Face the Music: Nigerian 1970s album covers reflected individual and national identities.

"On the cover of Geraldo Pino and the Heartbeats’ 1972 debut album, Afro Soco Soul Live, is a man breaking his chains. In the background are drums and people dancing. ... Two years later, the cover of their next album, Let’s Have a Party, was a portrait of a woman sitting in an evening gown, wine glass in hand, afro blown out, chin up, gaze transfixed. Placed on a red background, the portrait is edited with an embossed filter such that the woman looks like a silver relief sculpture. ... Global oil price shocks of 1973–1974 resulted in the most monumental transfer of wealth Nigeria has seen to date. Nigeria too was on the clouds—of an oil boom. ..."

Wax Poetics

Waiting for the Nighthawks – Edward Hopper and the Denizens of New York

"Edward Hopper was a visual alchemist. Scenes of life’s mundanities — offices, street corners, apartment blocks, rooftops — entered his eyes, traversed his meticulous brain, quested through spine and viscera, and flowed into fingers wielding brushes to materialize on canvas as mesmerizing dramas of light, volume, and psychology. Even when his workaday spaces are unoccupied, they thrum with mysterious narratives. ..."

Voice

Automat, 1927

 

Judge Rules Trump Committed Fraud, Stripping Control of Key Properties

"A New York judge ruled on Tuesday that Donald J. Trump persistently committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets, and stripped the former president of control over some of his signature New York properties. The surprising decision by Justice Arthur F. Engoron is a major victory for Attorney General Letitia James in her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, effectively deciding that no trial was needed to determine that he had fraudulently secured favorable terms on loans and insurance deals. Ms. James has argued that Mr. Trump inflated the value of his properties by as much as $2.2 billion and is seeking a penalty of about $250 million in a trial scheduled to begin as early as Monday. ..."

NY Times  

***NY Times: Trump’s Lawyers Try to Grasp the Implications of Judge’s Fraud Ruling  

NY Times: Ruling Against Trump Cuts to the Heart of His Identity  

NY Times: Read the Judge’s Ruling in the Trump Fraud Case

My Strawberry Plants: On Marcottage

"Recently, I read Virginia Woolf’s first published novel, The Voyage Out, for the first time. There, I made a discovery: it features a character named Clarissa Dalloway. This encounter initially provoked delight, surprise combined with double take, like bumping into someone I thought I knew well in a setting I never expected to find them, causing a brief mutual repositioning, physically, imaginatively. ... Then I remembered why I’d had that 'caught out,' 'I should have known this' feeling: this same technique of novel-growth was also of great interest to Roland Barthes. In his lecture courses at the Collège de France in the late seventies, he named it marcottage. It’s a horticultural term...."

The Paris Review  

W - Strawberry

Alphonse du Breuil, Marcottage en serpenteaux, 1846. 

America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow

"Global warming has focused concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view. Many of the aquifers that supply 90 percent of the nation’s water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world’s most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole. The New York Times conducted a months-long examination of groundwater depletion, interviewing more than 100 experts, traveling the country and creating a comprehensive database using millions of readings from monitoring sites. ..."

NY Times  

NY Times: Uncharted Waters

David Byrne and the Modern Self: “How Do I Work This?”

"STOP MAKING SENSE (1984), compiled from footage of four 1983 Talking Heads concerts, is a good movie, but it counts more as a major contribution to our current stock of troubled figures—or figurative troubles. According to the credits, Stop Making Sense was “conceived for the stage” by David Byrne, lead singer of the Heads. Byrne had pictorial intentions to his design, which director Jonathan Demme respected. Instead of a plot, the movie chronicles the elegant gestures and twitches, manic and grand, of Byrne’s ongoing struggle to find a fit between his 3D body and the 2D screen. Toward the end of the film Byrne encases himself in the literal, boxy flatness of a white suit a couple of feet too wide for his frame...."

