In New York City’s Coolest Clubs, Remixing Cumbia for the Hipster Set

"It was 1 a.m., and Thursday night had become Friday morning when Anthony Dominguez, known around the New York City D.J. scene as hellotones, took the stage at the Market Hotel, a club in a 19th-century building whose windows look directly on the elevated J and M trains passing through Bushwick, Brooklyn. The theme of the evening was 'experimental Latin sounds,' and arriving at his console, Mr. Dominguez unleashed a thunderous bass. Then came the beat, from a metal comb scraping a ridged, hollow tube, known as the guacharaca: chik-chika-chik-chika-chik, repeating over and over. ..."

NY Times (Video)

Soundcloud: DjExtreme Cumbia 2023 Mix (Audio)

The Fantastic Women Of Surrealism: An Introduction

"When André Breton, a leader of the Surrealist movement and author of its first manifesto, wrote that 'the problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world,' he was not alluding to the unfair lack of recognition experienced by his female peers. Marquee name Surrealists like Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, René Magritte, and Max Ernst positioned the women in their circle as muses and symbols of erotic femininity, rather than artists in their own right. ..."

Open Culture (Video)

Israel-Hamas war: what has happened and what has caused the conflict?

"What happened on the border between Israel and Gaza on Saturday? Shocked Israelis woke on the last day of the Jewish high holidays to the wail of sirens as Hamas and Islamic Jihad fired thousands of rockets from Gaza and armed militants broke down the hi-tech barriers surrounding the strip to enter Israel, shooting and taking hostages. Militants in boats also tried to enter Israel by sea. It was a staggering and unprecedented offensive by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and a catastrophic intelligence failure by Israel – and both will have long-lasting repercussions and consequences. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that Israel was at war and that Palestinians would pay a heavy price. ..."

Guardian (Video)  

NY Times - Maps: Tracking the Attacks in Israel and Gaza

Offensive launched from Gaza represents large failure of Israeli intelligence and is likely to have long-lasting repercussions.

Remanence ~ Sepiadrone (2023)

"... It feels like a small miracle that this album has even seen the light of day. Like a collection of old photos, most of this material languished in boxes for years while partner John Phipps gradually moved west to Portland and I moved southwest to Santa Fe. We tried picking up the pieces numerous times but lost momentum as soon as a recording session came to an end or we said goodbye over the phone. Ultimately, the distance proved too great and Remanence slowly drifted apart, leaving 'Sepiadrone' in limbo. ..."

Bandcamp (Audio)  

YouTube: Sepiadrone 1 / 11

What the 1910s stained glass windows say about a 19th century Brooklyn tavern

"With its tin ceiling, mosaic tile floor, and handsome mahogany bar, Teddy’s Bar and Grill is like stepping into a late 19th century time machine. This corner tavern on Berry and North Eighth Streets in Williamsburg opened in 1887 as a family-run Irish tavern, according to Teddy’s website. At the time, Brooklyn was a separate city and Williamsburg was a working-class district of Irish and German immigrants, many of whom worked along the waterfront a few blocks away in sugar refineries and other industrial plants. ..."

Ephemeral New York

Israel’s Worst Day at War

"When I need the most accurate analysis about Israel, the first call I always make is to my longtime friend and reporting partner there, Nahum Barnea, a veteran Yediot newspaper columnist. When I called him on Saturday afternoon for his read on the Hamas attack on Israel, I was stunned by his first response: 'This is the worst day that I can remember in military terms in the history of Israel, including the blunder of the Yom Kippur war, which was terrible.' Nahum is a careful reporter who has covered every major event in Israel for the past half century, and when he explained his rationale, I realized it was an understatement. ..."

NY Times: Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman

Maxim Barkalifa stood on the roof of his neighbor’s house and surveys the damage to another neighbor’s house that was struck by a rocket fired from Gaza in Ashkelon, Israel, on Saturday. 

