Scandal Brought Reforms to Soccer. Its Leaders Are Rolling Them Back.

Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, center, in Washington in April. He has overseen the weakening of changes he championed as a candidate for the position.

"The 12-page report was intended to save soccer’s governing body, FIFA, in its moment of existential crisis. Filled with reform proposals and drawn up by more than a dozen soccer insiders in December 2015, the report was FIFA’s best chance to show business partners, U.S. investigators and billions of fans that it could be trusted again after one of the biggest corruption scandals in sports history. In bullet points and numbered sections, the report championed high-minded ideas like accountability and humility. It also proposed concrete and, for FIFA, revolutionary changes: transparency in how major decisions were reached; term limits for top leaders and new limits on presidential power; and the abolition of well-funded committees widely viewed as a system of institutional graft. ..."

NY Times

A deal negotiated in secret by the South American soccer confederation will allow it to host several matches in the 2030 World Cup.

Sincerely, Detroit - Apollo Brown (2019)

"... Detroit has an indelible legacy in hip-hop. From artists like J Dilla to Black Milk, from Denaun Porter to Apollo Brown, Detroit's music has a sound unlike any other. When Apollo Brown set out to create the tribute to his home, he knew he needed to do the city justice. Featuring over fifty Detroit artists, Apollo Brown’s new double disc album, 'Sincerely, Detroit,' is a love letter to the culture. From different eras and different walks of life, veterans and newcomers alike lend their styles and deliveries to the twenty-one track album. Featuring artists like Royce Da 5’9”, Black Milk, Trick Trick, Elzhi, Slum Village and many, many more, 'Sincerely, Detroit' is a nearly comprehensive look at the styles and flavors of Detroit. While the world watches Detroit for influence, Apollo is back to remind people that Detroit sets a standard for others to follow and is a creative haven for Hip-hop. ..."

Bandcamp (Audio) 

amazon: Sincerely, Detroit Explicit Lyrics Import 

YouTube: Sincerely, Detroit (Full Album)

2022 October: Eight Essential Releases by Detroit Producer Apollo Brown, 2022 October: Gas Mask | The Left (2010)

The Squirrel: Joe Strummer’s favourite pub in London

"The streets of London have been weathered by a countless array of historical events. From the days when William Blake detailed the 'chartered streets' of the city, to the recent years of skyscrapers and gentrification, the city never lost its penchant for one thing: drinking. There is scarcely a street in the city that has not, at one point, housed an honest London boozer – some more honest than others. The drinking holes of the city have provided a home to a variety of notable characters over the years, including the punk rock icon Joe Strummer.  It should come as no real surprise that Strummer held a deep appreciation for the pub. ..."

FAR OUT (Video)

Mid-Afternoon Map: Pick Your Palestine Monopoly

"In recent weeks, student protests over the war in Gaza have generated an increasingly outraged debate, pitting people who are so outraged by the protestors’ rhetoric that they refuse to be outraged by the war against people who are so outraged by the war they refuse to be outraged by the protestors’ rhetoric. Much as voicing any criticism of Israel apparently makes you a Hamas supporter, suggesting that protests might be more effective with fewer actual Hamas supporters now makes you complicit in genocide. Walking by a pro-Palestine rally in Dupont Circle several months ago, the very first thing I heard was the chant 'We don’t want no two-state / We want ’48.' As a historian, I’m always glad to hear people shouting about history. But as someone who still thinks that two states represent the least impossible of the good solutions to the current catastrophe, I was outraged to hear it rejected so emphatically for a more impossible, more problematic alternative. ..."

War On the Rocks

May 2024 solar storms

Aurorae taken with long exposure from Viola, Arkansas

"The solar storms of May 2024 are a series of powerful solar storms with intense to extreme solar flare and geomagnetic storm components that have been ongoing since 10 May 2024 during solar cycle 25. The geomagnetic storm was the most powerful to affect Earth since 2003, and produced aurorae at far lower latitudes than usual in both northern and southern hemispheres. On 8 May 2024, a solar active region which had been assigned the NOAA region number 3664 produced an X1.0-classand multiple M-class solar flares and launched several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) toward Earth. On 9 May, the active region produced an X2.25- and X1.12-class flare each associated with a full-halo CME. ..." 

Wikipedia (Video) 

2016 July: Aurora at Your Fingertips, 2022 Janaury: How to Photograph the Northern Lights

Bay View, Washington

From Then 'Til Now - Roots Architects

"... Bringing together over 50 of Jamaica's greatest session musicians, whose work spans from the birth of reggae in the late 1960s until today, Roots Architects is the largest gathering of Jamaican musical talent on one all-instrumental album. Never before have so many veterans, who helped create the immortal rhythms that made reggae internationally successful, been assembled to play on new material without vocals. This album aims to celebrate and pay tribute to the unsung heroes of reggae music: the rhythm builders or Roots Architects. ..."