ARTFORUM  

YouTube: Girlfriend Is Better - Stop Making Sense

A NASA Spacecraft Comes Home With an Asteroid Gift for Earth

"A brown-and-white capsule that spent the last seven years swooping through the solar system — and sojourning at an asteroid — has finally come home. And it has brought a cosmic souvenir: a cache of space rock that scientists are hungry to get their hands on. On Sunday morning, those scientists waited eagerly as the pod shot through Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. It gently parachuted down into the damp desert landscape of the Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, at 8:52 a.m. local time. ..."

NY Times (Video)  

W - OSIRIS-REx 

W - 101955 Bennu  

YouTube: Tour of Asteroid Bennu

Rotherham’s Millmoor: The mystery of the unused ghost stadium

"You can see the floodlights as you come off the motorway, just before reaching central Rotherham. Turn onto Masbrough Street and the stadium reveals itself on the left, halfway up the hill and just before Coronation Bridge that goes over the train line. If you just went past with not much more than a glance, Millmoor would look like any other lower league football ground: old, could do with a little care and attention, but identifiably a football ground. Until, perhaps, you caught sight of the barbed wire. ..." 

The Athletic (Video) 

W - Millmoor 

YouTube: Abandoned Millmoor Football Stadium Exploration 15:53

Netflix Prepares to Send Its Final Red Envelope

"In a nondescript office park minutes from Disneyland sits a nondescript warehouse. Inside this nameless, faceless building, an era is ending. The building is a Netflix DVD distribution plant. Once a bustling ecosystem that processed 1.2 million DVDs a week, employed 50 people and generated millions of dollars in revenue, it now has just six employees left to sift through the metallic discs. And even that will cease on Friday, when Netflix officially shuts the door on its origin story and stops mailing out its trademark red envelopes. ..."

NY Times

Inca Records: A History Of The Puerto Rican Salsa Label

"When the Dominican music virtuoso Johnny Pacheco and the Brooklyn-born lawyer Jerry Masucci teamed up to form the inimitable salsa label Fania Records, the stars seemed to align. The duo captured the salsa phenomenon before it even had a name, and their efforts would help shoot the genre into the global spotlight. But Fania’s success wasn’t just a matter of fate. Pacheco and Masucci had two important qualities: sharp business acumen and an undeniable eye for talent. The combination explains, in part, why they began scooping up New York City labels such as Tico Records, Alegre Records, and Cotique Records in the early 1970s – acquisitions that shrunk their competition and expanded an already impressive roster of artists...."

udiscover (Video) 

Guardian: Everybody salsa! Fania, the ramshackle New York label that sent Latin rhythms global 

W - Cheetah (nightclub) 

1960s: Days of Rage - An NYC Mambo, Boogaloo and Salsa Family Tree (April 2019)

A Majestic Gesture in Geneva. Saype Advocates Peace, Healing

"Now in his mid-thirties and painting large skill land art for over a decade, it is still a pleasant surprise to see renowned street artist Saype unveiling a new masterpiece. His recent project in Place des Nations, Geneva, was commissioned by Handicap International. With it, he hopes to present an eco-responsible image that depicts a hand emblematic of humanity, offering a new leg to the iconic “Broken Chair” – a symbol for the numerous innocent victims of war bombings. ..."

Brooklyn Street Art

Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action - Nadja Millner-Larsen

"There are many paths through the radical arts of the 1960s. Nadja Millner-Larsen’s Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action takes one back alley and turns it into a bustling boulevard. Her central figure: Ben Morea, artist-activist and acolyte of the Living Theatre and of East Village anarchist Murray Bookchin; member of Aldo Tambellini’s anti-commodification mixed-media Group Center; cofounder of the Neo-Dada provocateurs known as Black Mask (their name likely referencing the 1920s pulp magazine as well as eliding Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks); and de facto leader of Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (UAW/MF), the notorious 'street gang with an analysis.' ...”

