As France celebrates, it doesn’t seem like 150 years since the first impressionist exhibition

Auguste Renoir: Bal du Moulin de la Galette, 1876.

"... By the standards to which European artists had cleaved for the previous four centuries, Impression, Sunrise isn’t a finished work of art at all but an oil sketch. 'An impression indeed!' the critic Louis Leroy sneered when it was unveiled along with works by Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and more in an 1874 group show. Another critic dismissed the works as 'paint scrapings from a palette spread evenly over a dirty canvas'. But it was Leroy’s review that bit, with his parting shot that the entire show was 'the exhibition of impressionists'. The name stuck and 150 years on, the first impressionist exhibition is being commemorated in France with the enthusiasm the British reserve for a royal wedding. The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition 1874: Inventing Impressionism opens on 26 March, with other impressionist shows coming in Strasbourg, Tourcoing, Clermont-Ferrand, Chartres, Nantes, Bordeaux, with an impressionist festival planned in Monet’s Normandy. ..."


Camille Pissarro: The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897
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Maureen Gallace’s Elemental Realm

“Crashing Waves, Late September” (2023).

"The English landscape painter John Constable died roughly 200 years ago, but lightning-fast brushstrokes that echo the agitated clouds and roiling waves he depicted keep his paintings looking astoundingly fresh compared to the varnished stillness of many of his compatriots’ canvases. An ocean away and a couple of centuries later, the pounding surf in Maureen Gallace’s 'Crashing Wave, Late September' (2023) conjures a similar immediacy, but one that has also subsumed the frissons of modernity — all those revolutions of expression and abstraction that have continually rejuvenated the bloodline of an art form that stretches back tens of millennia to pigment on cave walls. In the 1950s, Jackson Pollock looked out at the Atlantic from the far end of Long Island; Gallace (born 1960) surveys the expanse of Long Island Sound from Connecticut. Pollock worked at mural scale, Gallace on panels that are often less than a foot across, and yet both artists’ compositions pulse with visceral gestures constrained only by the frame edges.





"Summer Porch" (2023)
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The Henry Cow Box Redux: The Complete Henry Cow (2019)


"The Henry Cow Box Redux: The Complete Henry Cow (subtitled 50th Anniversary Box) is a seventeen-CD plus one-DVD box set by English avant-rock group Henry Cow; it was released by RēR Megacorp in November 2019. ... The Henry Cow Box Redux was released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the formation of Henry Cow. Included in the box set are three 60-page booklets: Book 1: The Studio Volumes 1–7; Book 2: The Road Volumes 8–12; and Book 3: The Road Volumes 13–17. All the studio CDs were remastered by Bob Drake. RēR Megacorp also released the Ex Box bonus CD as a free-standing album. ... A review of The Henry Cow Box Redux: The Complete Henry Cow in Moors Magazine called Henry Cow 'one of the most fascinating and best British bands ever'. It described their music as having 'the mentality of free jazz and the discipline of the intelligent rock of Zappa'. It was always 'exciting' and 'surprising" music and just as relevant today as it was 50 years ago. The reviewer concluded that "[t]his box is an absolute must for lovers of intelligent jazz rock.' ..."





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Matana Roberts - Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the garden... (2023)


"Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden is the tenth solo studio album by American jazz saxophonist Matana Roberts. The album was released on September 29, 2023, by Constellation Records, and is the fifth in Roberts' ongoing Coin Coinalbum series. The album's narrative centers an ancestor of Roberts who died from an illegal abortion. Roberts first announced the album on June 14, 2023, for a September 29 release date by Constellation Records, and released the first three songs, 'We Said', 'Different Rings', and 'Unbeknownst', as a suite. ... The album blends a number of genres including folk, avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, post-bop, spoken word, noise, post-rock, hymns, free jazz, and chamber jazz. The variety of instruments is broader than past Roberts albums, including saxophones, violin, drums, and tin whistle. ..."






