The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Historical Primers That Help Explain the Century-Long Conflict
"On October 7th, Hamas invaded Israel and brutally massacred 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians. On a per capita basis, the attack amounted to twelve 9/11s (per The Economist). It also marked the single bloodiest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Faced with an existential threat, Israel has launched its own devastating invasion of Gaza, with the goal of destroying Hamas leadership. Already, the assault has left 9,000 civilians dead and tipped the population into a humanitarian crisis. Barring a ceasefire, the casualties will almost certainly mount from here. This explosion of violence represents the latest chapter in a century-long struggle between Jews and Arabs in the region. ..."
A Beginner’s Guide to Looking at the Universe
"... Nearly a million miles away, the James Webb Space Telescope just took a picture. Since transmitting its first data in late 2021, Webb has made stunning discoveries, including a plume of water spanning 6,000 miles in our solar system and a galaxy that formed only 390 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion years ago. The telescope is an engineering marvel: Its massive mirror makes it possible to collect light from the faintest objects. It has multiple ways of blocking and dissecting that light, giving us detailed portraits of distant galaxies and close neighbors alike. And its position, orbiting the sun and using Earth as its shield, allows it to take pictures around the clock, sending us up to 57.2 gigabytes of data — the equivalent of tens of thousands of standard iPhone photos — every day. What’s it telling us about our past — and the future of cosmology? ..."
Invite - Trio Chemirani (2011)
"Perhaps one of problems with mixing jazzers and folk musicians is that, though they may borrow some ideas across the musical borders, they don't seem to fully embody the element of the other. In some cases, the mix creates a tendency to negate each other's best attributes. The resultant feeling is that, rather than truly integrating on all levels, the musicians are actually on separate sides of a fence playing roughly the same kind of tune. Jazzers can have a (sometimes inappropriate) tendency to turn folk music into a 'jam track,' and some folk musicians seem to play limitedly: tonally locked into a jazz arrangement's tetrachords or other western sensibilities about music. Invite is a rare gem of an album, especially because it is not that type of album. ..."
Merchant's House Museum
"The Merchant's House Museum, also known as the Old Merchant's House and the Seabury Tredwell House, is a historic house museum at 29 East Fourth Street in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. Built by the hatter Joseph Brewster between 1831 and 1832, the house is a four-story building with a Federal-style brick facade and a Greek Revival interior. It served as the residence of the Tredwell family for almost a century before it reopened as a museum in 1936. The Merchant's House Museum is the only nineteenth-century family home in New York City with intact exteriors and interiors. ..."
The Black Album - Prince (1987)
"The Black Album is the sixteenth studio album by American recording artist Prince. It was re-released with re-mastered audio (and a few song title revisions) on November 22, 1994, by Warner Bros. Records after its original release on December 8, 1987, as the follow-up to Sign o' the Times and was to appear in an entirely black sleeve with no title or even a credit to Prince; hence it was referred to as The Black Album. Dubbed The Funk Bible by preceding press releases, and in a hidden message within the album itself, the work seemed to be a reaction to criticism that Prince had become too pop-oriented. It was his attempt to regain his Black audience. ..."
2020 September: Prince's Sign O' The Times: An oral history, 2022 April: 'Prince And The Revolution: Live' Set For Multi-Format Reissue
Paris’s First Underground Soundsystems
2016: "Didier Vacassin’s instinct was perfectly right, at least in one regard: 'I knew we were doing something that had never been done before.' Five mythical evenings at the rue des Panoyaux chapel didn’t exactly go down in music history, but the MC – who went by the name Ras Gugus – had the foresight to document what would be the birth of Parisian soundsystems, lovingly annotating each one of the photographic artifacts he and then-girlfriend Marie Vanetveelde (who passed away in 2008) took over 33 years ago. Today, the fastidiously organized collection can be perused in his apartment, which is lined from floor to ceiling with an equally methodical collection of reggae and dub 45s, competing for scarce square meters with an impressive archive of books and magazines. ..."
