Ancestry as guide to character in Tolkien’s legendarium

"In Tolkien's legendarium, ancestry provides a guide to character. The apparently genteel Hobbits of the Baggins family turn out to be worthy protagonists of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo Baggins is seen from his family tree to be both a Baggins and an adventurous Took. Similarly, Frodo Bagginshas some relatively outlandish Brandybuck blood. Among the Elves of Middle-earth, as described in The Silmarillion, the highest are the peaceful Vanyar, whose ancestors conformed most closely to the divine will, migrating to Aman and seeing the light of the Two Trees of Valinor; the lowest are the mutable Teleri; and in between are the conflicted Noldor. Scholars have analysed the impact of ancestry on Elves such as the creative but headstrong Fëanor, who makes the Silmarils. Among Men, Aragorn, hero of The Lord of the Rings, is shown by his descent from Kings, Elves, and an immortal Maia to be of royal blood, destined to be the true King who will restore his people. Scholars have commented that in this way, Tolkien was presenting a view of character from Norse mythology, and an Anglo-Saxon view of kingship, though others have called his implied views racist. ..."


Bilbo's and Frodo's ancestry analysed by geography of the Shire and Hobbit family character. Bilbo inherits bourgeois Baggins and adventurous Took, suiting him both for life in the Shire and for the adventure described in The Hobbit. 


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Chaucer goes digital as British Library makes works available online

"The entire collection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works held by the British Library is being made available in digital format after the completion of a two and a half year project to upload 25,000 images of the often elaborately illustrated medieval manuscripts. In a 'major milestone' for the library, which holds the world’s largest surviving collection of Chaucer, it is hoped the digital platform will enable new research into the 14th-century poet, courtier, soldier, diplomat, and MP who is most famous for his Middle English epic, The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer, who died in 1400, was proclaimed by his contemporary poet Thomas Hoccleve as the 'firste fyndere of our fair language' and is widely regarded as the father of English poetry. He was, in essence, the first poet laureate, being rewarded by Edward III with a gallon of wine daily for an unspecified task, thought to be for poetic work or works. He was also the first to be buried in what became Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. The British Library holds more than 60 items related to his works and life, and has now digitised them all. ..."


A detail from The Canterbury Pilgrims in a medieval edition of the book by Chaucer.
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Inside Man: How FIFA Guided the World Cup to Saudi Arabia

“As the world reeled from the coronavirus crisis in the fall of 2020, the president of soccer’s global governing body, Gianni Infantino, headed to Rome for an audience with Italy’s prime minister. Wearing masks and bumping elbows, Mr. Infantino, the president of FIFA, and the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, greeted each other in front of journalists before disappearing with the president of the Italian soccer federation into one of the ornate state rooms of the 16th-century Palazzo Chigi, the Italian leader’s official residence. …”


Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, at the 2022 World Cup.
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Well Charged – Vital Dub (1976)

"... Ok, back to the topic at hand: the riddims that are on this classic Dub-Set from 1976 are, with one exception, from the undisputed masterpiece of the Mighty Diamonds: 'The Right Time" aka 'I Need A Roof' and this connection alone has earned the reputation of 'Vital Dub' reasoned. Although no band is named on the album cover, a quick look at the line-up (despite some aliases) and it's obvious that the rhythms of this work were recorded by the early revolutionaries: drummer Sly Dunbar, bassist 'Ranchie' McLean ( partial replacement for Robbie Shakespeare), keyboardist Ansel Collins and all the other usual suspects are mentioned. Joseph 'Jo Jo' Hookim and keyboardist Ossie Hibbert sat at the mixing desk. The mix is ​​mostly a straight-through of the rhythms that are still unparalleled to this day. The solid production is a remarkable instrumental collection Dubs. ..."




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ModularGuitarFields I-VI - Zimoun (2023)

"... Zimoun is a multi-disciplilnary Swiss artist who is best recognized for his immersive and site-specific installations with cardboard, DC motors and other industrial objects to create large-scale installations of orchestrated noise and movement. His mechanized environments have been shown in prestigiuos museums and galleries worldwide. On his latest musical release, ModularGuitarFields I-VI is entirely based on the sounds of a Tenor Baritone Guitar, combined with select elements of a Modular Synth and a vintage 1960s Magnatone Amp. ModularGuitarFields I-VI encompasses expansive and atmospheric realms, showcasing Zimoun’s passion for raw, warm sounds, as well as minimalist concepts and approaches. ..."


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John Luther Adams – Darkness and Scattered Light (2023)

"'Darkness and Scattered Light' is an album of composer John Luther Adams’s darkly beautiful, mesmerizing, virtuosic music for double bass (two solos and a bass quintet), performed by the late bassist extraordinaire Robert Black (1956–2023). This is one of the most beautiful albums I have heard in years. And so emotional. It seems strange that an album about the vastness of nature should be so human, and so emotionally resonant. As the music goes deeper into exploring the stark, mysterious slowness of the natural world it becomes clear just how little this world cares about what we think about it. Nature doesn’t need us – the majesty of this music reflects our smallness back to us. It is a humbling, devastating kind of beauty. ..."



