A Monumental Legacy

An aquatint by English landscape painter Thomas Daniell depicts the Taj Mahal. Daniell traveled India with his nephew William Daniell, drawing scenes from across the country and later publishing them in a multivolume collection, Oriental Scenery, 1795 and 1808.

"... Artist Sita Ram’s 1815 chalk-and-watercolor-on-paper piece is as exquisite as its magnificent subject: the world’s most famous Islamic mausoleum. Visible are a tender gray-white sky and a swaying garden of lush mango trees. Between these layers of gray and green, like a creamy floating cloud, stands the Taj Mahal. 'The Taj Mahal by moonlight' is one of more than 200 surviving works that the Indian painter created on a yearlong trip with his employer, Warren Hastings, an official with the British East India Company, which at the time was the equivalent of the world’s biggest trading corporation. The inspiration for the art that has transcended time corresponds to Hastings’ nightly visit to the Taj Mahal in 1815, which he describes as a once-in-a-lifetime experience, adding an epithet to the monument as 'uncommonly striking.' He also confessed how the visit left an 'impression of gratification' for him. ..."


“Reminiscences of Imperial Delhi” consists of 89 folios containing approximately 130 paintings of Mughal and pre-Mughal monuments of Delhi, as well as other contemporary material, and accompanying text written by Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe, the governor-general’s agent at the imperial court (1795-1853). 

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk - Greg Tate (1989)

 

"In these scant lines, Frederick Douglass succinctly describes the ongoing crisis of the Black intellectual, that star-crossed figure on the American scene forever charged with explaining Black folks to white folks and with explaining Black people to themselves — often from the perspectives of a distance refracted by double alienation. If you want to hide something from a negro put it in a book. Douglass knew from experience the compound oppression of being poorly fed and poorly read, but also of having to stand Black and proud in isolated situations where nobody else Black was around to have your back. When the windchill factor plummets that low, all that can steady you is the spine of cultural confidence and personal integrity. ..."



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Masterpieces of Koto - Michio Miyagi (1956)


"The plucked zither derived from the Chinese guzheng spread through east Asia, arriving in Japan over 1400 years ago, and was incorporated into gagaku court music. As it was adapted over several hundred years, it became associated with blind musicians, notably the 17th-century performer Yatsuhashi Kengyō who is credited with making major adaptations to the instrument and for taking it from the courts to the common people. Similarly, Michio Miyagi (b. Kobe, April 7, 1894) was a blind virtuoso of the instrument who was both an innovator and preservationist of its lineage. ... His recording of "Haro no Umi (Spring Sea)" in the 1930s with the touring French violinist Renée Chemet is strikingly similar to work produced a decade later by Eastward-looking Californian avant-gardists of the 1940s including Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and John Cage. ..."



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The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture


"Midway between the glitz of Times Square and the grind of Wall Street, Greenwich Village used to be New York’s ulterior zone, a refuge for artists and agitators, dropouts and sexual dissidents. With the New York Times established as the city’s greyly official almanac, in 1955 this bohemian enclave acquired its own parochial weekly, the Village Voice. The rowdy, raucous Voice deserved its name, and now, following its closure in 2018 (it has since been revived as a quarterly), it has an appropriately oral history. The collage of interviews in The Freaks Came Out to Write extends from the paper’s idealistic beginnings to its tawdry decline, when it scavenged for funds by running sleazy ads for massage parlours. The Voice’s origins were proudly amateurish. One early contributor was a homeless man recruited from a local street; equipment consisted of two battered typewriters, an ink-splattering mimeograph machine and a waste paper basket for rejected submissions. ..."




The Village Voice offices c1975: ‘Contributors denounced one another in abusive slogans scrawled on the walls of the office toilet.’
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On Queens Soccer Fields, Immigrants Find Each Other and a Sense of Home

No matter the weather or season, players gather in Corona for soccer games.

