With ‘Gems’ From Black Collections, the Harlem Renaissance Reappears

Credit...Archibald Motley Jr., “Black Belt” (1934), inspired by jazz culture, was loaned to the Met by the Hampton University Museum, in Virginia.

"How do you measure the United States in the 20th century without Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington? You wouldn’t dream of it. The writers, poets, singers and musicians of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, centering around the New York neighborhood from 1919 to the end of the 1930s, loom large in the American cultural imagination. The period was when 'Harlem became the symbol for the international black city,' as the novelist Ishmael Reed described it. But what about the painters Laura Wheeler Waring, Charles Henry Alston and Malvin Gray Johnson? Or the sculptor Richmond Barthé? Hardly household names. And while other visual artists — Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley Jr., Augusta Savage — have long been celebrated, their contributions have until recently been too often treated as a byway, separate from the rest of European and American modernism. ..."
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Taking a trip back in time at this Wall Street subway station


"Entering the Wall Street IRT subway station on Lower Broadway at Trinity Church can feel like going into a time warp. That’s because of the cast iron hoods that cover the stairwell as you descend underground. Decorated in a leaf pattern, the curved hoods date back to the station’s 1905 opening. The hoods mesh well with the elegant lamp posts and green bulbs on top. I’ve never seen anything like it at any other station, but this National Register of Historic Places document tells me the Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn also has a cast-iron hood. The wayback machine continues once you get to the platform. On the southbound side, there’s an original wood ticket booth—empty and dark, but quite stunning. The elegant lights, curlycue ironwork, and the slight curve of the booth give it a very Art Nouveau kind of feel. The photo is an old one from 2010—a subway ride no longer costs $2.25. (Think of it as part of the time traveling effect). ..."


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The Drunkard's Progress

The Drunkard's Progress: From the First Glass to the Grave. Nathaniel Currier 1846.

"The Drunkard's Progress: From the First Glass to the Grave is an 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier. It is a nine-step lebenstreppe on a stone arch depicting a man's journey through alcoholism. Through a series of vignettes it shows how a single drink starts an arc that ends in suicide. Below the structure, the protagonist's wife and child stand in tears. The lithograph is based on John Warner Barber's 1826 work The Drunkard's Progress, or The Direct Road to Poverty, Wretchedness, & Ruin. Critical reception has been poor since the image was released, but it influenced other temperance-themed works. The Drunkard's Progress is used in high school American history classes to teach about the temperance movement. ..."



The Drunkard's Progress, or The Direct Road to Poverty, Wretchedness, & Ruin. John Warner Barber 1826.
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Architect Breaks Down the Design Of Four Iconic New York City Museums: the Met, MoMA, Guggenheim & Frick


"Context may not count for everything in art. ... The question of just which design elements make the difference has occupied museum architects for centuries, and in New York City alone, you can directly experience more than 200 years of bold exercises and experiments in the form. In the Architectural Digest video above, architect Michael Wyetzner (previously featured here on Open Culture for his exegeses of New York’s apartments, bridges, and subway stations, as well as Central Park and the Chrysler Building) uses his expert knowledge to reveal the design choices that have gone into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Frick Collection. ..."

In the Architectural Digest video above, architect Michael Wyetzner (previously featured here on Open Culture for his exegeses of New York’s apartments, bridges, and subway stations, as well as Central Park and the Chrysler Building) uses his expert knowledge to reveal the design choices that have gone into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Frick Collection. 


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Down in Jamaica – 40 Years of VP Records


"Celebrating 40 years of growth in a fickle, fast-moving industry, VP Records’ Down in Jamaica draws from the label’s practically unrivaled catalog to honor the story of Chinese-Jamaican entrepreneurs Vincent and Patricia Chin, whose trajectory was remarkably synonymous with that of dancehall reggae itself. Launched from an ice-cream parlor in downtown Kingston, the Chins’ business (originally called Randy’s Records) grew from a one-stop shop for local wax into a bustling recording studio, the world’s largest independent reggae label, and a major arm of the global reggae industry, after the Chins relocated to Jamaica, Queens, in the late 1970s and turned their focus to foreign markets. ..."