2012 January: John Luther Adams, 2015 June: Leaving Alaska, 2019 June: Become Ocean (2013)

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Dissenting in Style: How Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Collars Became Political Signifiers

"When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat on the Supreme Court bench on August 10, 1993, she became the second female to serve on the country’s highest court, joining Justice Sandra Day O’Connor(nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981). In the court’s group portrait from RBG’s first term, the nine justices, posed in front of red velvet curtains, wear flowing black judicial robes. The uniform is a simple but powerful symbol: concealing the individual’s body, it conveys impartiality and the somber, collective responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor flank the seven male justices. There isn’t a dress code for Supreme Court justices—the black robe has been worn over the years out of tradition. ..." 


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‘Fear of Flying’ Is 50. What Happened to Its Dream of Freedom Through Sex?

"Fifty years ago last month, Erica Jong published a debut novel that went on to sell more than 20 million copies. 'Fear of Flying,' a book so sexually frank that you may have found it hidden in your mother’s underwear drawer, broke new ground in the explicitness of writing by and for women. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, was a live wire. She was also a dead end, certainly for Jong, and maybe for feminism, too. Born in 1942 to a family of freethinkers in Manhattan, Erica Mann, who became Erica Jong, belonged to a generation 'raised to be Doris Day,' as she later wrote. Her Barnard yearbook photos showcase the full early-1960s checklist: velvet headband, twin set, pearls. Jong was gifted and ambitious. But even as a literature major at one of the country’s most distinguished women’s colleges, she had read vanishingly little work by female authors. ..."

Erica Jong published “Fear of Flying” “during that fleeting moment when sex struck some feminists as the thing that would set us once and forever free.”

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‘All Mod Cons’: How The Jam Outstripped Punk To Enter The Mainstream

"Unlike contemporaries such as Sex Pistols and The Clash, The Jam initially spent several years honing their craft on the small club circuit, so when they burst onto the scene early in 1977, they blazed with passion and purpose. In just five short years, with albums the likes of In The City, All Mod Cons and Sound Affects, the group spearheaded a mod revival that still reverberates today. Seemingly at odds with punk’s “Year Zero” mentality, the Rickenbacker-wielding, Surrey-based trio didn’t immediately slot in with their peers. Though acceptably loud and aggressive, the band’s music openly betrayed their collective love of mod-inclined forbears The Who and The Kinks, while their sharp black stage suits were anathema to young punks sporting safety pins, ripped T-shirts, and bondage trousers. ..."


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2023-24 College basketball preseason rankings: Kansas, Duke lead top 25

"It's that time of year — we're rolling out our FOX Sports preseason college basketball rankings. Before we unveil my projections for the 2023-24 season, let's look at last year's preseason poll to provide some needed context. The top-ranked team in last year's preseason poll, North Carolina, failed to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010. Meanwhile, the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament, Alabama, wasn't ranked in the top 15 of the preseason AP poll. With Zach Edey leading the way, Purdue wasn't even ranked heading into last season. The Final Four — UConn, San Diego State, Florida Atlantic University and Miami — only had one team that was ranked in the preseason with the Aztecs clocking in at No. 19.  With that being said, the following is the definitive and undisputed FOX College Hoops Top 25, and it cannot be argued. ..."



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Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans

"Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled. The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways. Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis. He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year. To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. ..."


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The Tunnels of Gaza: How the subterranean maze below the Gaza Strip works.

"The Gaza Strip has all the harrowing pitfalls soldiers have learned to expect from urban warfare: high-rise ambushes, truncated lines of sight and, everywhere, vulnerable civilians with nowhere to hide. But as Israeli ground forces inch their way forward in Gaza, the bigger danger may prove to be underfoot. The Hamas militants who launched a bloody attack on Israel last month have built a maze of hidden tunnels some believe extend across most if not all of Gaza, the territory they control. And they are not mere tunnels. Snaking beneath dense residential areas, the passageways allow fighters to move around free from the eye of the enemy. There are also bunkers for stockpiling weapons, food and water, and even command centers and tunnels wide enough for vehicles, researchers believe. ..." 


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Fight The Power: The Politics Of Hip-Hop

"Since its earliest days, hip-hop has been inherently political – a powerful vehicle to deliver messages society needs to hear. Through the spoken word, its MCs have often conveyed the politics of hip-hop even more directly than those of their rock and folk predecessors. Whether it’s Boogie Down Productions’ KRS-One breaking down the journey of the cow from the slaughterhouse to your dinner plate, or Doug E Fresh (and, later, Common) speaking about the sensitive topic of reproductive rights, hip-hop has always been the genre where no subject is off-limits. ... Hip-hop as a genre can be traced back to militant spoken-word groups such as The Last Poets and The Watts Prophets; just as they reflected the realities of their surroundings, modern day hip-hop would deliver its own missives from the frontline, becoming, as Public Enemy frontman Chuck D put it, 'black America’s CNN.' For a better part of a decade, much of the politics of hip-hop revolved around and reacted to the policies of then President Ronald Reagan, who served in office from 1981 through 1989. ..."