The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions - Howlin' Wolf (1971)

"The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions is an album by blues musician Howlin' Wolf released in 1971 on Chess Records, and on Rolling Stones Records in Britain. It was one of the first super session blues albums, setting a blues master among famous musicians from the second generation of rock and roll, in this case Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Charlie Watts, and Bill Wyman. It peaked at #79 on the Billboard 200. ... Clapton secured the participation of the Rolling Stones rhythm section (pianist Ian Stewart, bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts), while Dayron assembled further musicians, including 19-year-old harmonica prodigy Jeffrey Carp, who died in 1973 at age 24. ..."

Wikipedia  

What happened when Howlin' Wolf hooked up with rock royalty to make an album (Video)  

YouTube: The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions 1 / 13

 

The Neil Young song that attacks Starbucks

"Neil Young has consistently voiced his concerns throughout his career. While his constant desire to stand up for what’s right has earned him several enemies over the years, nobody can question Young’s authenticity, and his unwillingness to stay quiet deserves to be respected. It’s a character trait that continues to follow him today, with businesses from Spotify to Starbucks among those in the firing line. ... Young was eventually the victor as the GMA were unsuccessful in their attempt to overturn Vermont’s decision to enforce labelling on genetically modified produce. However, it’s improbable he’s returned to Starbucks to get his daily coffee fix. ..."

FAR OUT (Video)  

Neil Young's New Music Video Mocks Starbucks, Monsanto, and GMOs (Video)  

Neil Young’s new anti-GMO song confuses science on Starbucks, Monsanto

Cooking with Madame d’Aulnoy By Valerie Stivers

"The fairy tales of Mary-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronesse d’Aulnoy—first published in French in the 1690s—are full of jewel-like foods, poisoned drinks, and violent feats of baking. The cooking is extreme. In one story, 'Finette-Cendron,' a Cinderella figure, pleases her fairy godmother by baking her a cake with 'two pounds of butter'; later, she serves her a feast made from two chickens, a cock, and 'two little rabbits that were being fed up with cabbage.'... Lest anyone find d’Aulnoy’s repasts and their power unrealistic, the opposite is true, as I discovered while attempting to re-create the food with my friend Celia Bell, whose novel, The Disenchantment, published this May, was inspired by d’Aulnoy’s life and work. ..."

The Paris Review  

The Paris Review - Author Archives: Valerie Stivers

Music That Listens to Itself (Playlist)

"I just got back home from the 'Music That Listens to Itself' event that I hosted in Berkeley at the Alembic. Here, quickly, is the evening’s 80-minute playlist (I trimmed one track to get the full set to fit). The first six tracks came from the recent Disquiet Junto project (0611) that engaged with the theme of the evening. More details soon. I had a blast. Major thanks to Erik Davis, Samuel Plattner, and everyone who came. Each of the Junto tracks in the list links to its SoundCloud page, and each of the other six links to the album, on Bandcamp, where it originated. ..."

disquiet (Video/Audio)

Carl Jung on the Power of Tarot Cards: They Provide Doorways to the Unconscious & Perhaps a Way to Predict the Future

"... The eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung, however, might have done so. As Mary K. Greer explains, in a 1933 lecture Jung went on at length about his views on the Tarot, noting the late Medieval cards are 'really the origin of our pack of cards, in which the red and the black symbolize the opposites, and the division of the four—clubs, spades, diamonds, and hearts—also belongs to the individual symbolism. They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents.' ..."

Open Culture  

Mary K. Greer's Tarot Blog: Carl Jung and Tarot (Video)  

Tarot: A Gateway to the Unconscious

Let's Ride: Art history after Black studies

"BLACK STUDIES—as modeled by the transdisciplinary work of contemporary thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, and Frank B. Wilderson III—has grown increasingly central to critical thought in the art world and the academy, with especially urgent implications for art-historical praxis: How do the discipline’s notions of objecthood and objectivity shift in light of transatlantic slavery’s production of persons as property? How must art-historical methods, given their origins in racist, sexist, and colonialist epistemologies, be retooled to engage with complexities of Black life and expression that are designed to evade capture?..."