ARTFORUM: Up Against the Well - J. Hoberman  

Black Mask, the Radical Collective Who Tried to Shut Down MoMA  

Google: Up Against the Real: Black Mask from Art to Action  

amazon

The Strange World Of... Gavin Bryars

"Gavin Bryars' music presents the listener with sublime paradoxes. It sounds both familiar and uncanny; archaic and modern; elegiac and impassive. His unfurling melodies tug at the heartstrings, but drift away from any anticipated climaxes. His scores draw on 20th century minimalist and experimental music, refracted through Renaissance choral music, cushioned by an Edwardian gauze of dark-hued strings. It's music for time travellers. ...."

The Quietus (Video/Audio) 

2023 April: The Sinking Of The Titanic (1975)

When Metalsmiths Found Their Groove

"On a heavy incense burner made some 700 years ago, a laudatory inscription in Arabic encircles the name of the sultan. From a distance, the inlaid strokes of its naskhi script burst like golden sunrays. For a small pen case of about the same age, only a close-up view reveals a universe of intertwining inlaid designs where silver birds fly inside golden spheres. So opulent are such pieces that it is hard to believe the amount of precious metal in them is small. Mostly, they are made of a common metal alloy that, in the 12th century CE, metalsmiths in the Turco-Persian Seljuq world transformed into luxury ware. Today, it is as iconic of Islamic art as lavishly illustrated manuscripts or tilework tessellated with arabesques and geometry. ..."

Aramco World

The open grooves of this 12th-century bronze-cast vessel once held inlaid silver and copper. 

The Avantgarde Series

"I recently received a 21CD box set from the Deutsche Grammophon label, reissuing almost all of the two dozen albums they put out between 1968 and 1971 in their Avantgarde series. Four boxes, each containing six LPs, were released, one each year, premiering works by composers including Luciano Berio, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Luc Ferrari, Vinko Globokar, Mauricio Kagel, Roland Kayn, Gyorgy Ligeti, Luigi Nono, Krszystof Penderecki, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. There are string quartets, organ pieces, vocal works, electronic and tape compositions, things that sound like weirdo theater happenings, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. ..."

Interview: Kyle Gann  

Various Artists - The Avantgarde Series (Audio)

 

Ukraine Has Gained Ground. But It Has Much Farther to Go.

"In June, Ukraine prepared to launch its counteroffensive facing immense risks: Without a decisive victory, Western support could weaken, and Kyiv could face pressure to negotiate a ceasefire. Since then, Ukrainian forces have breached the first line of defense in some Russian positions along this southern line of advance, the counteroffensive’s most promising front. Kyiv’s forces have recaptured the tiny village of Robotyne, a tactical victory that highlighted the enormous challenges that lie ahead. Progress has been grueling and slow. In some weeks, troops have moved only a few yards at a time along this line of advance. ..."

NY Times

Slapp Happy's Sort Of (50th Anniversary)

"The borders between what gets termed prog rock and post punk were far more porous and negligently policed than the conventional histories of either have tended to credit. How did John Lydon transform British music for a second time in two years? By walking backwards into his teenage loves of prog acts such as Van der Graaf Generator and Captain Beefheart. The Fall may have loudly scoffed at hippiedom, but they emerged from a Hawkwind-listening, spliff-smoking, psychedelic-gobbling counterculture in Prestwich that owed a lot to those ideals. ..."

The Quietus (Audio)

U.N. General Assembly: Zelensky Warns World Leaders That Russian Aggression Could Expand Beyond Ukraine

World leaders debate pressing issues. Here’s the latest. "At the annual gathering of world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday in New York City, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine presented Russia’s aggression as a worldwide unrelenting threat that would not stop at the borders of Ukraine. 'The goal of the present war against Ukraine is to turn our land, our people, our lives, our resources into a weapon against you, against the international rules-based order,' Mr. Zelensky told the assembled leaders. He added that Russia was weaponizing essentials like food and energy 'not only against our country, but against all of yours, as well.' His remarks were among the most scathing in a series of addresses by world leaders, including President Biden, who condemned Russia’s 'naked aggression' and said the United States would continue to stand with the 'brave people of Ukraine.' ..."

NY Times (Video)  

NY Times: Abrams Tanks Expected to Arrive in Ukraine Soon, Austin Says (Video)

The Ukrainian president delivered a speech at the U.N. General Assembly meeting before his visit to Washington.