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Jill Stein Announces Third-Party Bid for President

"Jill Stein, who ran unsuccessfully for president on the Green Party ticket in 2012 and 2016, will run again in 2024, she announced on Thursday — adding yet another name to the field even as the two major parties appear almost certain to nominate the same two candidates who ran in 2020. ... The group of third-party candidates could significantly complicate what looks likely to be a rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump. Some of Mr. Biden’s allies, worried that third-party candidates could siphon support from him in swing states and make a Trump victory more likely, have been working aggressively to undermine those campaigns. ..." 


 
Jill Stein will be running to the left of President Biden and is joining a group of third-party candidates who are making some Democrats fearful that they could siphon support from his re-election bid.
Credit..
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The George Floyd Uprising - Vortex Group (2023)

Thinking Was for Later; Movement Was for Now: On the Vortex Group’s “George Floyd Uprising”: "In the final shots of Jordan Peele’s horror film Us (2019), a cavalcade of ghouls join hands across a burning landscape in a gesture inspired by the Reagan-era charity stunt Hands Across America. This scene comes as the denouement of a story in which a mistreated underclass created by a shadowy 'them' escapes the underworld to take revenge on their unwitting upper-world doppelgängers. As we find out from the film’s final big twist, there’s no difference between us and them, at least not at birth: the same child can become a well-to-do college graduate or a zombie-like monster. After a lifetime of underground torment, the shadow people lack the capacity for anything but violence. Once they’ve done away with the upper-world doubles, they become primitive imitations of them. One does not get the sense that the ghouls are going to build a new world to replace the one they’ve destroyed. Their revolution spells the end of civilization. This apocalyptic vision mirrors the way many Americans think about proletarian insurrection. ..."

"I kind of missed the George Floyd uprising. I was in the United States, but in jail at the time, so I don’t have firsthand experience of what went on in the streets. Of course, we knew about it in jail, and followed it as closely as we could. It was impossible not to hear about the rebellion that summer, or get drawn in by it. Even people who tended not to be very interested in politics soon found themselves marching in the streets for Black lives and against the police amid looted businesses and the looming husks of burned-out cruisers, paddy wagons, and even precincts. The multiracial everyperson quality of the crowds who carried out the uprising is a major theme of Vortex Group’s The George Floyd Uprising, an anthology that offers a transporting account of the revolutionary strategies used during the uprisings, and published largely anonymously. ..."


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Best Tribute Albums: 40 Classic Albums Honoring Great Artists

"Tribute albums have been inspiring musicians and delighting fans for decades. In 1950, only a couple of years after the first 33rpm LPs were made, Oscar Peterson honored the great Duke Ellington with a whole album of his music. There have since been thousands of tribute albums – more than 50 alone devoted to The Beatles – and the best tribute albums find artists paying homage while making their inspirations’ music their own. And they just keep coming. In 2017, for example, there were fine tribute albums from jazz singer Gregory Porter (Nat 'King' Cole & Me); Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (The Source, a tribute to Art Blakey); and jazz drummer Louis Hayes (his Horace Silver tribute, Serenade For Horace). Here’s our selection of 40 of the best tribute albums of all time. Let us know in the comments section if you have any other favorites. ..."


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Red Desert - Michelangelo Antonioni (1964)

"Red Desert (Italian: Deserto rosso) is a 1964 drama film directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Monica Vittiwith Richard Harris. Written by Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, it was Antonioni's first color film. The story follows a troubled woman (Vitti) living in an industrial region of Northern Italy following a recent automobile accident. ... In 1965, a reviewer for TIME lauded Red Desert as 'at once the most beautiful, the most simple and the most daring film yet made by' Antonioni, and stated that the director 'shows a painterly approach to each frame'. ..."


Red Desert: In This World - "Red Desert came out in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of the war, by which time Italy had recovered from the devastation caused by that catastrophic event and was on the way toward modern prosperity; the years stretching from 1954 to 1964 were those of the 'economic miracle.' Particularly vigorous in the recovery was the contribution of the country’s petrochemical industry: the companies SAROM and ANIC, which we hear mentioned in the film (their plants form the background of the opening scenes), began refining operations around Ravenna in the 1950s, in the process transforming the sleepy estuarine landscape south of the Po into the vast industrial waste ground that the movie so strikingly dramatizes. Michelangelo Antonioni’s attitude toward the cultural and economic changes affecting his country appears to have been complex and ambivalent. ..."




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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. ..."


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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? ..." 


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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. ..."




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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. ..."


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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. ..."




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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. ..."


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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. ..."
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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. ..."



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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

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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. ..."




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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. ..."


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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.”
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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."

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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. ..."


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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.' ..."



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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. ..."


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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. ..."


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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. ..."






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