ARTFORUM

Living Dub Volume One & Two - Burning Spear

"Like many records from the first murky decade of reggae's mature period, this one has a complicated history. It is the dubwise companion to Burning Spear's classic album of 1978, Social Living. However, Social Living was also released under the title Marcus Children. Living Dub, Vol. 1, which consisted of dub mixes by Sylvan Morris, was originally released as a vinyl record shortly after the album on which it is based, but the CD reissue released under that title in 1993 actually consists of a completely different set of dub mixes by Barry O'Hare; the original mixes were released on CD ten years later, on the revived Burning Spear label, as Original Living Dub, Vol. 1. ..."

allmusic: Vol. 1 (Audio), allmusic: Vol. 2 (Audio)  

W - Living Dub Vol. 1, W - Living Dub Vol. 2  

YouTube: Living dub vol 1 38:50, Living dub vol 2 39:49

Glasgow to the rescue! Blast of realism gives the new Scottish galleries punch

"One thing rapidly becomes clear in these lavish new purpose-built galleries of Scottish art: Scotland likes itself. Or at least, Scottish curators are far fonder of their country than their opposite numbers at Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery are of the UK as a whole. Whereas these London museums have recently opened rehangs that call out past injustices and national guilt, Edinburgh’s new look at Scotland’s artistic story is a celebration. It’s also ravishing. ..."

Guardian

Passion for place … detail from Wandering Shadows, 1878, Peter Graham.

Sun Ra Sundays

"Linked below (as pdf) are two compilations—one by me, one by Sam Byrd—of blog posts about SUN RA recordings authored by RODGER G. COLEMAN from 2008 to 2015. These were originally posted each Sunday at nuvoid.blogspot.com. Coleman's blog contains hundreds of posts on a myriad of music subjects; we've harvested the Ra content. To preserve and circulate this 'Saturn research,' I compiled a chronological text-only edition in late 2018, whereas Sam sequenced Rodger's posts in discographical order with blog graphics...."

SUN RA SUNDAYS by Rodger G. Coleman  

amazon

Highlights From A Colorful “Asalto”: Zaragoza's Premier Street Art Festival Flourishes.

"Zaragoza’s Asalto Festival, in its recent edition, once again demonstrates a magnetic pull in the world of street art, attracting both local talent and international artists. Nestled in La Jota, one of Zaragoza’s most historic neighborhoods, the festival radiated creativity on the streets from September 15 to 24. Not only did it reclaim its mural game, but it also embraced a spectrum of activities reminiscent of its pre-pandemic grandeur. ..."

Brooklyn Street Art

Taroe. Festival Asalto 2023. Zaragoza, Spain.

The literary World Cup: readers’ best all-time teams

"July 2014: “Back when the World Cup was in those exciting and unpredictable first rounds, we were playing away at Penguin’s imaginary books World Cup, where an England with JK Rowling, George Orwell and Agatha Christie in attack and the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens in the midfield could possibly – possibly – have had a chance to win something. The UK imprint imagined matches and footballing incidents on Twitter, and we joined in the fun, asking for your all-time favourite literary teams. Now that the actual competition is coming to an end, here are our top five writers’ XIs. ..."

Guardian

Yukes – White Ghost beyond the Great Firewall

"1. Favourite knob or fader or switch on a piece of gear and why?  If I’m being honest, the 'feather touch technology' buttons on my Yamaha MT44 4-track cassette machine are just… something else entirely. Back in the 80’s when buttons n’ switches were more mechanical and clicky, a lot of different 'options' were lost to the more common ones. What we have here is a thin ribbon beneath a plastic cover with no click. Sounds bad right? But when you press the button, it causes whatever mechanical function you triggered in the machine to violently come to life somewhere deep within the machine, causing an almost distant haptic shake, despite the button feeling almost unresponsive. ..."

martinyammoller

Yamaha MT44 cassette tape recorder

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)