"Ender Mora arrived at the soccer field in Flushing Meadows Corona Park one Sunday afternoon with a couple of new Venezuelan friends who had gotten off a bus at Port Authority four hours earlier, after a journey from the Texas border. The two 20-year-olds had no socks, wore only thin jackets and looked confused and exhausted. While waiting for his turn on the field, Mr. Mora, wearing his soccer uniform, busied himself bringing them bottles of water, sandwiches and warmer coats. ... For decades, the field in Corona, Queens, in the shadow of the borough landmark the Unisphere, has been home to numerous soccer leagues of mostly Latin American immigrants. The teams are loosely organized around national identity. The latest team to join their ranks, called La Vinotinto, is all Venezuelans. ..."



Jorge Sotello administers Islas Malvinas players in the Estudiantil Soccer League on Oct. 15.
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Cool Cats Invasion (Highlife, Juju & Palm​-​wine)


"This is classic collection of Highlife, Palm-wine music & Juju from Nigeria & Ghana, from the 50's & 60's.... and includes unavailable tracks by Earnest Olatunde Thomas, known as Tunde Nightingale or The Western Nightingale, who was a Nigerian singer and guitarist, best known for his unique jùjú music style, following in the tradition of Tunde King... As well as legendary Afrobeat pioneer Fela Ransome Kuti's first recordings of highlife and calypso, recorded in London in 1959... Highlife, type of West African popular music and dance that originated in Ghana in the late 19th century, later spread to western Nigeria, and flourished in both countries in the 1950s. The earliest form of highlife was performed primarily by brass bands along the Ghanaian coast. By the early 20th century these bands had incorporated a broader array of instruments (primarily of European origin), a vocal component, and stylistic elements both of local music traditions and of jazz. Highlife thus emerged as a unique synthesis of African, African American, and European musical aesthetics. ..."


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Shanty town


"A shanty town, squatter area or squatter settlement is a settlement of improvised buildings known as shanties or shacks, typically made of materials such as mud and wood. A typical shanty town is squatted and in the beginning lacks adequate infrastructure, including proper sanitation, safe water supply, electricity and street drainage. Over time, shanty towns can develop their infrastructure and even change into middle class neighbourhoods. They can be small informal settlements or they can house millions of people. First used in North America to designate a shack, the term shanty is likely derived from French chantier (construction site and associated low-level workers' quarters), or alternatively from Scottish Gaelic sean. Globally, some of the largest shanty towns are Ciudad Neza in Mexico, Orangi in Pakistan and Dharavi in India. They are known by various names in different places, such as favela in Brazil, villa miseria in Argentina and gecekondu in Turkey. Shanty towns are mostly found in developing nations, but also in the cities of developed nations, such as Athens, Los Angeles and Madrid. Cañada Real is considered the largest informal settlement in Europe, and Skid Row is an infamous shanty town in Los Angeles. ..."


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Black Clouds Above The Bow, All Hands Bury The Cliffs At Sea by Wanderwelle 


"Based in Amsterdam and active since the middle of last decade, Wanderwelle is the ambient duo of Phil van Dulm and Alexander Bartels, with Black Clouds Above the Bows their latest full-length release and the first in a trilogy that’s focused on the climate crisis and its detrimental effects on global coastal regions. Crucial to the recording’s final form are antique cavalry trumpets, their natural sound digitally altered to gripping and suitably dark effect. Growing in power as the eight pieces unwind through rigorous invention and inspired purpose, the CD is out now through Important Records, who will be releasing the second part of the trilogy, All Hands Bury the Cliffs at Sea, on vinyl later this year. ..."



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Columbia Said It Had ‘No Choice’ but to Call the Police

Columbia University

"Exactly 56 years to the day after the 1968 student occupation at Columbia University was violently cleared by the New York Police Department, hundreds of police officers moved into the Manhattan campus on Tuesday night to quell a different kind of antiwar protest. A total of 109 people were arrested as police officers entered Columbia’s main campus, which was on lockdown, and cleared Hamilton Hall of a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had broken in and occupied it the night before. It was a dizzying and, to many students and faculty, disturbing 24 hours on campus. Last time, students were protesting the Vietnam War and Columbia’s plans to expand its campus into Harlem. This time, students were protesting the Israeli offensive in Gaza that has killed about 34,000 people, according to health officials there, and trying to force the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel. ..."