Aroun Haouzi El Baidi – Ana nadi bel ghram [Sides 1-2], Polyphon, 1932

"'I am the one who is in love,' Aroun Haouzi El Baidi sang majestically into a microphone in a Constantine recording studio in 1932, 'O my desired one.' On this ninety year old recording of “Ana al-ladhi bil-gharam ya saʿfaya” (أَنَا الذِي بَالغْرَامْ يَا سَعْفَايَا), the Aïn Beïda-born Algerian Jewish musician expertly executes an integral song-text of the mahjuz repertoire, itself part of the extended family of Constantine’s classical maluf tradition (and sometimes considered to be an antecedent to it). ..."

Gharamophone (Video) 

Soundcloud (Audio) 

2019 February: Gharamophone

The story of a magnificent 1850s house dubbed the Blue Belle of Brooklyn

"It’s the blue belle of Brooklyn; a former country villa that stands alone at 271 Ninth Street, between walkup flats and a featureless one-story Post Office. Passing this dowager beauty, which has stood on the block between Fourth and Fifth Avenues since the Antebellum era, is like being in a time machine. Everything about it is a wonderful anachronism: the mansard roof, the lacy ironwork over the bay windows, the front yard with rosebushes and lavender. ..."

Ephemeral New York

The “Caribbeanization” of Afrobeat in Colombia

"Bogotá Orquesta Afrobeat (La BOA), the first self-designated Afrobeat band in Colombia was created in 2009, about 37 years after Fela’s Shakara became a hit on the western coast of Colombia, and 12 years after Fela’s death.. In this article, I trace Afrobeat’s memorable arrival in Colombia, its impact on the cultural landscape, and the transformations it is undergoing in a country where, since the Frente Amplio (Large Front) won elections in June  2022, a complex process of self-renewal and 'total peace' is underway to tackle the scourge of para-military, state and drug trafficking violence, as well as the impact of guerrilla warfare. ..."

Africa Is a Country (Video)

YouTube: Fela Kuti And The Africa '70 - Shakara Oloje

A Trip to Ukraine Clarified the Stakes. And They’re Huge.

"While visiting Kyiv last week, my first trip to Ukraine since Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, I tried to get my exercise every morning by walking the grounds of St. Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery. Its serenity, though, has been disrupted by a jarring exhibit of destroyed Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers. During my walks, I’d poke my head into these jagged, rocket-pierced hulks, wondering what terrible death must have come to the Russian soldiers operating them. But the shock of this tangled mass of rusting steel, sitting in the middle of this grand, whitish-stone piazza, evoked a different image in my mind’s eye: a meteor. ..."

NY Times: Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman

Destroyed Russian military equipment is exhibited in Kyiv at St. Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery.

Lonesome Sundown

"... 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. ..."

Toppermost (Video)

Boston desegregation busing crisis

"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. ..."

Wikipedia  

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.   

Living in the Future, Lost in the Snow

"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?... "

CTM (Video)

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 

Six Photos from W. G. Sebald’s Albums

"... 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. ..."

The Paris Review

My Generation

"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.' ..."

Harpers

10 Lost & Extant Storefronts of Mom-and-Pop Shops of NYC

"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! ..."

Untapped Cities

Everybody Loves Red Hook. Or So They Say.

"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

The Otherworldly Music of Carl Stone

"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. ..." 

Bandcamp (Audio)

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)

 

Marcel Proust: Ghost Writer By Michael Wood

"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. ..." 

Laphams Quarterly

Office Board, by John F. Peto, 1885. The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

The Story Behind The Song: how Patti Smith created the reggae-inspired 'Redondo Beach'

"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)

Earthquake in Morocco

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 (Video)  

NY Times - Scenes From Morocco: A Deadly Earthquake Strikes

 

Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion by Charlie Porter review – style revolution

"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. ..."

Guardian  

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 Greatest Debut 45 Records In History

"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. ..."

udiscover (Video)