Dur Dur of Somalia - Volume 1, Volume 2 & Previously Unreleased Tracks (Analog Africa Nr. 27)
"... When Analog Africa founder Samy Ben Redjeb arrived in Mogadishu in November of 2016, he was informed by his host that he would have to be accompanied at all times by an armed escort while in the country. ... Although previous Analog Africa releases have demonstrated a willingness to go more than the extra air-mile to track down the stories behind the music, the trip to Mogadishu was a musical journey of a different kind. It was the culmination of an odyssey that had started many years earlier. In 2007 John Beadle, a Milwaukee-based musicologist and owner of the much loved Likembe blog, uploaded a cassette he had been handed twenty years earlier by a Somalian student. ..."
An Extremely Detailed Guide to an Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods
"How is a neighborhood born? In a small pocket of the Bronx, the answer involves rising rents, a civil war and an air traffic controller at Kennedy Airport. To see for yourself, zoom in with Google Maps near the Bronx Zoo, past Van Nest, Bronxdale and Morris Park. Get closer, and another label appears. ..."
How Israel and Palestine Became Enemies | With Palki Sharma
"Palestine is often considered the most unsolvable diplomatic issue in modern times. It's a conflict rooted in religion, race and most importantly, land. But how did this conflict begin? How and why did Jews decide to establish their homeland in Arab territory? Palki Sharma tells you on Flashback."
YouTube Oct. 21, 2023
Now’s The Time To Celebrate The Genius Of Charlie Parker
"Reissued in 1957 as The Genius Of Charlie Parker, Vol.3: Now’s The Time, with alternate takes of the original 10” LPs eight tracks, the original Verve album simply called Charlie Parker, released in 1953, is a gem among Parker’s work. The original LP had eight tracks, the first four recorded at Fulton Recording in New York City, on July 28, 1953, while the following four tracks date from a session at the same studio, seven months earlier. ..."
2011 July: Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, et al 1950, 2012 July: The Charlie Parker Story, 2014 May: Afro-Cuban jazz, 2014 December: The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Recordings 1944-1948, 2017 February: Bird in Boston · Live at the Hi-Hat 1953-1954, 2018 February: Bop City, 2019 November: What Is Bebop? Deconstructing Jazz Music’s Most Influential Development, 2020 August: Charlie Parker at 100: What to Read, Watch and Dig
St. Marks Is Dead - Ada Calhoun (2015)
"St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street is a nonfiction book by Ada Calhoun about the history of St. Mark's Place, a three-block stretch of East Village, Manhattan. Calhoun, who grew up on the street, shows how disillusioned bohemians of every era have declared "St. Marks Is Dead" when their era on the street passed. ... In a narrative history informed by 250 interviews and 70 rare images, St. Marks native Ada Calhoun profiles iconic characters, including W. H. Auden, Abbie Hoffman, Keith Haring, Beastie Boys, Frank O'Hara, Emma Goldman, The Velvet Underground, and the New York Dolls. She argues that St. Marks has variously been an elite address, an immigrants' haven, a mafia warzone, a hippie paradise, and a backdrop to the film Kids―and always been a place that outsiders call home. ..."
Russian Landmines Carry On the War Against Civilians in Ukraine
"Izyum has been the site of unimaginable horror during the ongoing war in Ukraine. After a long battle, in April 2022, Russian forces seized control of the Ukrainian city, which remained under occupation for the next six months. The more fortunate fled before their city fell, but those who remained, often the elderly, sick, or low-income, were forced to live under Russia’s military rule. When Ukraine’s military finally liberated Izyum, last October, during its fall 2022 counteroffensive, they discovered a mass grave filled with 447 bodies and multiple torture chambers. ..."
Valerii Borsch: “I crawled around 450 meters to the tree and started screaming.”