 




California State Polytechnic University
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Cross Road Blues

"'Cross Road Blues' (commonly known as 'Crossroads') is a song written by the American blues artist Robert Johnson. He performed it solo with his vocal and acoustic slide guitar in the Delta blues style. The song has become part of the Robert Johnson mythology as referring to the place where he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for musical genius. This is based largely on folklore of the American South that identifies a crossroads as the site where Faustian bargains can be made, as the lyrics do not contain any references to Satan. ... Over the years, several bluesmen have recorded versions of the song, usually as ensemble pieces with electrified guitars. Elmore James' recordings in 1954 and 1960–1961 have been identified as perhaps the most significant of the earlier renditions. Guitarist Eric Clapton and the British rock group Cream popularized the song as 'Crossroads' on their 1968 Wheels of Fire album, and their fiery blues rock interpretation became one of their best-known songs and inspired many cover versions. ..."



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The forgotten painter who captured the contrasting landscapes of 1930 New York City

The Cavalry, Central Park

"By the Depression year of 1930, New York City was increasingly becoming a city of highs and lows. ... The highs were evident in Gotham’s skyline. Elegant residential towers lined the borders of Central Park and the city’s posher avenues. The Chrysler Building rose above 42nd Street, and the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center soon followed at different ends of Midtown. At odds with these gleaming towers were the lows—the many low-rise blocks across Manhattan. Spread out between their new high-rise neighbors and congregated in poorer, more densely packed areas were tenement buildings, factories, and warehouses, some crumbling with age. ..."


On the Rooftops of New York
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Pina Bausch

"Philippina 'Pina' Bausch (27 July 1940 – 30 June 2009) was a German performer of modern dance, choreographer, dance teacher and ballet director. With her unique style, a blend of movement, sound, and prominent stage sets, and with her elaborate collaboration with performers during the development of a piece (a style now known as Tanztheater), she became a leading influence in the field of modern dance from the 1970s on. She created the company Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch which performs internationally. ... Her best-known dance-theatre works include the melancholic Café Müller (1978), in which dancers stumble around the stage crashing into tables and chairs. Bausch had most of the dancers perform this piece with their eyes closed. The thrilling Frühlingsopfer (The Rite of Spring) (1975) required the stage to be completely covered with soil. ..."

Costumes  

Video  

Sourcebook | Etc. 

Year - Title (1989 - 2009) 

Year - Title (1972 - 1988) 

Grasses, Weeds and Flowers for Pina Bausch


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Palestine Solidarity Shines at the New York Art Book Fair


"At a high-traffic corner of the New York Art Book Fair (NYABF), I found myself blinking at an arrangement of potato-shaped stress balls bearing the logo of Berkeley’s Apogee Press. ... This year’s edition of the go-to fair for all things riso-printed, folded, and otherwise pushing the boundaries of what a book can be is back in Manhattan’s gallery-dotted Chelsea neighborhood through this Sunday. It’s a delightfully overwhelming spectacle and impossible to absorb in one visit. As I wandered through the four floors of tables, I found myself drawn to newcomers and to the details — the small potatoes — that transformed the fair into an imaginative and openly political space that flies in the face of the commercial book sphere. ..."


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Hybrid Resonances: Tradition and Experimentation at the KSYME Contemporary Music Research Centre

The Synthi100 housed within KSYME/CMRC

"Through several events and commissions running 2019-2022, the Chronotopia initiative by Athens & Epidaurus Festival, Goethe-Institut Athen, and CTM aimed to highlight connections between experimental music, research, and media practice. From 2020-2021 an artistic lab titled Chronotopia Echoes / Αντηχήσεις engaged six sound artists and composers of electronic or electroacoustic music, selected via open call, who were invited to interact with the vast archives of KSYME / CMRC – the Contemporary Music Research centre in Athens – with the aim to create new works. The resulting compositions were premiered at the Athens & Epidaurus Festival in October 2021, and then reworked for the Chronotopia digital release. ..."