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CITY OF KINGS: A History of New York City Graffiti


“'City of Kings: A History of NYC Graffiti' is a crafted exploration of the graffiti scene’s historical roots in New York City. Born from a prominent exhibition co-curated by Al Diaz, Eric Felisbret, and Mariah Fox, this book transcends the role of a mere catalog to become a substantive text that presents a detailed overview of the graffiti movement in a structured, academic, and engaging manner. Al Diaz, an original New York graffiti writer and a member of the influential SAMO© duo with Basquiat, not only shares his own contributions but also illuminates the collaborative history of the movement. He eloquently describes the perseverance of graffiti artists, painting a vivid picture of their dedication. ..."

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“In Space” by Holger Czukay


"Holger Czukay was a founding member of German experimental rock band Can. In addition to playing those hypnotic motorik bass grooves, Czukay was the recording engineer for Can, and an early adopter of ‘sampled’ collage sounds, recorded to tape from shortwave radio broadcasts and other sources, edited and manipulated by hand in those pre-digital days, woven into the music assembled by Czukay from hours of improvised music creation. Beyond Can Czukay recorded several ‘solo’ albums – often in conjunction with Can human drum machine Jaki Liebezeit – and collaborations with other musicians. One of those collaborations was with David Sylvian, producing two albums 'Plight & Premonition' (1988) and 'Flux + Mutability' (1989). These albums were recently re-issued on a double LP on the Grönland label. ..."





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“A Thousand Eulogies Are Exported to the Comma.” Of Syntax and Genocide


"This essay was originally given as a speech given at “A People’s Cinema & Night of Poetry & Song for Palestine” in Brooklyn, New York on January 27th. * I don’t know how to use a comma. I am painfully aware of the irony. Not only am I a writer but I was also an editor where part of my job consisted of proofreading, and with a fine tooth comb having to discern if a comma was placed by mistake or missing from a sentence. I know what a comma is, and generally I know its function, but I just don’t think about it too much when I write. ... And on Day 113, I don’t want any attention to be diverted from what I wrote to how I wrote it. On the other hand, mistakes, repetition, and jarring sentence structures are much more representative of my state of mind. We are on day 113 and the most well-documented genocide of all times is still unfolding on our screens. There is no sense in this senselessness. No eloquence to be extracted from an airstrike. No metaphor that can aptly describe the horror of there being no functioning hospital that hasn’t already been communicated by reality itself. There are many ways to use the comma. ..."
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New Orleans Music: From Mardi Gras To The Meters… And All That Jazz

Danny Barker's King Zulu project was part of a wave of 1950s Mardi Gras recordings that give us a window into the forces that influence the soundtrack of Carnival to this day.

"From the moment you first hit New Orleans, the city’s musical history is impossible to avoid. Fly into Louis Armstrong International Airport – the world’s only major metropolitan airport named after a jazz musician – and you’ll be greeted by a life-sized statue of the man himself. Instead of standard Muzak, you’ll hear local classics through the sound system. It could be The Meters’ 'Hey Pocky Way,' Armstrong’s ubiquitous 'What A Wonderful World,' or Allen Toussaint’s 'Shoo Ra' guiding you toward baggage claim. If it’s lunchtime you might even find a jazz combo playing in the piano bar. There are locals who swear that everything great about American music came from New Orleans. And, to large extent, they’ve got a point. Credit that partly to New Orleans being a seaport city, or the 'northernmost point of the Caribbean' as it’s sometimes called. From the start, New Orleans music was about absorbing a world of influences and creating something uniquely funky and tasty out of it.  ..."


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Scene And Not Heard: Jesse Rifkin’s Playlist For NYC’s Lost Music Spaces


"In my book, This Must Be The Place, I examined sixty years of New York City music scenes, analysing the music, real estate, and economics, to try to understand why and how some of the city’s most fruitful scenes came to exist – and how they fell apart. When I asked over 100 musicians, deejays, club workers, and club-goers about what makes a scene vibrant, the answers I heard didn’t just involve the marquee names who are typically given all the credit. Rather, each scene’s success – from the 70s glam rock at Max’s Kansas City to the 00s indie at the Silent Barn – required a rich ecosystem of artists working at all levels, as well as behind-the-scenes workers. Some became internationally known, while others never made it very far beyond the city limits; but remove any one of them and the whole ecosystem falls apart. One of the guiding principles for This Must Be the Place was to try to elevate some of these people, who were major players in their scenes but, in one way or another, never quite got their due. ..."