Four Figures at a Table, by the Le Nain Brothers, c 1643
"It often seems the art of pre-modern Europe is a cavalcade of kings and queens and aristocrats. Yet in the age when Van Dyck was painting silk-clad cavaliers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain painted the French peasantry. This is a typically blunt and bleak example of their unvarnished records of real life. An older woman looks right at us, despairing, while a younger woman also casts us a melancholy glance. She is holding a plain ceramic water jug, to go with the dry bread the young boy in the picture is eating. Life’s no picnic for these country folk – it is an all but bare table. Dull brown light adds to the atmosphere of plainness and poverty. About 150 years before the French Revolution, the Le Nain Brothers reveal the injustice that sustained the brilliance of upper-class life."
Counter Intelligence: Los Angeles
"From the East River to the Pacific Coast, the map of America is dotted by record stores – some famous, some wildly obscure. On Counter Intelligence, RBMA Radio gets the stories of these storefronts straight from the personalities who run them, soundtracked by their signature records. This week, our episodes focus on shops based in Los Angeles. In advance of their premiere on RBMA Radio, we sent Maxwell Schiano to document each one. ..."
Jaco Pastorius, An Introduction To The Jazz Legend
"Jaco Pastorius often told people that he was the greatest bass player in the world. During his brief, mercurial career, there was enough truth to his contention that his words didn’t seem all that brash or uncouth. Pastorius, who passed away at the age of 35 in 1987, was a singular figure in the jazz world. No one sounded like him before, and few have imitated his style in the decades since his untimely death. As Joni Mitchell once put it, 'he was doing things that no one could do; he was being Jimi Hendrix on the bass.' ..."
New York City Water Towers: How They Work
"The second episode of our The Untapped New York Podcast is all about the New York City water tower! In it, we answer questions like: how do water towers work? How many water towers are there in New York City? What are the water tower companies that build, install, and service the rooftop on top of the buildings in this city? You’ll learn about the different types of water tanks — the classic wood water tower and the more modern metal ones. We’ll also explore why New Yorkers love the water tower so much. ..."
Untapped Cities
2014 November: Water tower, 2017 March: New York is a city of rooftop wooden water tanks
The History of the Electric Guitar Solo: A Seven-Part Series
"No instrument is more closely identified with rock and roll music than the electric guitar, and no form of performance is more closely associated with the electric guitar than the solo. You can hardly discuss any of those three without discussing the others. Hence the broad sweep of Axe to Grind, the new seven-part video series from Youtube music channel Polyphonic on the electric guitar solo, a cultural phenomenon that can’t be explained without telling the story of a vast swath of popular music through practically the entire twentieth century and continuing on into the twenty-first. ..."
Once Upon a Time in America - (Extended Director's Cut)
"This film has been with me for many, many years. I was 15 when I saw it and was just blown away by it. It contains my favourite soundtrack of ALL TIME, De Niro in his prime, the volatile James Woods, the first sighting of the beautiful, Jennifer Connelly, the time jumps, the kids, Bugsy, Pesci, Burt Young, opium, gangsters, loyalty, betrayal, New York, Dominic slipping, the cake scene, Elizabeth McGovern, Tuesday Weld, Danny Aiello, the babies scene, going for a swim, Fat Moe, William Forsythe, Treat Williams and the unions all brought beautifully together by the mighty Italian director, Sergio Leone. This was his 10th and final film. I have seen it countless times and it gets better with every viewing. Always the 229 minute version, thanks goodness I never got to witness the abomination that was the American cinema release, the butchered 139 minute chronologically ordered version cut by the studio. ..."
YouTube: ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA: (Extended Director's Cut) - Trailer, Why THIS SCENE In Once Upon A Time In America Is PERFECT
Rivers of Babylon - The Melodians (1970)
"The Melodians were a rocksteady harmony trio composed of Tony Brevett, Brent Dowe, and Trevor McNaughton. There was a fourth member, Robert Cogle, but he apparently contributed to the group only as a songwriter, not as a singer. After singing in various amateur talent shows from 1960 on, they recorded for Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd in 1966, and had a series of hits for the producer Duke Reid in 1967-68. They then recorded several songs for Sonia Pottinger before working with Leslie Kong in 1969-70. They recorded an album's worth of material for Kong, notably hits like 'It's My Delight' and 'Sweet Sensation' (which were released in the UK on a Trojan 45 at the time and were later covered by the British reggae band UB40 in the 1980's and 1990's), but it was 'Rivers of Babylon,' a Rasta-influenced hymn-like song, that was to prove their biggest hit. ..."