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John Vasquez Mejias


"With their sharp depictions of political upheaval via hyper-evocative caricature, John Vasquez Mejias’s woodcut panels update the printmaking stylistics forged by the German Expressionists. The forthcoming hardcover edition of Mejias’s The Puerto Rican War comprises ninety-six woodcut panels. It tells the story of the 1950s revolutionary uprising in Puerto Rico against the colonialists, which included a failed assassination attempt against President Harry S. Truman. The book contemplates the complexity and contradictions inherent to the possession of a moral compass, while bringing this lesser-known piece of history to a new audience. Through his visual storytelling, Mejias offers the prospect of a deepened affinity with his heritage. ..."





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Why Iran Hates America – A Fareed Zakaria Special


"When the terrorist organization Hamas brutally attacked Israel and took dozens of hostages on October 7, 2023, it ignited brutal repercussions that have destroyed Gaza, imperiled Red Sea transit, and launched a bloody conflict that threatens to spread to neighboring nations – and allies on nearly every continent. Behind the stunning violence, have been Iran and her proxies. On Sunday, Feb. 25, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, host of the global public affairs program Fareed Zakaria GPS, leads the one-hour special, Why Iran Hates America (8:00pm ET CNN & CNN International). The special traces the roots of the current conflagration to Britain’s post-World War II colonial embers. Zakaria discusses stunning evidence with contributors, and revealed in declassified and leaked documents, that American and British intelligence – including a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt – fomented a coup in 1953 that led to the deposing of Iran’s prime minister. The operation ultimately backfired, leading to the Iranian Islamic revolution that continues to have consequences for the entire Middle East. ..."

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Sound system Jamaican

Coxson Dodd

"In Jamaican popular culture, a sound system is a group of disc jockeys, engineers and MCs playing ska, rocksteady or reggae music. The sound system is an important part of Jamaican culture and history. The sound system concept first became popular in the 1940s, in the parish of Kingston. DJs would load up a truck with a generator, turntables, and huge speakers and set up street parties. Tom the Great Sebastian, founded by Chinese-Jamaican businessman Tom Wong, was the first commercially successful sound system and influenced many sound systems that came later. In the beginning, the DJs played American rhythm and blues music, but as time progressed and more local music was created, the sound migrated to a local flavour. ... By the mid-1950s, sound systems were more popular at parties than live musicians, and by the second half of the decade, custom-built systems began to appear from the workshops of specialists such as Hedley Jones, who constructed wardrobe-sized speaker cabinets known as 'House[s] of Joy'. ..."

W - Sound system (Jamaican)

Hedley Jones: The Renaissance Man Who Pioneered Jamaican Soundsystem Culture

The Mysteries of Soundman Metro

The Roots of Sound Systems

urbanimage

YouTube: Sole Sound System

Hedley Jones at Work
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Catherine Christer Hennix (1948–2023)


"Pathbreaking experimental Swedish musician, artist, and polymath Catherine Christer Hennix, whose mesmerizing drone compositions embodied her vision of music as endless, died of an undisclosed illness November 19 at her home in Istanbul. She was seventy-five. Her death was announced by arts organization Blank Forms, which distributed her work. Hennix in such pioneering compositions as The Electric Harpsichord and Central Palace Music (both 1976) welded mathematics and tone to offer listeners what she cast as 'a sustained out-of-body experience in an altered state of consciousness.' ... Around this time, thanks to Stockholm’s vibrant jazz scene and her mother’s role in it, she saw such greats of the era as multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, saxophonist John Coltrane, trumpeter Miles Davis, and pianist Cecil Taylor perform live; Coltrane especially would loom large in the formation of her sound. While studying first biochemistry, then theoretical linguistics, and finally mathematical logic at Stockholm University, Hennix began composing works for the massive mainframe computers at Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion, working in the vein of Karlheinz Stockhausen before abandoning the complicated avant-garde style. ..."
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After Two Years of War, A Weary Ukraine Remains Defiant

A residential building heavily damaged in Russian military strikes, Avdiivka, Ukraine, Nov. 8, 2023.

