)
"The narrator in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time refers quite often to the text we are reading, naming 'the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book' and 'the rest of my story.' ... But who is talking to whom when we read these allusions to a novel in progress? As actual readers of Proust’s book, we have seen or read precisely these words and many others. But then is the fictional narrator speaking to us or to his fictional audience? Do we get a little dizzy thinking about his imagining as part of the past a beginning he hasn’t arrived at yet, or do we think Proust could just be making casual use of an old convention: the writer pretends she is telling a tale and readers pretend they are listening? The material acts of writing and reading are bracketed or forgotten. ..."
Office Board, by John F. Peto, 1885. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
"In 1975, Patti Smith released one of punk rock’s most influential records: Horses. After
moving to New York City in 1967, Smith began writing and performing in
underground venues, such as CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. By 1974, she
had released her debut single, ‘Hey Joe/Piss Factory’, which was
followed by a two-month residency at CBGBs alongside Television,
performing live every weekend. Soon enough, Smith was ready to record her debut album,
with production carried out by The Velvet Underground’s very own John
Cale. The artist’s unique blend of spoken word poetry, raw
instrumentation, and a distinctively feminine perspective made Smith
stand out among her predominantly male contemporaries. ..."
FAROUT (Video), Redondo Beach - 1976 - Stockholm (LIVE)
Here is the latest on the deadly earthquake. "Search
and rescue efforts were intensifying on Saturday night, nearly 24 hours
after a powerful and deadly earthquake surged across western Morocco,
as emergency teams raced to prevent more deaths in remote mountain
villages that are not easily accessible. The quake, which struck in the High Atlas Mountains
shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday, has killed more than 2,000 people and
raised the specter of a humanitarian disaster in a seismically
vulnerable area of Africa. ..."
NY Times - Scenes From Morocco: A Deadly Earthquake Strikes
"When Virginia Woolf invited TS Eliot
down for a country weekend in 1920 she concluded with 'Please bring no
clothes'. ... Eliot
was famously wedded to his three-piece suit to the point where, Woolf
joked, he would have worn a four-piece one if such a thing existed. What
she meant by 'bring no clothes' was that at Monk’s House
they did not dress for dinner, change for church (there was no church),
or worry about getting their best clothes grubby in the garden. This
was Bloomsbury, albeit a rural version, and the clothing conventions to
which the rest of upper-middle-class society had returned after the
first world war had no place there. ..."
Charlie Porter’s New Book ‘Bring No Clothes’ Is A Radical Account Of The Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf with fellow Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, in a photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell.
"The medium may change from analog to digital, but there’s always
something magical about a great single, a record that can change your
life in four minutes or less, and there’s a special knack to coming up
with a classic your first time out of the gate. Even the most brilliant
artists haven’t always managed that and there are a few world-class
bands who had an underwhelming single or two before their big
breakthrough. Still, there are quite a few artists who claimed their
territory with the first notes of their first single, and below are the
greatest debut 45 records. A few were great one-offs, but most were the
start of a long career. ..."
"... JR still pastes things in the street; it’s just that the things have got
bigger. And the world has an expanded idea of what’s vandalism and
what’s art. JR’s canvases are now tower blocks, whole buildings, entire
streets. His scale is epic, monumental. He turned the separation wall
between Israel and Palestine into a giant gallery of faces
– Palestinians on the Israeli side, Israelis on the Palestinian side,
though no one could tell. He transformed a huge favela in Brazil into a vast artwork
in which he literally gave the town eyes, and he displayed a pregnant
refugee on the point of giving birth on half a mile of the Seine
embankment in the solidly bourgeois Ile Saint-Louis. ..."
Guardian - JR: ‘I realised I was giving people a voice' (Video)
Guardian - Can art change the world? The work of street artist JR – in pictures
JR in his Spring Street studio in New York: ‘he is pure energy’.
"The Black Star Line (1919−1922) was a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey, the organizer of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and other members of the UNIA. The shipping line was created to facilitate the transportation of goods and eventually African Americans throughout the African global economy. It derived its name from the White Star Line, a line whose success Garvey felt he could duplicate. The Black Star Line became a key part of Garvey's contribution to the Back-to-Africa movement, but it was mostly unsuccessful, partially due to infiltration by federal agents. It was one among many businesses which the UNIA originated, such as the Universal Printing House, Negro Factories Corporation, and the widely distributed and highly successful Negro World weekly newspaper. ..."
Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line
YouTube: Culture - Two Sevens Clash - 07 - Black Starliner Must Come, Burning Spear - Marcus Senior (Disco Marcus Children 1978)
"The images of Russian troops retreating
from a village in Ukraine under fire leave little doubt of the impact of
cluster munitions. Soldiers running from a constellation of at least a dozen explosions around them. An armored vehicle speeding down a road before being hit in a cascade of simultaneous eruptions salting the surrounding ground. The August drone footage of the Russian withdrawal from the southeastern village of Urozhaine, verified by The New York Times, highlights the power of the weapons. ..."
Aljazeera: What are depleted uranium munitions and why is US sending them to Ukraine? (Video)
Vox: Are the US and Ukraine at odds over the counteroffensive?
Guardian - Depleted uranium munitions: what are they and what risks do they pose?
A Ukrainian soldier firing a 155 mm howitzer, the type of weapon used to launch cluster munitions, in the Donetsk region in March.
"... In this moment of mild delusion, I’m
distracted. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about distraction, I
think. Add it to the laundry list of incomplete ideas I continue to
nurse because some part of me suspects they will never come to fruition,
and so will never have to be endured by readers. These are things you
can keep in the drawer of your mind, glittering with unrealized
potential. In the top row of my bedroom bookshelf is a copy of
Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet. Something about it seems appropriate, though I’m not sure exactly what. I pluck it down. ..."
2012 August: On Cataloguing Flaubert, 2013 March: Sentimental Education - 1(1869), 2017 August: The Sentimental Education (1869), 2018 May: In Which Our Tragic Effects Remain Purely Professional, 2019 March: The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (1911), 2021 November: Madame Bovary and the Impossibility of Re-reading - Anjali Joseph, 2021 December: In Which a Direct Line is Drawn From Flaubert’s Unfinished Novel, 2022 May: Three Tales (1877)
"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. ..."
Los de Abajo Collective (Kay Brown, Judith Duran, Poli Marichal, Victor Rosas, and Marianne Sadowski), “You don’t want to know” (2008), mounted prints
"... 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. ..."
"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. ..."
"'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. ..."
Come to Willets Point for whatever ails your auto.
"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. ..."
"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."
Slant: Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor on the Criterion Collection
Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor”: Beneath the Gold Ornamentation
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"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. ..."
"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.
"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: Pizza in America
"... 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. ..."
"... 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). ..."
W – Emma Jung, W – Marie-Louise von Franz
Emma Jung Holy Grail – Full description
"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. ..."
"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?..."
"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. ..."
"... 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. ..."
Puremagnetik’s Driftmaker
"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...
“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. ..."
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 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. ..."