The Botched Hunt for the Gilgo Beach Killer
"The beginning of the story was strangely familiar, like the opening scene in a shopworn police procedural: A woman runs screaming down a street in Oak Beach, a secluded gated community on Long Island’s South Shore, only to vanish, it seems, into thin air. It was almost dawn on May 1, 2010. Hours earlier, Shannan Gilbert traveled from New Jersey to see a man who had hired her as an escort from a Craigslist ad. By the time the police arrived, she was gone. They talked to the neighbors, the john and her driver and came up with nothing. A few days later, they ordered a flyover of the area and, again, saw no sign of her. Then they essentially threw up their hands. She went into the ocean, they decided, either hysterical or on drugs. ...
Like a Virgo: Spectacle, submission, and an endless European summer
"Virgo season's come and gone, the season of people who tighten their belts and straighten their backs, a time characterized by a destructive willingness to exert oneself without being able to answer the question, Why? A Virgo is her own worst enemy, and so, as a Virgo, to enter into a period of energetic overlap between personal and collective experience means the exacerbation of an already overly sensitive temperament. This is a kind of disclaimer. For such was the state in which I attended the press viewing at Fotografiska in early September. ..."
Monika Baer, Untitled, 2022/2023
Illuminating: an illustrated guide to some of the world’s most remote lighthouses
"José Luis González MacÃas acknowledges that he was
not the most obvious person to write a book about lighthouses. 'I grew
up a long way from the sea and had no personal connection with the world
of seafaring,' he says. 'My professional life has been more centred on
books than coastlines.' As a writer, designer,
illustrator and publisher of books and graphic materials for museums
and other cultural institutions, he had always dreamed of creating a
personal project that would put equal emphasis on images and text, but
the fascination with lighthouses came later. ..."
Matinicus Rock Lighthouse: Atlantic Ocean - North America
NEU!
"Neu! ... German for 'New!'; styled in block capitals) were a West German krautrock band formed in Düsseldorf in 1971 by Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother following their departure from Kraftwerk. The group's albums were produced by Conny Plank, who has been regarded as the group's 'hidden member'. They released three albums in their initial incarnation—Neu! (1972), Neu! 2 (1973), and Neu! 75 (1975)—before disbanding in 1975. They briefly reunited in the mid-1980s. ..."
How the New York City Steam System Works
"Our latest Untapped New York podcast
episode is out, all about how the New York City steam system works.
Have you ever wondered about those orange and white smokestacks you see
in the middle of New York’s streets with steam flowing out of them? To
find out more, we’ve gone straight to the source by interviewing Frank
Cuomo, the general manager for steam operations at Con Edison. We also
spoke with Mark Reigelman, an artist who used the steam system for one of our favorite guerrilla art installations ever. ..."
W - New York City steam system
YouTube: Why Steam Pours From New York City Streets
What Makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a Masterpiece: Great Books Explained
"Here on Open Culture, we’ve often featured the work of gallerist-Youtuber James Payne, creator of the channel Great Art Explained. Not long ago we wrote up his examination of the work of René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter responsible for such enduring images as Le fils de l’homme, or The Son of Man. Payne uses that famous image of a bowler-hatted everyman whose face is covered by a green apple again in the video above, but this time to represent a literary character: Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses. ..."