The Gallery, 172 Mercer Street and Houston
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Voice Magnetic - Hainbach (2023)


"Voice Magnetic by Hainbach is the enigmatic Berlin based artist’s sonic diary of 2022. On his sixth release on Seil Records, Stefan Goetsch collages the sounds he made and the ones that surrounded him over the course of twelve months into a powerfully intimate ambient experience. ... The connecting threads between these pieces are magnetic tape and the human voice — hiss and breath. The result are 15 immersive ambient pieces that make up Voice Magnetic. Often short like the moments that spark them. Fading and intricate, honest and pure. Based out of Berlin, Germany, electro-acoustic music composer and performer Hainbach creates shifting audio landscapes, using esoteric synthesizers, nuclear test equipment, magnetic tape and a collection of idiophones. Hainbach has become known for his immersive live shows and a unique sound that is both abstract yet very much a corporal experience. Otherworldly and intimate, raw and heartfelt. ..."

Anost (Audio)



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Has Jack Nicholson retired from acting?


"The debate over naming the greatest actor of all time is one that doesn’t have a definitive answer, but no discussion is complete – or even worth paying attention to – if Jack Nicholson isn’t involved. One of the most heavily decorated performers in history, the star’s dedication to his craft and ability to immerse himself fully into his characters was all the more impressive considering his larger-than-life persona, reputation for raising hell, and hard-partying antics that were never far from the headlines. Although Nicholson never formally or officially announced his retirement from acting, he did shut down rumours that he’d been forced away from the industry due to memory loss. Refuting such claims, the iconic performer offered that he still maintained 'a mathematician’s brain', and his retreat from the spotlight was brought on by a desire to not 'be out there anymore'. Nicholson did clarify that he was definitely retiring his reputation as a ladies’ man, though, which is something. ..."



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A Cultural Tour of Istanbul, Where the Art and History of Three Great Empires Come Together


"Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind: the Rijksmuseum, the Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre. These institutions alone could take years to experience fully, but it would be an incomplete journey that didn’t venture farther east — much farther east, in the view of Great Art Explained creator James Payne. In his latest Great Art Cities video, he makes the case for Istanbul, adducing such both artistically and historically rich sites as the İstanbul Archaeological Museum, the Basilica Cistern, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istanbul Modern, and of course — as previously featured here on Open Culture — the unignorable Hagia Sophia. ..."


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When Did New York’s Streets Get So Hollow?

St. Marks Place and Second Avenue, the East Village, 1969.

"Over the past decade, there has been much hand-wringing about New York’s puzzling empty storefront problem, with vacancy rates sitting north of 15 percent last fall in some of the city’s most celebrated areas. How did streets, from the East to the West Village, once home to the urbanist Jane Jacobs, a champion of the city’s neighborhoods, become so hollow? Rent escalation and the shift to e-commerce are, of course, obvious culprits. But behind the scenes, an important, largely overlooked factor is New York City’s zoning code, enacted in 1961. Written in the face of fears of overcrowding, the code incorporated the postwar planning ideology that New Yorkers would live in tranquil residential neighborhoods and commute by car to office jobs in Midtown or to factory jobs on the city’s periphery. The code also reflected an anachronistic, and at times elitist, view that limited where and how small businesses could operate. ..."

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Modulisme 100: Allen Ravenstine


"Allen Ravenstine was a key figure in the developing art and music scene in Cleveland in the early 70s. Working alone with an early analogue synthesizer, sans keyboard, and a four track tape recorder, he made a series of compositions. In 1975, one of those compositions titled Terminal Drive got him invited to join a group that was forming called Pere Ubu. That group’s membership changed over the years and eventually included Mayo Thompson who had founded the group Red Crayola in Texas in the 1960’s. During one of Ubu’s breakups, Ravenstine worked for a time in a reformation of Red Crayola both recording and touring. In 1991 he recorded his last album with Ubu and then left music to become an airline pilot. ..."