At the KSYME archive
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FirstLook: Beni Isguen, Algeria


"As a young college student in the 1980s, George Steinmetz hitchhiked in the desert lands of north-central Algeria along the Sahara. In 2009 he revisited the region, now as a world-renowned photojournalist working on a book about the world’s extreme deserts and the human adaptations and settlements in them. He recalled the hilltop city of Ghardaa and its unique architecture. This city is actually comprised of five villages, among them Beni Isguen, which in 1982 was inscribed as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and regarded as the best-preserved example of the region’s traditional building styles and urban organization. The day before this image was taken, Steinmetz flew up to get a view of the town using the foot-launched, motorized paraglider—at less than 45 kilograms, the lightest motorized aircraft in the world—that allowed him to make uniquely close, low-altitude aerial photographs in remote regions. ..."




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The burden of remembrance: Patti Smith’s dedication to lost legacies


"The world should be thankful to have Patti Smith. As a musician, a writer and a vital pioneer, merging the worlds of punk and poetry into something fresh and exciting, the influence is immeasurable. But there’s also another role Smith takes on, somewhat accidentally but not unwillingly. She’s a historian, too, dedicating herself to the memory of her own scene and the stories of those who can’t be here to tell them. ... Instead, there’s a feeling of survivor’s guilt that colours her older life and the realisation that as the others couldn’t tell their story, she’d have to try and do it for them. On the simplest, smallest scale, that responsibility rules over her Instagram feed. Smith doesn’t let a date pass her by. She remembered birthdays, death days, publication days and more as she catalogues and celebrates the lives of her old friends through a grainy picture and a sweet caption, just to make sure her followers don’t forget. ..."


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Scenes of Protests Spread at Elite Campuses

Protesters gathered around Columbia’s College Walk as a speaker addressed them from the Sundial.

"Protests and arrests spread across some of America’s most influential universities on Monday, as administrators struggled to defuse tensions on campuses over pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Monday. Nearly 50 people were arrested at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on Monday morning, following the arrests last week of more than 100 protesters at Columbia University in New York City. The arrests unleashed a wave of activism across other campuses, including M.I.T., the University of Michigan and Stanford University, as protesters sought their universities’ divestment from companies with ties to Israel and a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza. The flurry of protests has presented a steep challenge for university leaders, as some Jewish students say they have faced harassment and antisemitic comments. Early Monday morning, Columbia announced a same-day shift to online classes because of the protests. Barnard College, across the street, followed suit hours later. Here are scenes from the protests. ..."






The encampment at Columbia was put back up by protesters after being removed the previous week.
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The mystery of the gilded glass booth outside Midtown’s St. Regis Hotel


"It’s an eye-catching piece of street furniture: a booth made of glass, brass, and copper, with a door like a Romanesque arch and a capsule-shaped side compartments. This unusual sidewalk booth can be found under the awning at the East 55th Street entrance of the St. Regis Hotel. Built on Fifth Avenue in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV (the only son of the infamous Mrs. Astor), the Beaux-Arts St. Regis has long been one of Manhattan’s most luxurious hotels, heralded as 'the new shrine of the millionaire' shortly after it opened by the New York Times. ..."


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Who killed Caravaggio and why? His final paintings may hold the key

The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew

"The National Gallery’s haunting new exhibition The Last Caravaggio has at its heart a sepulchrally toned painting called The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. Caravaggio includes himself in it as a witness to a brutal murder – a pale, bleak farewell of a self-portrait set against Stygian darkness. An extravagantly armoured man, the chief of the Huns, has been rejected by the beautiful young Ursula. His response is to shoot her with an arrow at point blank range. She contemplates the shaft between her breasts as if she can’t believe what she is seeing: her own death. Soon after painting this, Caravaggio too would be dead. Sailing north from the Naples area to Rome in the heat of summer in a triangular-sailed felucca, he was arrested at a coastal stop and by the time he was released his luggage, including new paintings, had left without him.  ..."


2015 August: Caravaggio

The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
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How Muddy Waters’ ‘Father And Sons’ Reinstated The King of the Blues


"According to Muddy Waters, 'Every time I go into Chess, [they] put some un-blues players with me […] If you change my sound, then you gonna change the whole man.' By 1969 Marshall Chess had to do something financially viable that would reinstate the real King of the Blues. ... When Mike Bloomfield visited Marshall Chess’ home, an idea began to form, 'It was Mike Bloomfield’s idea. He was at my house and said he wanted to do a thing with Muddy. He had talked about it with Paul Butterfield, too. Both of them had talked with [producer] Norman Dayron. Since Mike and Paul were coming to Chicago for a charity concert we decided that maybe we could cut an album then, too, and the whole thing just built up.' So, Waters, Otis Spann (piano), Bloomfield (guitar), Butterfield (harmonica), Donald “Duck” Dunn (bass guitar), Sam Lay (drums), and Paul Asbell (rhythm guitar) stepped into the studio to begin recording on April 21, 1969. ..."