The Last Angel of History - John Akomfrah (1996)
"The Last Angel of History is a 45-minute documentary, directed in 1996 by John Akomfrah and written and researched by Edward George of the Black Audio Film Collective, that deals with concepts of Afrofuturism as a metaphor for the displacement of black culture and roots. The film is a hybrid documentary and fictional narrative. ... The structure of the film makes it a meta-narrative commenting on while also becoming part of the genre of Afrofuturism. The film uses concepts based on George Clinton's Mothership Connection and features interviews with Clinton, Derrick May, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Nichelle Nichols, Juan Atkins, DJ Spooky, Goldie, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Bernard Harris, Kodwo Eshun, Carl Craig, and A Guy Called Gerald to explore the link between black music as a way of exploring the future. The film makes mention of Sun Ra, whose work centres on the return of blacks to outer space in his own Mothership.
YouTube: The Last Angel of History 45:06
The Lasting Whole Earth Catalog
"When the Whole Earth Catalog arrived in the Fall of 01968, it came bearing a simple, epochal label: ‘Access to Tools.’ As its editor and Long Now Co-founder Stewart Brand wrote in the introduction to that first edition, the goal was for the Catalog to serve as an ‘evaluation and access device’ for tools that empowered its readers ‘to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.’ The key word in all of that idealistic declaration of purpose was ‘access.’ The Whole Earth Catalog did not intend to directly grant its readers this knowledge, wisdom, and mastery, but to provide a kaleidoscopic array of gateways from which they could attempt to find it themselves. ..."
The Long Now Foundation X: The Lasting Whole Earth Catalog
The Long Now Foundation X: Ideas
The George Orwell guide to the perfect cup of tea
"British novelist George Orwell dedicated his writing to unravelling complex societal structures. Best known for penning Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four,
his opposition to totalitarianism and ardent support of socialism
undercut his most major works. He tackled class inequality, bleak
dystopian futures, and capitalism in his poetry, fiction, and journalism
– but in 1946, he tackled his most divisive subject yet. How to make
the perfect cup of tea. ..."
2011 July: Spanish Civil War - 75 Year, 18 July, 2012 March: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), 2012 June: "The Spanish Earth", Written and Narrated by Ernest Hemingway, 2013 January: The Real George Orwell, 2015 August: Songs of the Spanish Civil War, 2016 September: George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia (1938), 2017 January: Guernica (2016), 2019 September: What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural, 2021 November: Down and out in George Orwell’s Paris: A guide to the secret Paname
Israel Can Defend Itself and Uphold Its Values
"Israel stands on the verge of invading
Gaza in response to the terrorist attacks by Hamas that many, including
Israel’s leaders, have compared to Sept. 11 not just because of the
scale and savagery but also because the terrorists sought to destroy the
tranquillity of daily life. They killed the very young and the very
old, the strong and the weak, civilians and soldiers; they took some 150
hostages, including children, and survivors said the attackers raped women — all to send a message that no Israeli was safe. Israel
has a responsibility to its citizens to hold accountable the
perpetrators of this violence, but as Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this week, 'How Israel does this matters.' ..."
NY Times: Opinion | Editorial Board
The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time
"... The guitar is the most universal instrument, the most primal, and the most expressive. Anybody can pick up a little guitar in no time at all, but you can spend a lifetime exploring its possibilities. That’s why thinking about what makes a great guitarist is so much fun. Rolling Stone published its original list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists in 2011. It was compiled by a panel of musicians, mostly older classic rockers. Our new expanded list was made by the editors and writers of Rolling Stone. This one goes to 250. ..."
89 | Lou Reed
A Left That Refuses to Condemn Mass Murder Is Doomed
"This weekend in Israel, a far-right Islamist group perpetrated the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, murdering entire families, including babies, in their beds and slaughtering 260 concertgoers. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed in all, and over 100 others taken hostage. Israel’s far-right government predictably responded by choking off all food, electricity, and fuel to Gaza’s 2 million residents and then preparing a military assault more untempered by concern for civilian casualties than ever before. ..."
NY Times: The Secrets Hamas Knew About Israel’s Military (Video)
Maps of the 2023 ‘Ring of Fire’ Solar Eclipse
"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. ..."
Interviews - Henry Taylor: B Side
"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’s Future Came True
"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.
Orioles’ season was special, which is why the last four days were so painful
"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. ..."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)