2017 June: Allen Ravenstine

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ASHBERY-ESQUE: Adventures in Cataloging the John Ashbery Reading Library


"Cataloging John Ashbery’s book collection has been a massive undertaking. At least it has been for me, the English Department grad student who, book by book, leaves through the foxed pages that frame the background of Ashbery’s rich literary life. After processing over 2,500 books from his library in a mere nine months—roughly half of the collection, which was generously donated to the Poetry Roomby David Kermani—Ashbery’s archived books have revealed some fascinating things about him, his peers, and maybe even about myself. ... 1. Self-Portrait as a Comprehensive Collector. One of the first lessons gleaned from the library is that Ashbery diligently collected some authors’ work to completion. A bookworm since his time at Harvard in the 1940s, John sought his own copies of collections by beloved influences like Marianne Moore and W. H. Auden, and he closely followed the decades-spanning careers of such friends as Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. ..."
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Rasta Man Chant: How Bob Marley Became A Spiritual Figurehead


"Like the vast majority of the Jamaican population in the 50s and 60s, Bob Marley was brought up a Christian. He sang church songs, made gospel records with The Wailers, and praising a Christian God was always within his thoughts. Given these facts, it might seem strange that the same young man became the first and foremost figurehead for another faith – and found that the wider world was willing to listen when so many in his Jamaican homeland rejected his adopted religion and considered its adherents to be outsiders. Through songs such as 'Exodus,' 'Rastaman Chant,' and 'War,' Bob Marley did so much to deliver the message of Rastafarianism to the globe, but it was not all one-way traffic. In return, Rastafarianism did much to deliver Bob Marley’s music to the world. ..."



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Classical radicalism

Irish Classical Radical Thomas Francis Meagher

"Radicalism (from French radical) was a political movement representing the leftward flank of liberalism during the late 18th and early 19th centuries and a precursor to social liberalism, social democracy, civil libertarianism, and modern progressivism. This ideology is commonly referred to as "radicalism" but is sometimes referred to as radical liberalism, or classical radicalism, to distinguish it from radical politics. Its earliest beginnings are to be found during the English Civil War with the Levellers and later the Radical Whigs. During the 19th century in the United Kingdom, continental Europe and Latin America, the term radical came to denote a progressive liberal ideology inspired by the French Revolution. Radicalism grew prominent during the 1830s in the United Kingdom with the Chartists and in Belgium with the Revolution of 1830, then across Europe in the 1840s–1850s during the Revolutions of 1848. In contrast to the social conservatism of existing liberal politics, radicalism sought political support for a radical reform of the electoral system to widen suffrage. It was also associated with a variety of ideologies and policies, such as liberalism, left-wing politics, republicanism, modernism, secular humanism, antimilitarism, civic nationalism, abolition of titles, rationalism, secularism, redistribution of property and freedom of the press.


Mary Wollstonecraft
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Iowa’s Caitlin Clark brings the joy of basketball with her everywhere she goes


"EVANSTON, Ill. — Michael Jordan had a saying about scoring. Thirty-two points a game was just eight a quarter. And when you break it down like that, it doesn’t seem too difficult. Until normal players actually try to do it. This isn’t a video game, after all. But like Michael Jordan, Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark, who just happened to come into Wednesday’s game averaging 32 a game, isn’t normal. Not when it comes to scoring. Not when it comes to drawing a crowd. In front of a packed house, Clark scored a breezy 35 points in a ho-hum 110-74 win over Northwestern on Wednesday night. She scored 10 in the first quarter, eight in the second, nine in the third and eight in the fourth. It wasn’t her best night. She didn’t shoot from long range particularly well — she missed 9 of 12 3-pointers — but she got to the basket when she wanted, and she went 10 of 10 from the free-throw line. And she added 10 assists and 6 rebounds. It’s just the simple arithmetic of being Caitlin Clark. Every quarter and every game of her historic career has added up to her being on the doorstep of becoming the greatest scorer in women’s NCAA basketball history. ..." 