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In Warsaw - Elisa Gonzalez

The End of Dinner, Jules-Alexandre Grün, 1913.

"In our new Spring issue, we published the short story 'The Beautiful Salmon' by Joanna Kavenna. It features one of the most disastrous-sounding dinner parties I’ve ever read about in fiction, which is a meaningful distinction; it is also very funny at times and slightly surreal and imbued with a kind of offbeat philosophical bent. 'People often talk about learning experiences and, in the days after the salmon-based fiasco, I wondered about this,' the narrator says, at the end of the story. And it’s a good question: What do we learn from an experience like this? Anything at all? 'The Beautiful Salmon' made me think of dinner parties I’d attended or hosted—ones that had gone well and ones that had gone quite poorly and ones that had gone just fine, so that they mostly escaped my memory except for the specific dish or the offhand comment that has stuck with me for years. ... And so I asked some writers we admire to write short essays on dinner parties they remembered, often long after the dishes were removed from the sink. —Sophie Haigney, web editor ..."


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Geoff Dyer: ‘A gas mask on a tree stopped me in my tracks – it shows the air itself can be toxic’

A memorial and a prophecy … A gas mask on a damaged tree on the road to Kreminna in Ukraine's Luhansk oblast.

"This photograph of a gas mask on a tree beside a track in Kreminna in Ukraine’s Luhansk oblast stopped me in my tracks. The original caption in the Guardian reads 'tree' but it looks like the remains of a tree, more like a planted post. Has the rest of it – the parts that make it a tree – been damaged by war? Whatever the explanation there is a hint, in the mottled pattern of the bark, of a giraffe’s neck, that vulnerable loneliness of the vertical amid the overwhelmingly horizontal. By a careful choice of angle the photographer has also imparted an animating slinkiness, a slightly feminine torsion, to the immobile wood. ..."




‘A ghost of her former self’ … an image from Peter Mitchell’s book The Scarecrows 1974-2015
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Modulisme 104: Raoul Van Herpen


"Raoul Van Herpen is an electro-acoustic music composer and improvising musician from the Netherlands. In writing music he draws heavily on modern composing + improvisation techniques and loves to explore new 'territories' and play with noise, electronics, textures, Wurlitzer piano, clarinet, saxophone + flute and DIY Synhtesizers. Combining electronics, acoustics and silence. …"




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The Slits’ Ari Up laments the loss of “female rebellion” in music: “I didn’t know it would come to this”


"'Ari is wonderful and terrible in equal measure,' writes Viv Albertine in her memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys. When The Slits formed, Ari Up (real name Ariane Daniele Forster) was just 14 years old. A wild child who’d only moved to London from Germany a few years prior -Up was a totally unique presence who was totally consumed by music. According to Albertine, she was 'loud' and 'boisterous' but also 'a talented and committed musician' who simply didn’t care what she looked like. She was the perfect person to front a punk band. Full of energy and dissatisfaction with 'double standards' and 'false people,' Up tore up the stage, screaming, shouting, jumping, dancing, and even pissing in front of eager crowds. ..."



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Three New York City subway stops, three different design styles


"How many ways are there to style a subway entrance sign? In New York City, dozens of designs and typefaces are used across the subway system—often with no rhyme or reason. Take this gold and white sign on William Street. It’s for a side entrance/exit for the Fulton Street station, affixed to a 20th century office building called the Royal Building. Its long tapered shape, the white block (a light?) at the top—I’ve never seen anything like it. ... This last subway sign image comes from the East 23rd Street 6 train entrance, I believe. The typeface and tile feels classical, and the V instead of a U is a nice Roman touch. Why this design for this stop? I don’t know—but I do know that all the variety of styles in the subway make traveling underground a little more interesting. ..."


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