"The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was supposed to be an easy win for President Vladimir Putin. Eight years earlier, Russian soldiers had invaded eastern Ukraine, gained control of two cities, Donetsk and Luhansk, and annexed the Crimean Peninsula in just one month. In the aftermath of the invasion, many commentators predicted that Ukraine’s capital city, Kyiv, would fall to Russian soldiers in a matter of days. ... February 24 marks the two-year anniversary of the largest land war in Europe since World War II. No Ukrainian has been spared impact by the conflict, which has leveled entire towns, displaced 10 million, killed at least 10,000 civilians, and injured another 18,500. But in the darkness of war, Ukrainians have banded together to support their country and its people. Over the past two years, the Voice has corresponded with Ukrainian soldiers, volunteers, municipal workers, and civilians caught in a country in conflict. In light of the anniversary of the war, we reconnected with some of our previous correspondents to learn how their lives have changed since we last spoke. ..."








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Live MCMXCIII - Velvet Underground (1993)


"Live MCMXCIII ('1993' in Roman numerals) is a live album by the American rock band the Velvet Underground, released in 1993 by Sire Records. ... In late 1992, the Velvet Underground 1965–1968 core line-up of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrisonand Maureen Tucker suddenly decided to reform. The decision was unexpected because the relationship between Reed and Cale had been sour ever since the late 1960s, and though it had ameliorated after back catalogue royalty renegotiations in the mid-1980s, it had hit another low after their 1990 collaboration Songs for Drella. Nevertheless, an impromptu one-song reunion in Jouy-en-Josas, France, later that year for an Andy Warhol exhibition set the scene and by 1993, the band had started to rehearse for a world tour. ..."



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Cooking with Franz Kafka - Valerie Stivers


"In Franz Kafka’s first published story, 'Description of a Struggle,' the narrator is sitting in a drawing room at a rickety little table, eating a piece of fruitcake that 'did not taste very good,' when a man walks up to him. The man is described as an 'acquaintance,' but we soon realize he is a double, or another part of the narrator’s self. The acquaintance has fallen in love and wants to boast about it. 'If you weren’t in such a state,' he scolds, '[you] would know how improper it is to talk about an amorous girl to a man sitting alone drinking schnapps.' The comment seems to threaten an unchecked appetite. What would the lonely, schnapps-drinking man do if tempted by the girl? The struggle that follows, metaphorically speaking, is between the sides of the protagonist’s character—on one side, the man who desires to stand apart from society and guard his creative self, and on the other, he who wishes to fit in and reap the pleasures of fruitcake and amorous girls. ..."



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Talking About the Village Voice, the “Paper That Couldn’t Be Bought”

Rock ’n’ politics, read all about ’em: Two covers from the Village Voice Archive featured in Romano’s oral history.

"Imagine: Your Facebook feed is suddenly free of ads, and every post in it comes from one of your favorite Village Voice writers, cartoonists, or photographers. Staffers and freelancers at the legendary alternative weekly, alive and gone, are talking to you in the privacy of your room or on the bus or at the beach, their pithy comments bouncing off one another, sharing their memories and their inside scoops, assembling a saga that reaches back to 1955, when a trio of World War II vets — psychologist Ed Fancher, encyclopedia scribe Dan Wolf, and novelist Norman Mailer — threw 15 grand together, rented an office, and made publishing history. And imagine that this feed goes on for a hundred hours, that you keep scrolling and the stories keep rolling out, in the inimitable voices of people you knew — or wished you knew — and loved. That’s how I — a Voice contributor since the early ’80s, a senior editor from 1992 until 2006, and a contributor, again, from 2015 until, well, now — felt reading Tricia Romano’s extraordinary new oral history, The Freaks Came Out to Write, subtitled The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture.  ..."
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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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