 

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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948


"One year matters more than any other for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1948, Jews realized their wildly improbable dream of a state, and Palestinians experienced the mass flight and expulsion called the Nakba, or catastrophe. The events are burned into the collective memories of these two peoples — often in diametrically opposed ways — and continue to shape their trajectories. If 1948 was the beginning of an era, it was also the end of one — the period following World War I, when the West carved up the Middle East and a series of decisions planted the seeds of conflict. To understand the continuing clashes, we went back to explore the twists and turns that led to 1948. This path could begin at any number of moments; we chose as the starting point 1920, when the British mandate for Palestine was established. Over the following decades, two nationalisms, Palestinian and Jewish, took root on the same land and began to compete in a way that has ever since proved irreconcilable. The Arab population wanted what every native majority wants — self-determination. Jews who immigrated in growing numbers wanted what persecuted minorities almost never attain — a haven, in their  ancient homeland, from the hatred and danger they faced around the world. ..."


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Marc Weidenbaum – Disquiet


"1. Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why? The knobs on the Faderfox DJ44 are, to me, the pinnacle, but what do I know? Faderfox does such great work with its range of devices, and this one, in its little metal case, is an exceptional example of attention to detail. When I read your question a few years ago, when you first sent me the interview request, the DJ44 was my immediate thought — and it remains my answer to this day. I mention it with a sense of the bittersweet, because I’m likely going to trade my DJ44 at some point, because I just don’t use it as much as I used to, but in any case it’s a fantastic device. ..."


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Too Enjoyable to Be Literature


"I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night  in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature. ..."



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From chaos to champions? Don’t rule it out in Ivory Coast’s madcap Afcon

An Ivory Coast supporter celebrates Monday’s victory over Senegal on a street in the northern city of Korhogo. 

"The fact that Ivory Coast hired a veteran French coach – Jean‑Louis Gasset – with no experience in African football before the Africa Cup of Nations, only to sack him after their miserable performance in the group stages and replace him with a former international player but novice manager, Emerse Faé, for their last‑16 game against Senegal speaks to the cocktail of incompetence and chaos that is Ivorian football. Not even the pulsating, national morale-boosting penalty‑shootout win against Senegal on Monday, which sent the streets of Ivory Coast’s capital Yamoussoukro into a frenzy of jubilation into the early hours of Tuesday, can mask this fact. ..."
Guardian
South Africa knock World Cup semi-finalists Morocco out of Africa Cup of Nations                        

Ivory Coast’s redemption arc: AFCON hosts go from despair to delirium "Senegal’s supporters banged their drums with such ferocious intensity that it felt like they were rallying troops — maybe that was their intention. Scattered around the Charles Konan Banny Stadium in Yamoussoukro, in between the thousands of people who swayed their hips and danced for hours, were some supporters wearing grisly lion masks. When Habibou Diallo scored from Sadio Mane’s cross after three minutes, they let off a bright red flare. Ivory Coast boss Emerse Fae, in his first game as a senior head coach, must have wondered if he had accidentally stumbled upon the entrance to Mordor. ..."
The Athletic (Video)
Guardian - Afcon: Hakimi misses penalty and Amrabat sent off as South Africa stun Morocco
Africa Is a Country: Abidjan is orange

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The Complete Obscure Records Collection 1975-1978


"The first ever CD box set gathering the complete 10-album catalogue of Brian Eno's Obscure Records has been released by Italian-based label Dialogo. In the mid to late 1970s, Obscure gave a platform to some of the most significant young British composers of experimental music, together with a few Americans. In a quiet way spectacularly successful, the label's work continues to influence musicians in the 2020s. Some Obscure albums have never previously been available on CD and at least four of them are stone masterpieces. The Complete Obscure Records Collection 1975-1978 is an event. Obscure was founded by ex-Roxy Music synth player and tape operator Eno in 1975. He produced all the label's albums and was assisted in the A&R process by the then little known composers Gavin Bryars (pictured) and Michael Nyman. Most of the composers Obscure recorded were conservatoire trained but were considered too nonconformist to be employed on conservatoire faculties, Bryars and Nyman included. Mainstream record companies and concert halls were similarly wary. ..."




Gavin Bryars
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To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer


"Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics. Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic'. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world. ..."

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