"The darkest part of the moon’s shadow
will slide from Oregon to Texas on Saturday morning, then cross the Gulf
of Mexico into Central America. Viewers
inside this dark band — the path of annularity — will see a ring of
light around the moon for up to 5 minutes. Viewers outside the path of
annularity will see the crescent sun of a partial solar eclipse. The map below shows the path of the eclipse, and the approximate local time when the ring of fire will be visible. ..."
"Henry Taylor is one of those artists who just does it—puts shit
together, paints what he feels like painting. He works, as they say,
intuitively. But that’s not to dismiss the thoughtful way he’s arranged
his subjects: urban life, Black life, the artist’s life. Whether working
on tree-like assemblages, installations that bring the city’s grit into
the gallery, or (his calling) figurative painting, Taylor approaches
the world and the people in it not as an aloof observer or “student of
man,” but as someone full of empathy, someone who lives here too. ..."
Untitled, 2023,, acrylic on wood panel, 36 × 48"
"Devo isn’t overjoyed about being prescient. The band got started half a century ago as a satirical art statement. But by now, much of what Devo mocked has become inescapable. Gerald Casale, who founded Devo with Mark Mothersbaugh, said, 'If somebody would have told you 50 years ago where we would be at as a culture now, you probably wouldn’t have believed it. Neither would I. But here we are.' Devo’s lone hit, 'Whip It' in 1980, only reached No. 14 in the United States. But the influence of Devo’s buzzy, blippy synthesizer tones, its robotic moves and its re-contextualized retro graphics has grown ubiquitous, from commercials to cartoons and perhaps even into K-pop, where synthesizers, uniforms and tightly synced dance routines reign. ..."
They are not men, they are Devo: From left, Bob Casale, Gerald Casale, Bob Mothersbaugh and Mark Mothersbaugh performing in the late ’70s.
"The best teams to be around are the ones who catch you by surprise, the groups who captivate a city and worm their way into even the most irresolute fan’s heart.It’s June and you’re just glad they’re still fun to watch. It’s July and you’re braving the humidity just to get a closer look at the Homer Hose and the Splash Zone, as the stadium is buzzing again. ... The 2023 Orioles brought baseball back to Baltimore, where local businesses hung Orioles signs in their windows and fans yelled until the stadium vibrated and the players — many in their first year — looked at each other wide-eyed and thought, is this what the big leagues is always like? This group was special. It’s what made this season so great. It’s what made the last four days so painful. ..."
"They were killed waiting for the bus,
dancing at a festival, doing morning chores and hiding as best they
could. Searching bullet-riddled houses, streets and lawns, Israeli
soldiers are still finding them. The
soldiers, retaking control of the kibbutzim, towns and settlements near
the Gaza Strip that came under attack by Palestinian terrorists over the
weekend, have recovered body after body after body. Hamas gunmen,
hitting more than 20 sites in southern Israel, killed more than 1,000
people, including women and children, and abducted an estimated 150 more
people. ..."
YouTube: The Israel-Hamas War — and What It Means for the World | TED 47:57
"In previous articles about jazz music recorded in 1970, we featured
albums on major jazz labels including Atlantic, Impulse! and Blue Note,
with some of the releases showcasing free and experimental jazz by
artists such as Chick Corea’s Circle Quartet, Pharoah Sanders, Alice
Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. In this article we will review other
recordings of the esoteric sides of jazz, all recorded in 1970 and
released on various labels. We open with a free jazz royalty. In April 1968, as a shareholder in a co-op that purchased an old
seven-story factory at 131 Prince Street in Soho, just south of
Greenwich Village in New York, Ornette Coleman became the owner of the
street-level and third floors in the building. ..."
Ed Blackwell, Dewey Redman, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden at 131 Prince Street, May 1971.
"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. ..."
Soundcloud: DjExtreme Cumbia 2023 Mix (Audio)
"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. ..."
"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. ..."
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.
"... 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. ..."
YouTube: Sepiadrone 1 / 11
"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. ..."
"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 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. ..."
What happened when Howlin' Wolf hooked up with rock royalty to make an album (Video)
YouTube: The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions 1 / 13
"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. ..."
Neil Young's New Music Video Mocks Starbucks, Monsanto, and GMOs (Video)
Neil Young’s new anti-GMO song confuses science on Starbucks, Monsanto
"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 - Author Archives: Valerie Stivers
"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. ..."
"... 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.' ..."
Mary K. Greer's Tarot Blog: Carl Jung and Tarot (Video)
Tarot: A Gateway to the Unconscious
"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?..."
"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
"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. ..."
Passion for place … detail from Wandering Shadows, 1878, Peter Graham.
"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
"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. ..."
Taroe. Festival Asalto 2023. Zaragoza, Spain.
"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
"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. ..."
Yamaha MT44 cassette tape recorder
"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. ..."
"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. ..."
Automat, 1927
"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: 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
"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...."
Alphonse du Breuil, Marcottage en serpenteaux, 1846.
"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. ..."
"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...."
YouTube: Girlfriend Is Better - Stop Making Sense
"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. ..."
YouTube: Tour of Asteroid Bennu
"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. ..."
YouTube: Abandoned Millmoor Football Stadium Exploration 15:53
"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. ..."
"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...."
Guardian: Everybody salsa! Fania, the ramshackle New York label that sent Latin rhythms global
1960s: Days of Rage - An NYC Mambo, Boogaloo and Salsa Family Tree (April 2019)
"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. ..."