Bandcamp (Audio) 

Roots Architects: From Then 'Til Now

Power Before Petroleum

"Wind, bones, and other historical energy sources"

Laphams Quarterly

You Are Being Lied to About Gaza Solidarity Camps by University Presidents, Mainstream Media, and Politicians

Between salah and shabbat prayers, students at Columbia’s encampment listen to a speaker at sunset. April 19.

"Saturday was a gloriously beautiful spring day in Chicago, and as I wandered into the 'Liberation Zone' which has taken over DePaul University’s quad, a kind lady asked me if I would like some lunch. I declined because I was headed to a BBQ in a couple of hours, but I took her up on some coffee, thanked her, and asked her if she was affiliated with the Vincentian Catholic university. 'No,' she told. 'I’m just Palestinian.' I recognized her from previous visits to that particular Gaza Solidarity Encampment, one of four I have visited over the last few weeks: Columbia University’s (where, as a PhD student at NYU, I once took some classes), Northwestern University’s (where I am on the faculty and am a member of Educators for Justice in Palestine), and the University of Chicago’s (where, like at DePaul, I was there to observe and to offer faculty de-escalation support if needed). The lady had been at DePaul every day, serving free food (often donated by Palestinian restaurants) to hundreds of people. She, like everyone there that day, was extremely welcoming. ..."

LitHub 

LitHub: Inside the Occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, 1968 Version 

NBC News: Columbia unrest echoes chaotic campus protest movement of 1968 (Video)

Student demonstrators from Columbia University form a human chain in front of Broadway and West 116th Street after five campus buildings were cleared of protesters on April 30, 1968.

Democracy is losing the propaganda war - Anne Applebaum

"On June 4, 1989, the Polish Communist Party held partially free elections, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately removed the Communists from power. Not long afterward, street protests calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy brought about the end of the Communist regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would no longer exist. Also on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party ordered the military to remove thousands of students from Tiananmen Square. The students were calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy. Soldiers arrested and killed demonstrators in Beijing and around the country. Later, they systematically tracked down the leaders of the protest movement and forced them to confess and recant. Some spent years in jail. Others managed to elude their pursuers and flee the country forever. ..." 

The Atlantic

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. ..."

Aramco World

“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). 

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. ..."

Voice

2021 December: Greg Tate, April 2024: Letter from New York: Greg Tate on the Art of Lockdown and Days of Rage

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. ..."

Bandcamp (Audio) 

W - Michio Miyagi

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. ..."

Guardian: The Freaks Came Out to Write review – how the Village Voice changed American journalism 

NY Times: What Was The Village Voice? 

amazon

The Village Voice offices c1975: ‘Contributors denounced one another in abusive slogans scrawled on the walls of the office toilet.’

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. ..."

NY Times 

Latine Migrants Find Refuge on Soccer Fields in Queens

Jorge Sotello administers Islas Malvinas players in the Estudiantil Soccer League on Oct. 15.

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. ..."

Bandcamp (Audio)

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. ..."

Wikipedia

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. ..."

Graded on a Curve: Wanderwelle, Black Clouds Above the Bows 

Bandcamp: Black Clouds Above the Bows (Audio), All Hands Bury The Cliffs At Sea (Audio)

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. ..."

NY Times 

 

W - 2024 Columbia University protests

NY Times: Scenes From the Student Protests Churning Across the Country 

NY Times - Universities Face an Urgent Question: What Makes a Protest Antisemitic? 

YouTube: Police arrest dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University, From LA to NY, pro-Palestine college campus protests grow strong in US

California State Polytechnic University

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. ..."

W- Cross Road Blues

YouTube: Robert Johnson - cross road blues, Elmore James - Standing At The Crossroads, CREAM Crossroads 1968 (Live)

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. ..."

Ephemeral New York

On the Rooftops of New York

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

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. ..."

Hyperallergic

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. ..."

CTM Festival

At the KSYME archive

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. ..."

Aramco World 

W - Ghardaïa 

Algerian Saharan Oasis Walled Cities of M’zab Valley (Video)

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. ..."

FAROUT (Video)

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. ..."

NY Times 

The Nation: Inside the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University 

NY Times: Universities Struggle as Pro-Palestinian Demonstrations Grow 

Columbia Spectator: Pro-Palestinian organizations at universities across the world protest in support of Columbia ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ 

Columbia Spectator: Opinion | Is Columbia in crisis?

The encampment at Columbia was put back up by protesters after being removed the previous week.